The Ambiguities of Experiences

Citation

Magne, L. (2012), "The Ambiguities of Experiences", Society and Business Review, Vol. 7 No. 2, pp. 200-201. https://doi.org/10.1108/17465681211237646

What is, or should be the role of experience in creating intelligence, particularly in organizations? The chapters presented here are intended to provide fragments of a partial answer to that question (March, 2010, p. vi).

One cannot describe one's own work in more humble terms […] a definite way to warn us against our own learning process derived from reading this book!

Intelligence in learning from experience is not an easy thing to get. Drawing form traditions of scholarship from organizations, storytelling, narrative, myth and adaptive processes, the author is willing to identify “some endemic ambiguities and mistakes of experience” (March, 2010, p. vi). He explores a narrow topic: “when and how do organizations learn intelligently from experience? What are the possibilities and problems?”.

Intelligence derived from experience often provides us with misguided inferences since there are errors in the way we think. The pursuit of intelligence is a never‐ending business of extracting lessons from what happened. These “lessons” may well be ambiguous or unclear since our retrospective sensemaking puts us in the situation of actively organizing or even shaping experience through our interpretation of what happened.

This book is about relating theory and practice, learning and performance, thus dealing implicitly with the pursuit of intelligence (the title of chapter one) in both its aspects of efficient adaptive behavior (needed to survive) and the elegance of interpretation that provides us with meaning (without which we may not survive either) rather than tangible results and with no concern for the control of life. Experiential learning is uneasy not because we personally have specific difficulties in learning the author argues, but because experience is intrinsically ambiguous.

The author goes on in his second chapter by addressing one key feature of learning form experience: replicating success. Using a distinction between “low intellect” learning (“with little or no effort at causal understanding”, p. 11) and “high intellect” learning (“in which explicit efforts are made to understand the causal structure of the events of experience”, p. 11). The replication of success is the basic principle of “low intellect” learning. Its three mechanisms are: trial‐and‐error learning, imitation and selection, each of them implying some kind of statistical inference in order to learn. The issue at stake is to define the adequate proportion of exploration and exploitation one should engage in. This “low intellect” learning is simple and may be slow, but avoids the conceit of a presumed “high intellect” learning that may not be possible to prefer a more pragmatic point of view. Indeed, because of small samples, statistical inference is a definite limit to this “low intellect” learning way.

The third chapter tackles the “high intellect” learning from experience, based on “explicit understandings that fit the event of experience into a causal explanation through a natural language narrative, an analytical model, or a theory” (p. 42). The intrinsic problem here is to reach a balance between complexity and simplicity that make the narrative, the model or the theory graspable by and useful to their (end‐)users, up to a point called “maximum comprehensible complexity”. The use of stories and model to learn points to “the fundamental circularity of learning from experience” (p. 51) revealed by the fact that humans learn form their own inventions […] what can generate more confusion or resistance to discrepant information through a recursive process; the different “myths of the organizations” can be a testimony to it. Learning is infused with values like truth, justice and beauty that guide the learning process, posing an inherent limitation to this very process.

The two remaining chapters discuss the generation of novelty (which is so critical to learning) and the lessons to be derived from experience (which is both a useful teacher and an imperfect teacher). If intellect provides us with differentiation “both among humans and among species” (p. 118), it is also a tribute to effective problem solving. Each of us will nonetheless tend to prefer choosing one over the other: more meaning and culture or more action and results.

The distinction used by March is illuminating in that it helps us regroup many seemingly different problems under two clear categories. They shade some light on the two fundamental types of learning. March is not advocating choosing between meaning and action and implies that we should consider both, the proportion of the two depending and the situation we face and on what we want to do!

Knowing the intrinsic ambiguity of learning from experience in the two different learning processes is an interesting contribution to learn more, better, faster, but also a clarification on the initial problems and choices that led us to want to learn something (broader, more complex and meaningful learning, not just a concern for more efficiency).

Both private and public sector organizations (as well as individuals) are concerned with learning and the lessons to be derived from experience. What must be remembered is that experiential learning IS a mixture of statistical problems and political issues. This book is thus perfectly relevant to a journal focused on the close relationships between business and Society, on the relationships that could or should be established between meaning and efficiency.