Unlearning as a Strategy - Research Proposal Example

Unlearning as a Strategy Table of Contents Unlearning as a Strategy Table of Contents 2 0Introduction 3 1 Strategies 3 2 The Individual and the Organisation 5 2.0Research Description 6 3.0Methodology 8 4.0Expected Findings 14 5.0 Research Design & Methodology 14 5.0References 18 1.0 Introduction Organisations are run by people who have certain knowledge and manage the organisation according to their knowledge base. The organisation thus depends on their learning acquired from education, experience and exposure. All strategies formed out of such management have a tendency to follow a pattern which later forms the culture of the organisation. This gets embedded over a period of time and all newcomers to the organisation are expected to fit in to continue the tradition of the organisation. This leads to stagnation of ideas and the competitive advantage is eroded. Environments are dynamic and change is the only constant. Both people and organisations have to change their ways to adjust with the environment. This calls for unlearning the previous knowledge and to re-learn new ways of coping with the dynamics of the situation. Unlearning therefore becomes a strategy by itself. 1.1 Strategies All business organisations have a strategy for survival and the heart of strategy lies in its competitive advantage (Porter 1980, 1985). When a firm becomes different by offering value, quality and some attributes through which it offers some uniqueness then it will become an above average performer in its industry. The search for this competitive edge urges strategies in marketing, production, human resource management, customer relationships, supply chain managements and many others. It has also been said that competitive edge can be achieved only when all stakeholders are involved as collaborators (Venkataraman 2002). Of the stakeholders the employee has become a very important factor as it is his/her endeavour and skill that helps to create the competitive edge. Indeed Cummins and Worley (2005:306) state that "Faced with competitive demands for lower costs, higher performance, and greater flexibility, organisations are increasingly turning to employee involvement to enhance the participation, commitment and productivity of their members." The employee, his skill, competence and knowledge are for the benefit of the organisation. The role of the employee/worker has come a full circle in the last one hundred years. Prior to the Industrial Revolution the worker was his own master and could dictate quality, value and output based on his personal skills. The Industrial Revolution relegated him to the role of a subordinate and later in the early 20th century Taylorism introduced the deskilling of labour and made him an operator. He no longer had any part in decision making and became a clog in the whole manufacturing machine. Fordism in the forties gave him back some respect and rights but he still remained confined to a single small skill on the assembly line. It was only in the fifties that it became recognised by Maslow (1954) that the ultimate desire of the worker was self actualisation and without this production and quality would suffer. The most valuable assets of any business are its people. This is one fact that is singularly recognised as a winner. Through effective utilisation of a person’s talent the firm will achieve concrete results and build up a highly productive labour force (Harrington 2003). On the above basis various HR theories have attempted to explain why employees perform their duties the way they do. Abraham Maslow (1954) described this in a hierarchy, starting with human psychology, safety and security, belongingness, self esteem and finally self-actualization. According to Maslow, employees have a basic human need and a right to strive for self-actualisation, just as much as the corporate directors and owners do and, by this fulfilment, the organisation becomes stronger, more competitive and profitable. This brought the worker back into the realm of empowerment but this too was more of a burden rather than an acknowledgement of is abilities. In the larger canvas, there is an increasing demand for ‘cultural change’ in enterprises. This is an unstructured perception, which in fact is a call to secure ideological changes that will usher in new work systems. It aims at ‘empowerment’, but its supporters often use it without any real understanding of what power really means and of how difficult it is to assign or redistribute power. The fact is that often it does not result in a redistribution of power at all, but ‘all that happens is that employees assume higher levels of accountability and responsibility’ (Marchington, 1995:61). 1.2 The Individual and the Organisation While it has been proclaimed that empowerment is good there are some fundamental issues that will have to be dealt with first. Every organisation has some method of working called the culture of the organisation. This may be defined and planned or may come about through practices adopted over a period of time. This is an influential factor on the level and degree of empowerment. The individual worker has to fit in the organisation’s cultural pattern and the empowerment has to be within its confines. Within the organisational context, an individual has to understand that he has to uphold the organisational values and therefore these values guide his actions, attitudes and judgments beyond the immediate or distant goals (Rokeach, 1973: 18). This then becomes the limiting factor of the worker’s empowerment. In other words the empowerment is organisation led and oriented. If the organization culture is overpowering then the workers’ creativity is curbed and the organisation will loose an opportunity to gain from it. This becomes relevant in creative jobs that abound today. Empowerment therefore becomes a subjective issue. Indeed it may be said that the worker is coerced into a situation of compliance with the organisational demands. 