Purpose: This paper aims to illustrate the need for context-adapted models of military learning organizations (LOs), identify challenges to building LOs in the military and discuss how maturing as an LO provides military organizations a competitive advantage. Design/methodology/approach: This paper highlights the primarily industrial focus of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the phenomenon of organizational unlearning with a focus on challenging path dependence and its implications on the organizational change field. By generating a taxonomy of unlearning definitions and examining the dimensions, actors and processes involved, the authors aim to offer a holistic…

Purpose: This study aims to identify how and why chief learning officers (CLOs) build the learning organization. The study was undertaken in the conceptual framework of leadership and change by using the lens of the Marquardt Systems Model. Design/methodology/approach: This exploratory study used semi-structured interviews with 20 participants.…

Purpose: This paper aims to contribute to discussion around the need for improved models for change in a rapidly changing world. It also aims to provide insights for further discussion around how a Nordic management approach can relate to the need for new change ideas. Since Lewin proposed that change requires unfreezing, moving and refreezing,…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore how current trends in organization -- government regulation, authoritarian governance and digitalization acts specifically to stop relevant change of a Nordic model. These trends unfold in organizational contexts by revoking mandates, stopping information sharing and eroding trust. When these…

Purpose: The purpose of this two-part paper is to develop a process model of unlearning established organizational routines. The model traces the interactions among three unlearning sub-processes: ostensive aspects of initial destabilization of an established routine; performative aspects of ongoing discarding-from-use of old behaviors and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide advice to organizations on how to become successful in the digital age. The paper revisits Peter Senge's (1990) notion of the learning organization and discusses the relevance of systems thinking and the other four disciplines, namely, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and team learning…

Purpose: This paper aims to examine Borders response to business model innovation (BMI) by Amazon in the bookselling industry. The case illuminates potential causes for protracted periods of organizational unlearning, explaining why organizational unlearning, although beneficial in many documented cases, can also be insufficient to prevent…

Purpose: The purpose of Part II of this two-part paper is to uncover important differences in the nature of the three unlearning subprocesses, which call for different leadership interventions to motivate people to move through them. Design/methodology/approach: The paper draws on research in behavioral medicine and psychology to demonstrate that…

Purpose: This paper aims to offer a contextualized and multi-stakeholder perspective for creating a learning organization (LO) 2.0. Design/methodology/approach: Based on a systematic review of the critiques of LO in the past three decades, this paper suggests some possible directions for the development of next-generation of LO (e.g. LO 2.0).…

Purpose: The paper's aim is to explore the connection between individual worldviews, called ecological selves, and organizational change, which allows people to create the conditions to confront the global environmental challenges they face as a species. Design/methodology/approach: The essay is a conceptual one, with reference to a small…

Purpose: While the importance of organizational learning for sustainability has been stressed by a number of authors in the literature, the practicalities of how organizational leaders might foster such learning are seldom treated. This paper seeks to demonstrate that there is much that could be learned from the aviation industry about…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine and synthesize Argyris and Schon's Theory of Action and Kegan and Lahey's theory of Immunity to Change in order to produce an integrated model. Design/methodology/approach: Literature discussing Argyris and Schon's Theory of Action (Model I and Model II), single and double-loop learning, espoused…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a stage model for maturity levels for police oversight agencies. Design/methodology/approach: The paper is based on a literature review covering police oversight organizations and stages of growth models. Findings: As a conceptual paper, the main findings are related to the appropriateness of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe how interruptions in organizational learning effect institutional absorptive capacity and contribute to organizational inertia. Design/methodology/approach: An exploratory model is presented as a heuristic to describe how interruptions in organizational learning affect absorptive capacity.…