The Dying Church

Interesting thoughts from my “Organizational Management” textbook. I believe the church can learn something here:

“The biggest enemy of learning is, ironically, knowledge itself.  Whenever we assume that we know something, this implies that we can stop learning about it. Facit, the assumed name of an organization in the 1960s that produced better mechanical calculators at lower costs than any other company in the world, failed exactly because it thought it knew what to do:

The engineers within Facit itself concentrated on technologies having clear relevance for mechanical calculators, and Facit understood these technologies well.  Top, middle and lower managers agreed about how a mechanical-calculator factory should look and operate, what mechanical-calculator customers wanted, what was key to success, and what was unimportant or sill…No resources were wasted gathering irrelevant information or analyzing tangential issues. Costs were low, service fast, glitches rare, understanding high, expertise great! Relying on the company’s information-gathering programs, the top managers surmised that Facit’s mechanical-calculators would switch to electronics very slowly because they like mechanical calculators. Of course, Facit had no programs for gathering information from people who were buying electronic calculators.”

Also…

“Competency trap - It occurs when an organization does something well and learns more about it until it becomes such an expert organization that it does not see the limits of its achievements.  It cannot change in response to the changes in its environment because it has become so focused on doing things its way, even when it becomes evident that the old routines are no longer working (italics mine). Many ancient civilizations have gone down this path and disappeared because they got caught up in their routines and ways of doing things to such an extend that, even when their habits proved to be dysfunctional, they could not imagine different ways of organizing themselves.”