2.0 Research Description The organisation works on the basis of the collective memory of the individuals that forms the organisation. This called the Organisational Memory (OM) that has been defined as the active and historical information that is worth sharing for present and future management (Megill 1997).Hammel and Prahlad (1994) have defined this as a corporate knowledge that has been stored for reference and use. This is the knowledge base that is used in formulating strategies. It is evident that this knowledge is with the individuals and since an organisation is a conglomeration of individuals sharing is the only way that it gets into collective memory. However all the knowledge possessed by an individual may not qualify for use as OM and an individual’s knowledge is likely to be influenced by the OM and this means unlearning all or part of his knowledge and re-learning more useful knowledge. Spender (1998) has recommended that unlearning starts with the individual where he sheds his knowledge or learning by unlearning it in order to acquire or learn other knowledge that will help him to assist the organisation. Jackson (2005) state that the raw data provided by individuals needs a subjective interpretation as the perception and prowess of each individual differs from another. This is an important fact as it is this understanding that transforms the knowledge into worthwhile actions or strategies. This is called the exploitation of knowledge that produces strategies for the competitive edge. Cegarra and Dewhurst (2006) have suggested that such exploitation occurs during the process of unlearning and involves the a) understanding of the problem, b) changing of the thought processes and c) by integrating new actions by individuals with the objective of contributing to the organisation’s strategy. Commencing with the understanding of the problem, unlearning begins with failures (Schein 1993) as is inconsistent with perceptions and new events create confusions. But this should not be a considered as a barrier. This requires a re-focus on issues on a narrow scale to identify the problem which will lead to identification of the solution. A systematic approach that anticipates participation of both individuals and technologies provides the next steps towards unlearning. Indeed the current use of methodologies available for such interventions can be of great assistance in this direction (Jackson, 2003). Changing of the thought process requires a review of the current knowledge an importing of new knowledge or know-how. The culture of the organisation is the biggest barrier in this issue. Organisational culture is either promoted or backed by the leaders of the organisations and it is they who resent cognitive change as it hurts their hierarchies and challenges their authority (Pfeffer 1998). This can be overcome through promotion of frank dialogues between individuals and groups (Nonaka and Konno 1998) but requires understanding of the problem and the urge to solve it. Systems methodologies can help in providing participating individuals or groups by generating or simulation of environments and platforms for discussion and reflection to facilitate formation, sharing and variation of knowledge (Jackson, 2005). Methodologies can also support the architecture or any other improvements that require support of information and communication technologies (Córdoba, 2005; Córdoba and Midgley, 2006) Schein (1993) has suggested that employees should be motivated to take risks, innovate and come up with creative solutions to problems to facilitate unlearning. This supports the case for empowerment and brings the research problem to the fore as to how this can be achieved. Unlearning and re-relearning therefore become strategy by itself in search for new strategies for competitive edge. It is in this context that Hedberg (1981) stated long back that there is a huge wastage of talent and knowledge in not using the existing knowledge base for promoting organisations. According to Hedberg (1981) learning, unlearning and re-learning are prerequisites to the development of an organisation. If either of the three is ignored, development will come to a standstill and indeed decline. This needs to change and change is the basis of unlearning. This is the research problem that this paper will try to unravel. 