Learning from 'Sins of Ommission'

The BBC World Service Global Business Report (ABC News Radio) is a fatuous little segment I usually avoid. However yesterday's pompuous, waffly interview yielded an interesting management concept, based on the fact that managers generally reject far more ideas and suggestions than they accept, and for obvious reasons. They must decide on a limited set of actions from a wide field of possibilities, and, in evaluating outcomes, tend to focus on the consequences these few actualities , without learning from unfulfilled possibilities.
However Russell Ackoff raised the problem of identifying and learning from strategic 'sins of ommission'. These occur when it emerges that, rather than suffering the consequences of a mistaken path taken, an organisation loses out based on choices foregone, or decisions not even made.

Ackoff suggested that managers should record innovations not followed through and plot the consequences, especially when it emerges that these ommissions were mistakes.
The benefits of a system that plotted options not taken would be not only in learning about organisational strategy, but in facilitating communication and transmitting experience. Radical ideas tend to cut aross age groups and organisational hierarchies, with youngsters, outsiders and front-liners bringing proposals to management from a different perspective. In the other direction, mentorship, experience and discussion would be facilitated when the good reasons for many 'ommissions' come to light.

This system also has an HR dimension: not to trace these contingent results is a kind of double rejection. Management knock back someone's idea (not, in itself, a bad thing), and then ignore the possible learning from the foregone option. They are failing to acknowledge that it could have had future relevance. To the person whose idea it was, the disappointment might have been soothed for by a sense of ongoing interest. A culture of repeated rejection breeds frustration and alienation.

Here the challenge posed to organisational learning by blogs and wikis is evident. Frustrated and ignored staff can not only vent spleen (often harmlessly), but may resort to passing great ideas around outside organisational boundaries. So a management that doubly ignores ideas further misses out, and likely doesn't even know it.

On the flip side it would be crucial to manage the perception of such a system, which could easily could be viewed as an embittering blame device - the 'I told you so!' machine. It could also be unwieldy and wasteful. Clearly, its implementation would require technical forethought and managerial commitment, to build and launch a respectable, 'lightweight' management tool.

There are two main reasons why tracking the consequences of foregone strategies and ideas are particularly impotant to public librarianship. Right now, libraries are, or certainly should be, scrambling to 1) assess the myriad possibilits of Web2, and 2) avoid being sidelined, cut back, lose public profile and relevance as an institution. In short, this tool would have a major impact on how we strike the strategic (in the true sense) balance between conservativism and innovation; permanence and transience; control and trust. We have to try and learn, quickly, what information possibilities we are passing up, wisely or disastrously, every day.