A "learning organization" under time pressure tends to rely on knowledge already in hand ... it seems like too much of a luxury, far too expensive, to take people out of the front lines for training in new ideas, for exploratory thinking. Of course, after a few years of putting out fires, the knowledge in hand has become stale, irrelevant ... and the outfit goes belly-up or metamorphoses into something completely different, probably with a new cast of characters.
How can a company, or a family, or an individual, stay fresh? Only through investing in learning. Probably about 10% of the time budget, at a minimum, needs to be devoted to learning; that's only ~4 hours of a 40-hour working week. There are many possible routes: taking classes, reading books, forming small study/discussion groups. A weekly "philosophy breakfast" club is a start, as are sack lunch seminars on off-the-wall topics. Escape the box!
Tuesday, April 27, 1999 at 16:53:15 (EDT) = 1999-04-27
(correlates: FireFighting, TristramShandy, ImpossibleStandards, ...)