3.0 Methodology This paper will first conduct a Literature Review to study the observations and comments of different writers on the subject of Unlearning. This will result in a set of research hypothesis that can be validated through the use of research. There are two aspects of learning; individual and organisational. The individual carries with himself the sum total of education, experience and exposure. However there is a subtle knowledge that is acquired by individuals at a very early stage in life. This is influenced by the culture, religion and customs of the society and the external and internal environment and this learning is almost impossible to change. Hofstede (1993) has described this as the software of the mind, the impressions that a person carries throughout his life. While this may not be unlearned, it is the other knowledge acquired by a person that can be unlearned. The literature on unlearning shows disparity amongst different writers on how they visualize unlearning as a process. It is a matter of approach by each of them. For instance Bouton (2000) believes that a total change in behaviour is not the same thing as unlearning. For him lapses or relapses in memory in an individual are manipulated as a result the unlearning really does not take place. Klein (1989) has a different approach when he states that old memory is not erased but kept aside as in parenthesis. According to his theory the individual makes a decision in accordance with the environment and is likely to revert to the original learning if so required. Hamel & Prahalad, (1994) do not agree with this and state that in an unlearning the previous behaviours are forgotten and not repeated in new circumstances as they understand that they are no longer applicable. Duffy (2003) has expressed that unlearning is the process of giving up old ways for new one. At the end it is expressing similar feeling in a variety of ways subject to contextual environment. The other view of unlearning is the study of transition of the individual from one stage of learning to the other which involves unlearning during the transitionary period. This can also be used to understand the concept of unlearning. Chell (1993) has provided a seven step model and Nicholson, 1990 has a four step cyclical process to explain the transition stages that throw light on how unlearning takes place. They help in clearing the concept of how unlearning process is employed. Opposing this simple methodology French and Delahaye (1996) and Conner (1992) state that there are emotional mixtures in the process which humanise them. These models however only help to clarify how unlearning takes place. Organisational unlearning however is more related to change in the outlook and strategy of the organisational culture. The literature on Organisational Change is very exhaustive but it does not mention unlearning as a specific requirement and treat its as a normal change or makeover of the individuals. Cummins and Worley (2005:105) define Organisational Development as ‘a system wide application of behavioural science knowledge to the planned development, improvement and reinforcement of strategies, structures, and processes that lead to organisational effectiveness’. Thus the thrust of change is improvement for competitive edge although the fallout is unlearning without which change cannot take place. Cummins and Worley (2005) have drawn upon and elaborated on Lewin (1958) and described the three phases of change. They argued that in Phase 1, organisations must unfreeze the system. This unfreezing phase may take a variety of forms: creating a sense of urgency about the need for change, educating managers to behave dif­ferently, merging with another organisation and so on; but the under­lying idea is that the system must be "shaken up," or confronted with a compelling need to do business differently, and must break free from its present way of doing things so that in a new, more compliant, perhaps even vulnerable state or condition, the system is accessible and amenable to change interventions. The second phase, then, is of movement, or changing the organisation by moving in new directions with different technologies and ways of oper­ation. Lewins (1958) point was that unless and until an unfrozen condition is achieved, the system will not move or change in any meaningful way. Once change, or movement, is underway, the third phase, refreeze needs to be initiated. The change that has occurred cannot be allowed to dispel or drift away. The new, changed condition or state therefore needs to be reinforced with a process and accompanying infrastructure in place to maintain the new system. This means, for example, having a different extrinsic and intrinsic reward system that will support the performance that are fitting with the new, changed conditions. The employees are then able to see a clear and direct relationship between the organisations mission and strategy and their individual roles and responsibilities. The point to be noted here is that as the new state is frozen in the early stages of change, it is tentative and somewhat vulnerable, and until it takes shape, is subject to further change that needs to be controlled in order that it remains on track. On the group level organisational culture has a powerful effect on the performance and long-term effectiveness of organisations. Research findings indicate the importance of culture in enhancing organisational performance (Cameron and Ettington, 1988 and Trice and Beyer1993) .But culture change is intimately tied up to individual change. Unless managers are willing to commit to personal change, the organisations culture will remain unchanged. There is a lot of commonality between change and unlearning but the change literature fails to highlight it. This is the age of Information Technology that has provided a huge