Myopia of Learning Essay

Learning processes are powerful aids to intelligence but sometime they fail in coping with confusing experience and complicated problems because they do not take in consideration distant times, distant place and failures. The first step in overcoming these limitations is recognizing them and trying to avoid so they would not effect negatively in our performance. â€Å"Experience is often a poor teacher†. Drawing conclusion from experiences is common in the business world but we tend to forget that these conclusions are merely just point of views of went wrong or not with a decision. Learning from experiences can make you fall in repetition if you see that this way of doing things did actually brought the desired outputs. By doing so we tend to forget that not every issue has the same circumstances and qualities so the same thing that worked in another issue may not work in this task. Details and causality are two main factors that sometimes can guide you in a performance that can be successful or a failure. Experiences from the history of the organization are narrowed also by the memory, conflict, turnover, and decentralization that make it difficult to be a reliable source of experience. That is why sometime experiences give a misleading route in coping with problems. Learning is a process and people can perform differently. There are people that acquire knowledge at different paces; some are what we call fast learner and slow ones. If we put these two persons in the same start, the fast learner would learn quickly and perform the activity faster than the other one. This means that the other person would never have the chance to do something and this will narrow its possibilities to progress and learn. In an organization you will find people that are inactive because they do not have the chance to be active so you will tend to rely more on the faster learner. The manager will help more in building a wall that will end up by firing the slow learner. Learning gives you a broad image of the short-run activities but it fails to give you a solution to the long-run ones. For example now we learn things that maybe in some years will be irrelevant due to the advancing of the technology and globalization, that change the markets every minute we learn. That means that you stay stuck in time, even though the market is developing and changing. You tend to apply exploitation when maybe it is exploration time and tend to apply exploration when you should apply exploitation. This imbalance is due to the learning process because you tend to apply the easiest and quickest way of dealing with an issue In conclusion learning is a process that has limitations when we have temporal myopia (short-run goals are being overestimate), spatial myopia (effect that occurs near to the learner) and failure myopia (we tend not to recognize failure and attribute them to luck). If we avoid these limitations and try not to be influenced by biases, learning can be rewarding. Our life is a journey of learning only that not every issue can be alike, so there is no perfect solution to all our problems but there are approaches from our experience that can be changed to suit a new issue. Work Cited Levinthal,Daniel & March, James. The myopia of learning. Strategic Management Journal (1986-1988); Winter 1993; 14, Special issue; ABI/IFORM Global.