Week 1, Friday Lecture Outline

Organizational learning

Week 1, Friday

Psychology 360

Lecture Outline

• I. A tale of two navies
• II. Some lessons about learning
• III. Is the University of Michigan building galleys?

A Tale of Two Navies

• 13th and 14th centuries: Mediterranean empires
  • rise of Venice and Genoa as trading and naval powers
  • e.g., the travels of Marco Polo (1275-1292)
• 15th and 16th centuries: Atlantic empires
  • rise of England and Holland as trading and naval powers
  • e.g., Drake's circumnavigation (1580-81)

The Mediterranean and Atlantic Spheres
Mediterranean naval culture

• Built around the galley
• Human-powered
• Ideal for battles won by ramming and boarding
• Well-suited to calm and flat waters

An early galley
Atlantic naval culture

• Built around the caravel and galleon
• Sail-powered
• Ideal for battles won through superior firepower
• Well-suited to high waves and rough weather

The caravel
A changing tide

• Late 1500s - Holland chases Portugal from the East Indies
• 1588 - England defeats the Spanish Armada
• 1616 - Venetians saved from Spain by England and Holland

Sources of English/Dutch success

• Not bound by tradition
• Scarce resources
• Capacity for borrowing profitable ideas
• Adaptable
• Constant observation, inquiry, and experimentation

Some Lessons about Learning

• The role of direct experience:
  • competency traps - favorable performance with inferior technologies reduces experience with superior technologies
• The role of others' experience:
  • diffusion of ideas - maintaining the networks and connections that may provide exposure to innovations
• The role of experimentation:
  • variation in failure rate - success is the enemy of risk-taking, therefore induce ambiguity independent of performance

Is the University of Michigan
building galleys?

• What are the UM's competency traps?
• Is the UM open to diffusion of ideas?
• In what ways does the UM create variation in failure rates?

Learning at the UM

• Competency trap:
  • MTS - ten years ahead of its time, now obsolete - UM has negligible experience with distributed computing
• Diffusion of ideas:
  • travel budgets - generous funding to visit other places and see how others do things
• Variation in failure rates:
  • vague goals - M-Quality deliberately underspecified?

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Copyright © 1996, The Regents of the University of Michigan, All rights reserved.
Revised - November 4, 1996