The Ambiguities of Experience Read online

  THE AMBIGUITIES

  OF EXPERIENCE

  James G. March

  Cornell University Press

  Ithaca and London

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  1. The Pursuit of Intelligence

  Prolegomenon

  Two Components of Intelligence

  Experiential Learning

  2. Learning through Replicating Success

  Two Modes of Intelligent Adaptation

  The Replication of Success

  Complications in Success Replication

  Low-Intellect Learning and High-Intellect Explanations

  3. Learning through Stories and Models

  Stories and Models

  The Stories of Organizations

  Mythic Themes

  Truth, Justice, and Beauty

  4. Generating Novelty

  Adaptation as an Enemy of Novelty

  The Novelty Puzzle

  Two Theoretical Tracks for Understanding Novelty

  The Survival of Mechanisms of Novelty

  The Engineering of Novelty

  5. The Lessons of Experience

  Experience as a Useful Teacher

  Experience as an Imperfect Teacher

  Experience and Human Intellect

  References

  PREFACE

  The chapters in this book are based on three Messenger Lectures given at Cornell University in October 2008. I am grateful to the university and particularly to my hosts, Victor Nee and Danielle Adams, who made the visit a pleasure for me. Parts of the material are based on talks I have given at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Irvine. For their able assistance in preparing the manuscript for publication, I owe thanks to three Cornell University Press editors: Roger Haydon, Priscilla Hurdle, and Ange Romeo-Hall, as well as to Jamie Fuller. The index was prepared by Daniel Newark.

  The book focuses on a few small aspects of a simple question: What is, or should be, the role of experience in creating intelligence, particularly in organizations? The chapters presented here are intended to provide fragments of a partial answer to that question. The fragments represent a sampler of possible ideas rather than a comprehensive encyclopedia of them. They provide incomplete ruminations on the ideas rather than thorough expositions of them. The small number of words in the book may be somewhat balanced by the large number of references (a testimony to authorial inadequacy), including an excessive number of self-references (a testimony to authorial self-indulgence).

  Although they might with justice claim that I have extracted lessons from their teachings that are not what they intended, seven talented colleagues and friends have contributed substantially to the ideas here and must share some of the blame: Mie Augier, who bridges the chasms among Schütz, Kundera, Plath, Nietzsche, and Dosi with a combination of enthusiasm and skepticism that I admire; Barbara Czarniawska, who has tried patiently for many years to teach me about stories, narratives, and organization theory; Jerker Denrell, who has made my life better through conversations about endogenous sampling, learning, and the wonders of stochastic processes; Daniel Levinthal, with whom I have shared many years of conversation and collaboration on problems of organizational learning; Johan P. Olsen, whose wisdom, careful scholarship, and friendship inform everything I do, and particularly the topics covered here; William H. Starbuck, whose contributions to understanding the problems and possibilities of learning in organizations span almost as many years as mine; and Sidney Winter, whose reluctance to write his thoughts is matched only by their fruitfulness when he gets around to it. I will not try to list the many others to whom I owe debts. I once did that, and it took up several pages of text.

  I have benefited from generous financial support by the Spencer Foundation, the Reed Foundation, the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Stanford University School of Education, and the Copenhagen School of Business. I appreciate both their support and the spirit of free inquiry in which it has been provided.

  Finally, I owe a large debt to the infinite tolerance of my wife, Jayne. With a grace that suggests some rare variety of benevolence, she has borne my presence for over sixty years. It is an achievement as inexplicable as it is appreciated.

  JAMES G. MARCH

  Stanford University, December 2009

  1

  THE PURSUIT

  OF INTELLIGENCE

  Organizations pursue intelligence. It is not a trivial goal. Its realization is imperfect, and the pursuit is endless. Every day there are failures to temper any successes. Nevertheless, the pursuit is often exhilarating. It exalts the subtle textures of life and elevates coping with ordinary tasks to the artistry of history. The present book considers one aspect of the pursuit of intelligence—the effort to extract lessons from the unfolding episodes of life. Organizations and the individuals in them try to improve by contemplating and reacting to their experiences.

  Folk wisdom both trumpets the significance of experience and warns of its inadequacies. On the one hand, experience is described as the best teacher. On the other hand, experience is described as the teacher of fools, of those unable or unwilling to learn from accumulated knowledge or the teaching of experts. The disagreement between the folk aphorisms reflects profound questions about the human pursuit of in telligence through learning from experience that have long confronted philosophers and social scientists.

  Despite extensive enthusiasm for it, the prima facie evidence for organizational improvement through extracting lessons from experience is mixed. Contemporary organizations certainly engage in practices, follow procedures, and exhibit forms that are notably different from organizations of a century ago. By most measures of productivity, contemporary organizations are more efficient than their predecessors. At the same time, experience is often ambiguous and the inferences to be drawn from it are unclear; and the contribution of experiential learning to long-term improvements in organizations is difficult to establish. The ambiguity of history makes the matching of beliefs and actions to experience both complicated and prone to misdirection (March and Olsen 1975; 1995, chap. 6).