window of learning. This is another aspect that will be examined for the learning process, and it may rightly be called the re-learning process. This needs the organisation to be agile. The dexterity with which the organisation is able to meet changing situation is the agility of the organisation. The integration of all organisational processes, characteristics, and members with advanced technology is the agility that helps in problem solving. It is this agility that enhances the organisations ability to provide high quality and it is crucial to organisational competitiveness. Kodish et al (1995) define agility as the flexibility and speed at which an organisation can assemble its resources through use of Information Technology, communications and employees in a deliberate and coordinated response to market requirements. This ability to integrate the production/operations, general management, and the socio-technical views enables the organisation to develop a model of organisational agility. This model is based on suppliers, organisational members, and customers that are integrated or united through information technology and through a combination and integration of their efforts new learning takes place. Nevertheless these connections rest on the foresight of leadership. It is the vision created by the transformational leader that evolves this relationship between people and technology. As a result of such relationships more focused decision making, creation of value additions, improvements in quality is ensured. This is accomplished through offering employee empowerment, training in technology, and providing an extrinsic and intrinsic reward system. These activities, led and promoted by the leaders, bring about an agile organisation based on learning. The last aspect of the review will deal with empowerment and innovation as contributory factors for the unlearning process. It has been suggested by, Tushman and OReilly (1997) that discontinuous innovation is breaking with the past to create new technologies, processes, and organizational “S-curves” that result in major increases in the value delivered to the customers. In the same vein Hamel and Prahalad (1994) , and Utterback, (1986) describe discontinuous innovation as linking "disruptive technologies," "discontinuities," or "radical innovations" that facilitate the industries and markets to emerge, transform, or disappear. Therefore discontinuous innovation means creation of new forms of customer value within existing or new markets and by pursuing discontinuous innovations, business creates new markets or displaces existing techniques of bringing value to customers. Innovations therefore are a process of unlearning and learning for competitive advantage. The next part of the Methodology is the research that will attempt to find the missing links and to bridge the gaps between unlearning and change. This will be done in order to achieve the objective of this paper that is to prove that Unlearning can be used as Strategy. With this approach it is believed that this paper will be able to contribute towards a better understanding of unlearning and its usefulness. 4.0 Expected Findings The Literature Review and the research are expected to contribute to the topic of this paper that Unlearning can be used as a strategy. It is the contention of this paper that there is an important link between change and unlearning. Bringing about change is a well established strategy towards competitive advantage. However a change agenda also envisages a change in status quo (Lewin 1958). This by itself starts the process of unlearning. This is supported by Garrety et al (2003) who confirm that the change programme focuses on changing the individual, his approach, awareness and capabilities. This research will attempt to establish that unlearning can be effectively used as a strategy. The literature review points to the fact that unlearning, both at individual and organisational, is the route to change in perceptions and that is the beginning of unlearning. It is expected that the research finding will support this investigation. 5.0 Research Design & Methodology Sun and Scott (2003) have claimed that there is a deficiency of information and action in certain areas of the learning process. This then becomes the focus of this research. There appears to be a need for a mixed approach through both qualitative and quantitative research in this direction to understand the gaps in the knowledge and understanding of the issues. Eisenhardt (1989) and Locke (2001) have concluded that qualitative methodology is appropriate for both exploration and understanding of a phenomenon. Promotions results in events that require investigations as some succeed while others fail. A qualitative inquiry will establish both cause and reason. Research is a systematic inquiry reported in form of Analysis and Predictions. Quantitative and Qualitative research are strategies. The research is either exploratory or descriptive in nature. The exploratory research is used to formulate the problem, develop hypotheses and constructs, establish priorities for research, refine ideas and finally to clarify the concepts. The descriptive research illustrates the characteristics of certain specified groups, estimates the proportion of people in a given population who behave in a given way, and attempts to make predictions of directions in which