Fælder i organisationer

Chris Argyris has spent the better part of a lifetime researching and working on creating organisational change and, not least, learning in organisations. You can clearly sense this in the book, which is at one and the same time a kind of summary of his research and, at the same time, full of cases he has worked with over the years.

His point is that change finds it very hard to happen, because in every organisation there are a number of mechanisms that pull towards the status quo. That is what the trap is. The consequence is that it is difficult to develop the learning that is necessary to create fundamental change. We are caught by patterns of behaviour found at every level in organisations - patterns of behaviour that stem partly from the fact that we hide our real thoughts and considerations in a given situation, and that we cannot ourselves see that this is what we are doing.

Argyris says that we should instead seek real, testable information before we make decisions - and that we should be particularly attentive to detecting and correcting errors when we make decisions. In this way he aligns himself closely with Kahneman's point; you can read about it under The Nobel-prize-winning one.