p.3 Effective learning makes organizations more able to cope with problems. Learning takes place when organizations interact with their environments: organizations increase their understanding of reality by observing the results of their acts. Often the acts are experimental ones. In other instances, organizations learn by imitating other organizations' behavior, or by accepting others' experiences and maps of the environment.

p.4 Active forms of learning lead to insight (Thorpe, 1956). Attempts to act expose the conditions for acting; causal relationships in the environment, or in the interface between learner and environment, are gradually untangled. Learning, in this sense, is discovery... Understanding environments that change requires tearing down obsolete mental maps and starting anew.

p.5 Learners become experimenters who take initiatives to explore their habitats... The learners themselves must act, reflect, and name their findings. In directing their explorations and naming their observations, they begin to understand their environments and become more able to manipulate and change their situations (Freire, 1970b).

p.7 To identify stimuli properly and to select adequate responses, organizations map their environments and infer what causal relationships operate in their environment. These maps constitute theories of action which organizations elaborate and refine as new situations are encountered.

p.7 People making sophisticated responses seem to possess multi-dimensional stimulus-discrimination networks. They perceive several perspectives of a problem, and they select preferred interpretations and responses out of many alternatives.

p.7-8 Theories of action... are for organizations what cognitive structures are for individuals. They filter and interpret signals from the environment and tie stimuli to responses. They are metalevel systems that supervise the identification of stimuli and the assembling of responses.

p.8 Organizations select the stimuli to which they respond because they typically face much more information than they can sensibly process.

p.8 Perceptual filters make observations meaningful, but these filters also bias beliefs and actions... In a sense, the environment is inside the organization. The real world provides the raw material of stimuli to react to, but the only meaningful environment is the one that is born when stimuli are processed through perceptual filters.

p.9 When environments change, there are typically time delays between the environmental changes and changes in the organizations' responses. Minor changes can normally be handled through adjustments in existing action programs, or through switching back and forth within repertoires of behaviors.

p.14 Organizations can, to some extent, control their outer environments. These environments are partly enacted or selected... and successful organizations find and develop niches through which they can control, for example, the rate of change to which they are exposed.

p.15 Organizations can use their rewards and punishments to induce their members to search for new problems and solutions (Wilson, 1966)... If additional information... cannot be used to recover its costs, less information-rich environments are better learning environments, or at least more cost-effective (Ackoff, 1967; Simon, 1971). The costs of acquiring information should be set so that decision makers are both encouraged to gather relevant information and reminded of the declining returns from extensive search.

p.15 Organizations learn when they interact with their environments, but their environments are largely artifacts of the organizations' mental maps.

p.16 Organizations cannot afford to scan their environments, continuously searching for conditions that require actions. They search intermittently, they rely on attention-directing standard operating procedures, and they question these procedures only when problems begin to mount... Learning is typically triggered by problems.

p.16 Organizations scan only the parts of their environments where competitors and other outside forces threaten their survival (Terreberry, 1968). Doubts about viability lead to reexaminations and reevaluations of strategies in threatened segments of environments (Starbuck, 1976).

p.16 Organizations do not react to all problems. Many stimuli disappear in perceptual filters. Other stimuli are buried in aggregates. Because standard operating procedures must tolerate some fluctuations in the variables which they monitor, minor problems are often ignored. Deviations from normal must be large before adjustments or reorganizations occur (Bonini, 1963).

p.18 Triggers cause unlearning, and unlearning can trigger new learning.

p.18 Unlearning is a process through which learners discard knowledge. Unlearning makes way for new responses and mental maps.

p.18 reframing perceptions is a powerful way to change behaviors. People who are able to perceive reality in different terms can redefine their problems, unlearn old behaviors, and replace them with new responses almost instantaneously.

p.20 Learning abilities are needed to generate new knowledge and to adjust and update existing knowledge.

p.20 A theory of long-term behavior in organizations must contain a theory of how organizations learn, unlearn, and relearn.

p.20 Learning results from the adaptive and manipulative interactions between an organization and its environments: experimental actions are important because organizations rarely master their environments so that they can develop lasting optimal responses... Long-term survival calls for surveillance of opportunities, whereas short-term coping concentrates upon problematic search. Most organizations have much of the latter and little of the former (Thompson, 1967). Yet, if organizations are to survive in hostile and changing environments, they must change strategies and pursue new development patterns. Organizational design should encourage experimenting so that organizations attain long-term viability.

p.21 Instead of striving for clarity and harmony, perceptual filters should let decision makers see important properties of the real world.

p.22 Perceptual filters can be made more or less instrumental to search and discovery (Glimell, 1975).

p.22 Self-designing organizations should have minimal amounts - that is, just a little bit more than not enough - of the properties that characterize good and orderly organizations. This would provide for enough frequent triggering, reasonably easy unlearning, sufficiently low trust in previous successes, and enough slack resources to implement new strategies.

p.23 abilities for learning, unlearning, and relearning must be equally developed. To learn, unlearn, and relearn is the organizational walk: development comes to an end when one of these legs is missing.

[Notes from other pages in P.C. Nystrom & W. H. Starbuck (Eds.), Handbook of organizational design, Vol. 1]

ix This Handbook took close to eight years from conception to publication. The two editors and their assistants invested more than 21,000 working hours, and the 65 authors expended at least 60,000 working hours.

xii ...if you want to understand something, try to change it. (Walter Fenno Dearborn, as quoted by Bronfenbrenner, 1976: 164)

xviii Loosely coupled conceptual frameworks allow views to be modified gradually and progressively (Coser, 1956).

xix [Bronfenbrenner] the relation between person and environment has the properties of a system with a momentum of its own; the only way to discover the nature of this inertia, and its interdependencies, is to try to disturb the existing balance.

xix Don't fall in love with an idea. There are so many of them; they are truly expendable. It is only after an idea has been translated into reality that it becomes valuable (Don Koberg and Jim Bagnall, 1976: 24).