Organizational forgetting as strategy

Holan, Pablo Martin de; Phillips, Nelson

doi:10.1177/1476127004047620

Cited by 72 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…De Holan and Phillips (2004;, agree about the deliberate nature of unlearning, although they do not distinguish in the same way as others between forgetting and unlearning. Recently there have been a significant number of articles and book chapters on the topic of organizational level forgetting (see for example Casey and Olivera 2011;De Holan and Phillips 2011;EasterbySmith and Lyles 2011;De Holan 2011b). Due to the assumption that the accidental and unconscious nature of forgetting makes it a different and distinctive process to deliberate processes of unlearning, as well as the fact that the contemporary literature on forgetting is focussed at the organizational level, this literature is not examined any further in this paper.…”

Section: Clarifying and Developing The Unlearning Conceptmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The unconscious or accidental giving up of something is typically referred to as forgetting (De Holan and Phillips 2011;Easterby-Smith and Lyles 2011;Rushmer and Davies 2004). This process of forgetting contrasts with deliberate unlearning, which involves a process of consciously choosing to abandon or give up particular knowledge, values or behaviours.…”

Section: Clarifying and Developing The Unlearning Conceptmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The process of individual unlearning: A neglected topic in an under-researched field

Hislop

Bosley

Coombs

et al. 2013

Management Learning

136

249

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In a contemporary business environment where change is often regarded as continuous, the ability of people or organizations to be able to successfully adapt and respond to change is key. Change often involves not only the learning of new behaviours, ideas, or practices but also giving up or abandoning some established ones. Despite both these elements generally being important to change, academic focus on processes of abandoning or giving up established knowledge and practices, that is, unlearning, is lacking. This conceptual article draws on a range of literature to suggest that the process of individual unlearning may have particular features. The review defines the concept of unlearning, differentiates between two different types of individual unlearning, and suggests that each type of individual unlearning may have its own distinctive features and dynamics. This article builds from this insight through developing a typology, which distinguishes between four types of individual unlearning. It concludes with an agenda for future empirical research to examine and validate the concepts presented.

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Section: Clarifying and Developing The Unlearning Conceptmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Clarifying and Developing The Unlearning Conceptmentioning

confidence: 99%

The process of individual unlearning: A neglected topic in an under-researched field

Hislop

Bosley

Coombs

et al. 2013

Management Learning

136

249

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Organizations that are better at learning are more capable of coping with emerging threats. They are also better in creating new knowledge and in adapting to changing environmental conditions more quickly and efficiently (De Holan and Phillips 2004). Overall, training should be made in order to enhance preparedness for future incidents (Sapirstein 2006).…”

Section: Continuity Culture and Organizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Continuity Culture: A Key Factor for Building Resilience and Sound Recovery Capabilities

Sawalha

Anchor

Meaton

2015

Int J Disaster Risk Sci

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This article investigates the extent to which Jordanian service organizations seek to establish continuity culture through testing, training, and updating of their business continuity plans. A survey strategy was adopted in this research. Primary and secondary data were used. Semistructured interviews were conducted with five senior managers from five large Jordanian service organizations registered with the Amman Stock Exchange. The selection of organizations was made on the basis of simple random sampling. Interviews targeted the headquarters only in order to obtain a homogenous sample. Three out of five organizations could be regarded as crisis prepared and have better chances for recovery. The other two organizations exhibited characteristics of standard practice that only emphasizes the recovery aspect of business continuity management (BCM), while paying less attention to establishing resilient cultures and embedding BCM. The findings reveal that the ability to recover following major incidents can be improved by embedding BCM in the culture of the organization and by making BCM an enterprise-wide process. This is one of few meticulous studies that have been undertaken in the Middle East and the first in Jordan to investigate the extent to which service organizations focus on embedding BCM in the organizational culture.

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“…Purging or deletion of knowledge residing in the knowledge management systems must occur (Desouza, 2004;de Holan, Phillips, & Lawrence, 2004). Currently most knowledge management systems are subject to mechanical destruction of knowledge.…”

Section: Destruction Of Old Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

Maintaining knowledge management systems: A strategic imperative

Desouza¹,

Awazu²

2005

J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci.

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Web sites aimed at enabling the storage and exchange of explicit knowledge artifacts. In our research, we were surprised to find that knowledge workers have for the most part abandoned the use of knowledge portals. Moreover, in cases where they do turn to knowledge portals they use it as a last resort. In this brief communication, we call attention both to research and practice to help transform current knowledge portals to ones that are more sensitive to the issues faced by practitioners. To this end, we will elaborate on the need to pay attention to maintenance of knowledge management portals. IntroductionMost organizations have adopted knowledge management systems to enable the capture, storage, distribution, and application of know-how. A vast majority of these systems enable the management of explicit knowledge artifacts such as working papers, business plans, project proposals, software code, and so on (Davenport & Prusak, 1998;Desouza, 2003;Hansen, Nohira, & Tierney, 1999;Zack, 2003). These systems are mainly deployed via an organizations' Intranet and have been touted to aid in re-use of solutions, quicker decision making, increased quality of products and services, and increases in rates of innovation (Davenport & Prusak, 1998;Davenport, Delong, & Beers, 1998;Davenport, Thomas, & Desouza, 2003).In our research with a number of organizations, we found that for the most part these goals remain elusive.1 Most employees are only marginally convinced that knowledge management systems provide them with any real benefit. We were surprised to find that employees, for the most part, have abandoned computer-based knowledge management tools. In our investigations, we deduced a number of factors that lead employees to abandon or avoid the use of knowledge management systems. Most of these factors can be attributed to poor maintenance of knowledge management systems. In this brief article, we would like to elaborate on the why maintenance of knowledge management systems is a strategic imperative for any organization. The Need for System MaintenanceKnowledge management systems have only recently debuted in organizations, in comparison to the more traditional information technology (IT) systems. The oldest system we found was celebrating its fourth birthday. Because of the infancy and lack of maturation, most organizations have been focusing on getting the system accepted by members of the user community. This can be characterized as focusing on front-end efforts; by contrast, most organizations have ignored the backend efforts-system maintenance. As one manager put it, We investigated knowledge management practices in over 20 different organizations. The organizations ranged from Fortune 100s to small-tomedium sized enterprises. Moreover, the organizations spanned a number of industries. Our primary method of data collection was through the semistructured interviews, although we did write brief case studies to document peculiarities in knowledge management practices. We also administered a survey to two organizations,...

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Organizational forgetting as strategy

Cited by 72 publications

References 34 publications

The process of individual unlearning: A neglected topic in an under-researched field

The process of individual unlearning: A neglected topic in an under-researched field

Continuity Culture: A Key Factor for Building Resilience and Sound Recovery Capabilities

Maintaining knowledge management systems: A strategic imperative

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