For example, some researchers assess knowledge as changes in an organization's practices or routines that increase efficiency.
Knowledge originates within and is applied by units of an organization to evaluate and utilize experience and information effectively.
Silvia Gherardi measured knowledge as the change in practices within an organization over time, which is essentially learning from experience.
[27] In her study, she observed an organization acquire knowledge as its novices working at building sites learned about safety through experience and became practitioners.
Attempts to explain variance of rates in organizational learning across different organizations have been explored in theoretical models.
This context refers to an organization's characteristics, specifically its "structure, culture, technology, identity, memory, goals, incentives, and strategy.
[39] Research into these concepts like Edmondson's study (1999) shows that an organization operating under a context promoting curiosity, information sharing, and psychological safety encourages organizational learning.
In shipyards with no relative input reduction, individual unit cost decreased with increasing cumulative output.
[1] In a study of airplane manufacturing at Lockheed, unit costs declined with experience, but this effect weakened over time.
Wright's identification of organizational learning curves preceded more complex outcome considerations[4] that now inform measures of knowledge transfer.
Researchers investigate the context of various factors and mechanisms affecting knowledge transfer to determine their beneficial and detrimental effects.
[82] Transactive memory systems[83] are additional methods by which knowledge holders within the organization can be identified and utilized, subject to their development[84][85] and performance.
[4][86] Organizations that retain the bulk of their knowledge in individuals are vulnerable to lose that information with high turn over rates.
Leaders must practice the individual learning they advocate for by remaining open to new perspectives, being aware of personal biases, seeking exposure to unfiltered and contradictory sources of information, and developing a sense of humility.
It may be seen as a subset of the anthropological concept of diffusion and can help to explain how ideas are spread by individuals, social networks, and organizations.
Innovation policy, economic development initiatives, educational program endeavors, and entrepreneurial incubation and acceleration could all be informed by organizational learning practices.
Informal methods instead include secrecy, education, social norms and complexity, i.e. carefully choosing what knowledge to share and to whom, and making sure others do the same.
[97] In case no systematic approach has been applied when creating organizational memory systems, there is a risk of corporate amnesia.
[98]: 366, 372, 390 Corporate amnesia is said to be a double-edged sword – it helps to move on by forgetting the wrongdoing, but at the same time it creates a danger of repeating the same error all over again.
In a transfer mechanism, mental models are an excellent way to share knowledge and to make it independent from individuals.
Maintaining organizational memory is enabler for efficient and effective processes and routines but most of all for profitable business.
To this end, today's organizations form complex systems of interrelated human and machine learning that requires coordination and rises a wide range of new managerial issues.
[106] Finding shared vision is important to enable the adaptation of new systems and technologies that can be accepted by the organization and its members.
[109] Communities of practice in virtual environments can create tacit knowledge shared between the different factors such as individual members, rules accepted and technologies used.
[104]: 549 Building routines in a virtual team and the use of sophisticated technology such as video meetings, creates trust and psychological safety that enables learning.
[110]: 148 Developed by Crossan, Lane and White (1999) the 4I framework of organizational learning consists of four social processes; intuiting, interpreting, integrating and institutionalizing.
There is a wide variety of barriers in every level of each learning process identified as actional-personal, structural-organizational and societal-environmental.
Societal-environmental barriers of intuition process relate e.g. to the unclear success criteria of the branch of the organization or to cultural misunderstandings.
Integration process barriers that take place at the organizational level can be such as the willingness to maintain positive self-image or the fear of punishment.
A barrier to institutionalization process is when something previously learned has been forgotten – an innovation or lesson has not been put to practice so that it would become embedded into the structure, procedures and strategy.