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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Atlanta, GA | Posted: February 5, 2018
School of Public Policy Assistant Professor Scott Ganz is the author of a paper titled “Ignorant Decision Making and Educated Inertia: Some Political Pathologies of Organizational Learning” that was recently published Organization Science. In his paper, Ganz writes that studies focusing on failures in organizational learning, gathering, and decision-making highlight psychological and institutional causes. As part of his research, Ganz seeks to answer the question of why organizations seem to learn a lot of useless information but not enough information when the time comes for them to act. Professor Ganz builds on his research in organizational theory by developing a model that introduces political conflict into the theory of organizational learning. His model focuses on two organizational decisions. The first is whether an organization should decide to collect information and learn while the second looks at whether to keep an existing policy or implement an alternative policy.
Using the model, Professor Ganz finds that organizations that deal with political conflict will forego learning when it is not needed by leaders to build consensus to support change to a policy. Additionally, leaders will use learning when they are unable to build such a consensus without learning. He notes that learning is a strategic decision for people who have the authority to collect information. He adds that under certain conditions the benefits gained from learning are outweighed by the political constraints imposed by more information. In other conditions, learning can be helpful in breaking organizations out of gridlock.
