Reference
Glossary
Plain-language definitions of the ideas that recur across the essays, each linked to where it is developed.
- Organizational learning
- How organizations create, retain, and act on knowledge drawn from their own experience. Read more
- Organizational memory
- The stored knowledge an organization can retrieve and reuse; it lives not only in records but in people, routines, culture, and—historically—physical space. Read more
- Tacit knowledge
- Knowledge that is understood and used but hard to articulate or write down, and therefore easily lost when it is not transmitted in person. Read more
- Superstitious learning
- Forming a confident but false lesson because the link between action and outcome was misperceived—learning something that is simply not true. Read more
- Competency trap
- Over-relying on a routine you have become good at, and losing the incentive to explore alternatives even as conditions change. Read more
- Core rigidities
- The distinctive strengths that define an organization becoming the blind spots it cannot see past. Read more
- Organizational unlearning
- The purposeful discarding of obsolete beliefs and routines—deliberate forgetting treated as a capability rather than a failure of memory. Read more
- Knowledge debt
- The compounding liability of things an organization believes and acts upon that are no longer true; like technical debt, it accrues interest and is usually invisible. Read more
- Single-loop vs double-loop learning
- Correcting actions to hit fixed goals (single-loop) versus questioning the goals, assumptions, and measures themselves (double-loop). Read more
- Goodhart's law
- When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure—because optimizing it detaches it from the reality it was meant to represent. Read more
- Exploration vs exploitation
- The tension between pursuing new possibilities (exploration) and refining and reusing existing knowledge (exploitation). Read more
- Dynamic capabilities
- An organization's ability to reconfigure its resources and routines as conditions change. Read more
- Verification of lessons
- Testing a lesson's evidence—sample size, alternative explanations, coincidence—before trusting it and storing it as organizational knowledge. Read more
- Self-correcting learning system
- A way of connecting how an organization learns, remembers, forgets, and measures so that the system can catch and correct its own errors rather than entrench them. Read more