  There are well-documented cases of the apparent failure of organizations to adapt to their environments. Failures of business firms to copy successful practices from other firms are a familiar refrain of organizations research. Wars are filled with instances of what appears, with the clear vision of after-the-fact perspicacity, to be organizational blindness on the part of armies. The hugely successful American steel and automobile industries of the first half of the twentieth century withered in the last half. The American public school system changed from being the pride of the country and the envy of other countries to being an embarrassment. The American political system found it difficult to adapt to declines in American prosperity and power as the twenty-first century began.

  While acknowledging the power of learning from experience and the extensive use of experience as a basis for adaptation and for constructing stories and models of history, the chapters in this book examine particularly the problems with such learning. The essays argue that although individuals and organizations are eager to derive intelligence from experience, the inferences stemming from that eagerness are often misguided. The problems lie partly in correctable errors of human inference forming, but they lie even more in properties of experience that confound learning from it (March 2008, chap. 5). As a result, the book is somewhat more conservative about the possibilities for experiential learning than is characteristic of some writings about it (Kolb 1984; Sternberg and Wagner 1986; Kayes 2002). It identifies some endemic ambiguities and mistakes of experience.

  PROLEGOMENON

  The ideas pursued
in this book reflect three rather different traditions of scholarship. The first is the tradition of scholarship on organizations. That tradition draws particularly from economics, psychology, management science, sociology, political science, public administration, and artificial intelligence. For the most part, scholars within the tradition are Cartesian, scientific, and analytical. They emphasize the formal analysis of data and testing of hypotheses, exercising models, and proving theorems. They are prone to deductive cleverness in the form of relatively limited but provocative ideas, as reflected in enthusiasms for such things as game theory, cognitive dissonance, structural equivalence, absorptive capacity, and garbage-can theories. They practice a style of analysis that focuses on relatively simple relations among discrete variables. They speak, for the most part, from the perspective of the social and behavioral science establishments. And they presume a history that moves haltingly toward greater knowledge and intellectual progress.

  The second tradition is that of scholarship on storytelling, narrative, and myth. These humanistic traditions of scholarship draw particularly from literature, criticism, history, anthropology, linguistics, legal studies, and religion. They emphasize language, metaphor, and the elaboration of meaning. Like Dario Fo, who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages, attacking authority and glorifying the dignity of the downtrodden, many of them place themselves in opposition to the establishment. They are prone to expansive speculation in the form of sweeping generalizations in the manner of Freud, Marx, or Foucault but also revel in close investigation of the human estate in its fine detail. They practice a style of scholarship that exploits the nuances of language to evoke meanings. And they generally eschew notions of intellectual progress in favor of ideas of intellectual and historical embeddedness, social construction, and cultural consciousness.

  The third tradition is that of scholarship on adaptive processes. Although the work is intertwined with empirical studies of change, it is heavily theoretical. It emphasizes properties of the mechanisms of adaptation in organisms, species, technologies, organizations, industries, and societies. The traditions of research on adaptation draw heavily from evolutionary biology and psychological ideas about human learning. They attempt to further understanding by identifying adaptive processes and exploring their consequences in complex ecologies of multiple adapting agents. They pay particular attention to the capabilities of adaptive processes to realize outcomes that are, in some meaningful sense, improvements—even optimal. They generally presume a historical process that is heavily history-dependent with multiple unstable equilibria, but an intellectual process that allows some elements of nonrandom forward movement.

  The chapters in this book draw copiously and inadequately from all three traditions, but they focus on a relatively narrow topic: When and how do organizations learn intelligently from their experience? What are the possibilities and problems? The chapters address such issues, but they hardly resolve them. They have all the limitations and perversities of brevity.

  Among other limitations, strictly organizational factors in organizational learning from experience are subordinated in these chapters to the ambiguous features of experience, the structural features of adaptive processes, and the intellective features of human adaptation. Organizational factors are discussed from time to time, but there is no attempt to be exhaustive with respect to them. The subordination is one of convenience, not a symptom of unimportance. Organizations shape the way experience unfolds and the way in which it is observed and comprehended. They define the networks through which information flows and reinforce or reduce the cleavages of conflict. They create and maintain the goals and expectations that calibrate aspirations. They are systems of rules, routines, capabilities, and identities that both resist and record the lessons of experience. Such factors can be ignored only as a temporary expediency, and even so at some risk.

