Implications for practice

As Article 5 is designed specifically to serve the management of IT companies in their efforts to build strategic learning in their organizations, the implications for management practice discussed here briefly provide some additional insights cerning the facilitation of strategic learning. The managerial implications are con-structed in the light of three components: the learner (individual, group, and or-ganization), the learning process, and the context.

The results of this dissertation suggest that the top management of IT companies would benefit from perceiving strategy as a social learning process. That emer-gent view of strategy enables an organization to frequently create new strategies and shape old ones according to the changing environmental and organizational demands, so facilitating firm performance, and long-term survival. The strategic learning perspective considers strategy making to take place in social interactions among and between all organizational levels (e.g., individual, group, and

organi-zation), rather than being the exclusive preserve of senior management. From the perspective of individual learners, strategic learning demands all individuals de-velop the ability to think strategically. That ability will be reflected in qualities such as identification of opportunities; creative thinking; alternative creation;

challenging assumptions; being open to receive new information; judgmental quality; and the ability to compromise. Many of these qualities can be affected though organizational culture but concrete practices such as job rotations, special projects or challenging assignments targeted to stimulate innovation capacity, organization wide strategy workshops, and working with outside experts may help to develop the ability of individuals and teams to contribute to organization-al-level strategic learning.

Furthermore, according to Burgelman (1998) the internal entrepreneurs in organi-zational learning, individuals who promote change by recognizing and capitaliz-ing on opportunities, act as the drivcapitaliz-ing force in perceivcapitaliz-ing and apprehendcapitaliz-ing new opportunities based on capabilities that are not yet recognized as distinct to the firm. For top management this means that they should recognize these key indi-viduals in the organization and support their behavior and particularly be alert and open to strategic initiatives that emerge from the organization, as these initiatives may reveal unrealized aspects of organizational capabilities and associated oppor-tunities. In addition, middle managers are argued to have a knowledge access ad-vantage linked to the drivers of emergent processes of change and adaptation (Nonaka 1994; Tippmann, Mangematin & Scott 2013). This advantage makes middle managers important agents for the bottom-up development of organiza-tional capabilities. Thus, to foster strategic learning, top management should rec-ognize the important role of key individuals and learners in the success of the whole learning process. Taken together, although top management’s commitment and perception of strategy as a learning process is fundamental, the nature of stra-tegic learning as a social process highlights the need for management to engage with teams and departments and equip all individuals with sufficient ability, mo-tivation, and resources to contribute to the strategic learning process.

From the learning process perspective, the results in the appended articles imply that managers who invest in developing processes of strategic knowledge crea-tion, disseminacrea-tion, interpretation and implementation maximize strategic learn-ing. Thus, for management practice, the conception of the four learning sub-processes identified as constituting strategic learning provides an important tool to build, develop, and understand strategic learning capabilities. To initiate strate-gic learning, senior management should first realize that their firm needs new knowledge input. Then they must open their companies to external knowledge sources such as customers, suppliers and advisors (Oswald & Macpherson 2006).

The problematic aspect arises when a firm’s existing strategy focuses its knowledge efforts on the prior knowledge of the firm that is a function of individ-ual existing mental models and therefore is likely to affect to the assessment of the value of new external knowledge (Lane et al. 2006). In order to learn strategi-cally top management needs to direct the knowledge search beyond the existing knowledge domains in order to seek novel information that advances experimen-tation and innovation. Because social relationships matter to knowledge creation and development (Argote, McEvily & Reagans 2003), managers should con-sciously build teams and departments that are able to combine knowledge in a novel way. In fact, according to March (1991) the long-term interaction and so-cialization that often results when interpersonal interactions take on stable pat-terns over time can lead to collective myopia. To this end, top management may consider building heterogeneous teams that contain multiple diverse perspectives by recruiting members from different units and then regularly re-organizing those teams.