results are headed. The difference between the two is of context but in all fairness areas of interest overlap each other and often it is difficult to separate one from the other. Both types are associates with positivist and post-positivists philosophies. Their justification lies in internal and external reliability of content and validity through random and deliberate sampling of data. Examples of post positivist research methods are Naturalistic Inquiry and Narrative Inquiry. Here the justification is based on trustworthiness, as the result is credible, confirmable, dependable, and transferable. It is further authenticated by fairness and Ontological descriptions. Since Ontology is the precise description of a concept, it lends names to these Methodologies and Methods. In other words it describes them both (Straub et al 2004). Method refers to the research tactics used in the conduct of a research effort. Methodology on the other hand refers to the strategies researchers follow in gaining knowledge. Quantitative and Qualitative research strategies are examples of Methodologies and refer to the research tactics used in the conduct of a research effort include drawing samples, conducting questionnaire surveys, engaging, and participating in observations. Philosophies, or more accurately Philosophical Theories, offer a structured approach to finding answers on all events that keep occurring around us all the time. Whether in Business environment, Social, or any other, answers are needed to understand, comprehend, or evaluate in order to improve results, achieve better status or achieve accurate awareness. All enquiry leads to research and focused research is based on methodology and methods that are derivatives or elements of philosophy. When research is structured in this manner, the results are more accurate and closer to truth. Therefore ignoring philosophy will make research less productive and unreliable (Crossan Frank). There are four essential characteristics of positivist research; assumption of multiple realities for example takeovers and divestments; the data is in rich form for example it is collected from primary sources like interviews or secondary sources like the media; the researcher is immersed and involved in the data collection process and the data collection is highly interactive for example collection over wide geographical locations; and finally data collection methods are evolutionary and are flexible for example it is collected from a wide perspective and not limited to personal interviews only. A field study would be most suitable in the context of this research study. Dunning (1993) clarifies that field studies enhance the understanding of the role of FDI in establishing motives and entry modes. This will complement the identification of other variables. Single or sample case studies are conducted in the social scenario to identify the nature of the work that has been done or is required to be done in order to collect the right set of information; the work can be in single or in multiple cases even for the sample lot (Yin, 2003). In order to understand the entire set of work that has to be carried out, it is generally a practice to conduct a pilot study to know the impact of the case study and whether the approach is in right direction. Such a study is normally very descriptive in and all the details are thus collected and then laid out for further analysis. The discussion and case study covers the entire depth and scope of the study, in many cases, primarily addressing the need to confirm a hypothesis (Bent Flyvbjerg, 2006). While designing case studies according to Yin (2003) major linkages need to be taken care of. They are the study questions and propositions that are being held for this study to identify whether these are validated or invalidated, setting the unit of analysis and logically linking the data with the propositions already made to determine the criteria for interpreting the findings. These factors form the core of the case study that has to be carried out and then later on analyzed. However, there is no need for all studies to be propositioned. There can also be case studies without any legitimate proposition. Linking the data with the propositions thus made or the targets set for the entire case study along with the criteria that will be used to evaluate the findings will define the entire case study. Unlike in other sampling methods, where normally for research purposes an average sample is selected, in case studies an extreme case is taken up, expecting the same to produce edge conditions that would cover all possible requirements that might arise during the survey or during the study. Only then will the case study remain exhaustive. The case study methodology follows a standard practice in most cases and these have to be respected if scientific results are expected be derived out of it (Yin, 1984). A typical case study for the research purposes should be having an overview of the case study project with Field Procedure and case questions as well as a guide for the case study reports. 5.0 References Bouton, M.E., (2000), A learning perspective theory on lapse, relapse and the maintenance of behaviour change, Health Psychology, 19(Suppl), pp 57-63 Cameron, K. S. Ettington D.R., (1988, “The conceptual foundations of organizational culture”, in J.C. 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