p.3 "Learning" may signify either a product (something learned) or the process that yields such a product.

p.11 In Deweyan inquiry... doubt is construed as the experience of a "problematic situation," triggered by a mismatch between the expected results of action and the results actually achieved. Such a mismatch - a surprise, as we experience it - blocks the flow of spontaneous activity and gives rise to thought and further action aimed at re-establishing that flow.

p.14 Organizational theory-in-use may remain tacit [JLJ - understood or implied without being stated] because it is indescribable or undiscussable. It may be indescribable because the individual members who enact it know more than they can say and are unable, rather than unwilling, to describe the know-how embedded in their day-to-day performance of organizational tasks.

p.16 our exploration of organizational learning must deal not with static entities called organizations but, as Karl Weick pointed out (1969), with active processes of organizing. The members' evolving images of the organization shape the very object of their investigation.

p.16 In order to become organizational, the learning that results from organizational inquiry must become embedded in the images of organization held in its members' minds and/or in the epistemological artifacts (maps, memories, and programs) embedded in the organizational environment.

p.30-31 Dewey's idea of inquiry derives in part from the writings of Charles Peirce, the founder of American Pragmatism... He thought that inquiry begins with an indeterminate, problematic situation, a situation whose inherent conflict, obscurity, or confusion blocks action. And the inquirer seeks to make that situation determinate, thereby restoring the flow of activity.
 Inquiry for Dewey combines mental reasoning and action. The Deweyan inquirer is not a spectator but an actor who stands within a situation of action, seeking actively to understand and change it. When inquiry results in a learning outcome, it yields both thought and action, at least in some degree new to the inquirer.

p.31 The transaction between inquirer and situation is continuing and inherently open-ended. As inquirers seek to resolve what is problematic about a situation of action, they bring new problematic features into being. Inquiry "does not merely remove doubt by recurrence to a prior adaptive integration," as Dewey put it, but "institutes new environing conditions that occasion new problems." ...there is, in Dewey's words, "no such thing as a final settlement." Inquiry is to be tested by its success in resolving a problematic situation and by the value inquirers come to attribute to the new problems their resolution creates.

p.33 When organizational inquiry leads to learning, its results are manifested in thought and action that are in some degree new to the organization. In instrumental learning, organizational inquiry yields new ways of thinking and acting that enable the improved performance of an organizational task.

p.35 We see practitioners not as passive recipients of expertise, but as Deweyan inquirers. Hence, we ask, "What do these practitioners already know?" "How do they inquire and learn?"

p.37 Practitioners share with academic researchers an interest in building explanatory models of organizational worlds. Like researchers, practitioners try to account for the data they consider relevant... But practitioners' models must also serve the purposes of designing. However appealing models may be used as tools of exploration or explanation, they are judged by how well they "work," in the sense of enabling practitioners to do something they wish to do.

p.37-38 Researchers and practitioners alike are unavoidably concerned with issues of causality and causal inference. When organizational researchers try to understand... their understandings hinge on causal connections.

p.40 A practitioner-inquirer who operates on such a model of organizational causality tries to infer component causes of organizational events and to construct and test models of their interaction in causal patterns. The practitioner uses the method of causal tracing, observing how one phenomenon leads to another.

p.41 Like plumbers, organizational inquirers can test their causal hunches by carrying out on-the-spot experiments. For example, the plumber may close a valve and observe whether the leak stops... practitioners test their causal inferences by determining whether they can use them to get design results they intend and like.

p.50 from the point of view of the process of inquiry itself, what theories of action, strategies, values, and underlying assumptions are most likely to enable an enquirer to elicit information, interpret it, and test interpretations so as to form valid inferences about design causality?

p.75 We seek to help practitioners understand their world in such a way that they can produce conditions for organizational learning, especially double-loop learning.
 We see our... strategy as a model not only for effective research but for reflective practice especially regarding double-loop learning.

p.75 Our initial premise is that human beings design their actions and implement their designs. We call these designs theories of action

p.77 If a researcher or practitioner is to act effectively in the service of double-loop learning, skills are necessary but not sufficient. The inquirer also needs an actionable theory of organizational learning, one that may be used to generate and test specific hypotheses in a wide variety of settings, as well as in the individual case.

p.107 At the heart of explaining human behavior are the concepts of reasoning and causality. Human beings use reasoning to diagnose what is going on, to design actions, and to produce their designs. The concept of causality plays a key role in all of these processes because human action is intended to be effective. Effectiveness, in turn, requires having some concept of "If A..., then B...," when diagnosing, inventing, and producing.

p.154-156 An action map constructed for a feedback session is primarily a representation of actions, strategies, consequences, governing conditions, and the feedback and feedthough mechanisms that relate these phenomena to one another in a persistent pattern. Action maps are, in effect, hypotheses about what drives learning and antilearning activities within the organization. Therefore, all action maps have to be tested as frequently and as completely as possible.
 There are several strategies that may be used to test a map's validity. The first is to show it to the participants to see what features they confirm or disconfirm... A second strategy to test the validity of a map is to make predictions based on it... A third testing strategy is to predict the likely consequences of attempts to change the status quo... The more one can specify ahead of time the conditions of change, the sequences of actions that do and do not lead to change, the individuals or groups that will learn faster, and the conditions under which this learning will occur, the more robust the test will be.

p.157 It is our assumption that all individuals create designs for action, and they act in order to maintain the world within which they live. Effective actions in this context are those that persistently produce intended consequences.

p.196 [Leavitt and March] learning does not always lead to intelligent behavior.

p.220 In this passage, Burgelman argues, as he further notes, that in dynamic and uncertain environments there may be considerable value in "strategic neglect."

p.221 Burgelman's argument here is reminiscent of Hirshman's famous "principle of the Hiding Hand." Hirshman proposed (1967) that ignorance of dangers to come can actually foster the success of a development project because those who underestimate the dangers also tend to underestimate the creativity that may be brought to their resolution.

p.256-257 the interaction of artistic responses of managers at various levels of the firm within an increasingly complex and fast-changing environment, gives rise to a strategic "conversation" between the firm and its environment. It makes sense to think of a firm as engaging in a reciprocal transaction with its environment through which it takes stock of a new environmental situation, "speaks" to that situation through the design and implementation of new strategic moves, and receives (at times) surprising "back talk" from the environment, in response to which it is led to rethink its appreciation of the environment and to restructure its strategy.

p.257 the realization of strategy... involves a second-order design process: not only should the design of a strategy be considered and tested as a hypothesis about the firm's environment, but the resulting strategic action should itself be treated as a probe into that environment, potentially revealing new information about that environment and about the designer's ideas... actions taken to realize strategy are also seen as design moves and exploratory probes

p.258 designers and implementors... should seek information that could lead to nontrivial changes in strategy, so as to pursue the new opportunities that emerge or the new challenges that present themselves.

p.258 Framing the realization of a new strategy as a probe into the environment is distinctly different from seeing it as merely imposing strategic intent through rigorous implementation or as behavioral adaptation to a change in the environment through trial-and-error learning... managers may ignore information that points to mismatches between intention and action

p.259 Organizational inquiry, consisting in actively constructing and sorting out puzzles generated in the process of probing, is essential to the firm's strategic conversation with its environment and central to the fostering of strategic learning... In order to create an organizational environment conducive to such inquiry and to strategic learning, the members of the organization must be able to learn strategically. This means that managers should learn to create an organizational environment in which... both designers and implementors are helped to see that they are subject to bounded rationality and must, therefore, actively seek out evidence during the realization of strategy that may disconfirm their reasoning and lead to new information about the environment.