Ensuring knowledge access for the purpose of knowledge dissemination has been something commonly emphasized in the literature. To facilitate strategic knowledge dissemination, top management should structure their organization’s knowledge access mechanism to supply individuals with channels and a context that enables them to access organizational knowledge located in different places in the organization. Because strategic knowledge includes tacit components that have to be converted to explicit knowledge before it can have a wider effect in an organization, the knowledge dissemination actions that are widely socialized and which overcome knowledge distribution challenges, allowing to explore, articu-late and create new linkages between different bodies of previously disconnected knowledge are extremely important (Tippmann et al. 2013). In IT companies in particular, in addition to conventional knowledge sharing practices such as week-ly meetings, training and development, etcetera, new forms of leveraging knowledge flows such as communities of practice are proving promising plat-forms for facilitating strategic learning. Communities of practice such as open software communities are “self-forming, emergent groups that cut across business units, geographical dispersion and functional boundaries to connect individuals sharing common disciplinary interests or tasks” (Cabrera & Cabrera 2005: 725;

see also Lengnick-Hall & Lengnick-Hall 2003). A community of practice can exist entirely within organizational boundaries or even thrive with members from different companies. Senior management can foster these social networks by le-gitimizing them by giving them tools and resources to share knowledge more ef-fectively and encourage people to participate in such networks inside and outside their organizations. However, in those communities of practice that span firm

boundaries, strategic knowledge should also be protected from the risk of knowledge-spillover to competitors.

Because strategic knowledge is new and often conflicting, one of the key issues in a successful strategic learning process is the ability of individuals to provide meaningful interpretations for patterns of ambiguous information (Thomas, Clark

& Gioia 1993). Often this requires that the current ways of making sense of and understanding information must be altered and new ways of interpreting the world developed. A powerful source for the development of new mental models, and one that top management still rarely utilizes, is failure. A failure is an influen-tial event that can, if used as a source of learning, change the outdated knowledge interpretation processes in the organization and create new patterns of understand-ing (e.g., Cannon & Edmondson 2001; Cannon & Edmondson 2005). Failures create value if management devotes sufficient resources and design processes, and creates incentives that encourage analysis of the causes and consequences of such failures. To promote knowledge interpretation, multiple perspectives need to be brought together and the leader must create an atmosphere where people feel safe to identify and reveal failures and offer diverse opinions on the future. In addition, facilitating constructive criticism and promoting the creation of alterna-tive explanations are important aspects of the successful interpretation of infor-mation. Finally, in order to benefit from new strategic knowledge, senior man-agement needs to ensure that it is implemented rapidly and thoroughly enough to retain its value to the organization even in the face of a constantly changing mar-ket situation. In general, new strategic initiatives will be implemented far faster when the individual presenting the idea has some power and influence in the or-ganization (Crossan & Berdrow 2003). One possible way to ensure that promising strategic initiatives will be implemented is to create paths of least resistance where initiatives quickly gain support. This could be for example some specific department or team in the organization that has been recognized as open to new emergent ideas. Such “fast tracks” could be used to test the viability of new stra-tegic initiatives.

As demonstrated in Article 3, the organizational context in which learning takes place affects the strategic learning process. Most established organizations en-counter difficulties in overcoming inertial forces and developing their existing capabilities in response to environmental changes. To increase responsiveness and the ability to change at the organizational level, leadership attitudes that encour-age novel insights, differing opinions, and the acquisition and use of a new infor-mation support strategic learning. Over time these attitudes become part of the firm’s operating culture, fostering a knowledge-sharing climate and the creation of a learning organization (Senge 1990). In addition to the organizational context

and culture, the environment surrounding the firm affects strategic learning too.

In fact, organizations operating in dynamic industries might have little choice in the timing of their strategic decisions, as they are often forced to change their strategies quickly in response to a major environmental change. Therefore, envi-ronmental change is an important factor in determining the periods during which organizational change is efficient and those periods when stability is more benefi-cial. Thus, managers may need to evaluate the optimal timing for strategic learn-ing.