Research pick: Unlearning and forgetting - "The impact of organisational crisis on forgetting and relearning: an empirical study of unlearning in the Japanese electrical industry"

A study in the International Journal of Technology Management has looked at the notion of unlearning, forgetting, and relearning in the wake of organisational crises within industry. The work takes the Japanese electrical industry as a focus and looks at the triggers in a company’s top management team (TMT) that affect performance.

Pingsong Qian and Akitsu Oe of Tokyo University of Science in Japan explored the TMT dynamics among more than two hundred listed companies. They used multiple linear regression analysis with a random-effects model to examine the data they obtained on those companies in this context.

Unlearning can be thought of as the deliberate discarding or modification of a companies knowledge base, practices, and strategies during a crisis. It involves a conscious effort to reassess and adjust established ways of thinking and operating with the aim of adapting to the challenges posed by the crises and potentially overcoming the problems and improving organizational performance.

The team found that TMT unlearning could indirectly enhance organizational performance by nudging the company’s research and development (R&D) department into an unlearning phase. This R&D unlearning process seems to have a positive effect whereas neglectful loss or abandoning of knowledge, forgetting, as it were, simply had a negative impact. The inadvertent loss of insights and practices could not be a positive force in the same way as deliberate unlearning can be.

This work fills several gaps in our understanding of organizational learning and change. It goes beyond earlier studies that focused primarily on single-level unlearning and demonstrates how organizational forgetting and unlearning can positively influence TMT. The study also addresses a gap in empirical research by utilizing archival data, providing a solid foundation for identifying factors influencing unlearning and forgetting and their impact on organizational performance. Importantly, the work makes clear the distinction between those two often conflated terms – forgetting and unlearning. In practical terms, a company in decline must find a way to unlearn problematic knowledge and approaches and not simply forget or abandon them.

Qian, P. and Oe, A. (2024) ‘The impact of organisational crisis on forgetting and relearning: an empirical study of unlearning in the Japanese electrical industry’, Int. J. Technology Management, Vol. 94, No. 1, pp.135–155.