  In addition, three critical properties of organizational adaptation that are vital to a thorough understanding are not considered significantly here. First, organizations are coalitions of conflicting interests (March 1988, chap. 5; Hoffman 1999; Rao, Morrill, and Zald 2000). Conflicts of interest make theories of conflict-free adaptation notoriously incomplete, complicating particularly the association of success or failure with outcomes and the pooling of information (Cyert and March 1963; Augier and March 2001). Conflicts of interest are conspicuous factors in all organizations and influence not only the pursuit of intelligence but also its definition (Greenwood, Suddaby, and Hinings 2002; Olsen 2009).

  Second, organizational adaptation involves the simultaneous, interacting adaptation of several nested levels (March 1994, chaps. 2, 6; Friedland and Alford 1991). Populations of organizations evolve at the same time as the individual organizations within the populations, and organizations evolve at the same time as individuals within the organizations. These nested systems of adaptation affect each other, with adaptation at one level sometimes serving as a substitute for adaptation at another and sometimes interfering with it.

  Third, the environment of organizations consists, in part, in other adapting organizations; and the elements of coevolution produced by their simultaneous adjustments are an essential feature of the adaptive story (Hannan and Freeman 1989; Kauffman and Johnsen 1992; Levinthal and Myatt 1994). The treatment of the environment as exogenous, as is common in the literature on organizational learning and, to a substantial extent, in these chapters, is a significant simplification.

  TWO COMPONENTS

  OF INTELLIGENCE

  Intelligence normally entails two interrelated but somewhat different components. The first involves effective adaptation to an environment. In order to adapt effectively, organizations require resources, capabilities at using them, knowledge about the worlds in which they exist, good fortune, and good decisions. They typically face competition for resources and uncertainties about the future. Many, but possibly not all, of the factors determining their fates are outside their control. Populations of organizations and individual organizations survive, in part, presumably because they possess adaptive intelligence; but survival is by no means assured. Although a few organizations, most notably the Roman Catholic Church and older European universities, have survived for many years, the vast majority of organizations endure for only a relatively short time. By that criterion, at least, organizational adaptive intelligence is not guaranteed. It is not even typical.

  The second component of intelligence involves the elegance of interpretations of the experiences of life. Such interpretations encompass both theories of history and philosophies of meaning, but they go beyond such things to comprehend the grubby details of daily existence. The desire of human beings to make sense of their experiences permeates much of scholarship. It also permeates much of life. Interpretations of experience are ornaments of casual conversations and of theories of psychological, economic, political, cultural, and social systems. Stylishness of interpretation is a certification of human status and a basis for the social ranking of individuals and institutions. Interpretations decorate human existence. They make a claim to significance that is independent of their contribution to effective action. Raymond Fischesser, a former director of L’École des mines de Paris, defined intelligence as “la préoccupation efficace de l’essentiel” (Riveline 2008, 7). Such intelligence glories in the contemplation, comprehension, and appreciation of life, not just the control of it.

  EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING

  The tools for achieving intelligence reflect the knowledge technologies of the time and place. At some not-too-distant times and places, intelligence seeking involved extensive use of magic potions, enchantments, and incantations, as well as the anticipations and ambiguities of oracles and other keepers of extrahuman capabilities. No self-respecting manager of early Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, or Roman enterprise would have willingly confronted the uncertainties of life without a suitable pipeline to the gods who manipulated the universe within which their organizations operated.

  Though
various forms of godlike revelation continue to secure adherents (Eisenstadt 2006), efforts to access the mysteries of the gods have been largely replaced in modern life by efforts to uncover more mundane secrets of knowledge. In that respect, few ideas are as sacrosanct in contemporary sensibilities as the notion that human beings achieve mastery over their lives through learning from experience. Individuals and organizations try to improve their lots by observing and reacting to their experiences, partly by elementary efforts to reproduce actions associated with success, partly by more elaborate efforts to fit the events of their histories into acceptable causal frames. Experience is venerated; experience is sought; experience is interpreted.

  Learning from experience is, of course, by no means the only mechanism of human learning. Indeed, most of what is known by individuals and organizations is not discovered in lessons extracted from the ordinary course of life and work. It is generated by systematic observation and analysis by experts and transmitted by authorities (e.g., in books, through web browsers, by teachers), and accepted (or rejected) without direct experiential confirmation. It reflects, in a general way, academic knowledge rather than experiential knowledge (March 2004).

  Nevertheless, in the contemporary literature on organizations, experiential learning continues to be seen as one of the more important sources of adaptation in human action, a mechanism for improving the fit of actions by individuals or organizations to the environments they face (Argyris and Schön 1978; Levitt and March 1988; Huber 1991; Payne, Bettman, and Johnson 1993; Cohen and Sproull 1996; Argote 1999; Nooteboom 2000; Starbuck and Hedberg 2001; Greve 2003). Admirable organizations are described as “learning organizations”; advisers on ways to augment and refine learning abound (Argyris and Schön 1978; Senge 1990); and recent proposals for improving organizations have often emphasized learning from experience (Senge 1990; Olsen and Peters 1996; Dierkes et al. 2001; Zollo and Winter 2002).