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Organizational Learning
James March's simulation makes a counterintuitive decision visible: teaching people the organizational code faster can improve them immediately while preventing the organization from learning what they knew. The paper turns exploration and exploitation into a conflict across time and groups, but its formal agents are not observed workers and later studies have tested several different meanings of ‘balance.’
Argyris and Schön build their theory around organizations such as the anonymized Mercury Corporation, whose managers spent a decade trying to create new businesses while keeping the conflict between divisional profit targets and corporate innovation largely undiscussable. Reconstructing successes and failures made that contradiction visible, but the case also exposes the limits of consultant-led inquiry: a map of defensive reasoning is not yet evidence that authority, incentives, or durable practice changed.