Organizational Learning Lens: Does Intelligent Technology Make Organizations More or Less Intelligent?

This essay examines how emerging relations between digital technology, people, and organizations create trajectories for learning but also may reduce organizational intelligence. We study these trajectories from the perspective of three organizational learning models by looking at each one’s premises related to experience, continuity, and time. The community of practice learning model emphasizes shared experience through social practices. The behavioral learning model builds on the organization’s current knowledge base and involves trade-offs via adaptations that can be slow or fast, suggesting continuity in organizational learning. The information seeking and helping model produces knowledge that is vetted by the community or organization in terms of its currency. Juxtaposing these premises with recent literature on the evolving relations between digital technology, people, and organizations, we assert that learning becomes less constituted by shared experience, by continuity in knowledge accumulation, and by its currency in terms of questions and answers that share a temporal frame. In these evolving trajectories, learning is less intertwined with relations that are associated with organizations, such as people, routines, and processes. We seek to provoke further research by asking: Are new theories of organizational learning needed to understand the new relations? And what effect do the trajectories for learning have on organizational intelligence? Is intelligent technology stripping organizations from their intelligence?