Selective Attention and Cognitive Barriers to Experiential Learning
Managers frequently fail to learn from natural trial-and-error variation in daily operations because cognitive capacity limits prevent them from noticing or processing unorganized environmental variables.
Picture this
Imagine a bus driver whose bus breaks down frequently, but who assumes breakdown rates are completely random. Even though the bus floor is covered in loose trash and dirt every day it breaks down, the driver never notices the connection because they focus exclusively on engine noise, failing to observe that loose trash jams the foot pedals.
What the evidence says
Prior to intervention, managers failed to notice that disorganized factory floors and unmonitored defect counts directly suppressed output, despite decades of operating experience under routine operational variation.
- Who
- 28 manufacturing plants across 17 large cotton textile firms in Tarapur and Umbergaon, India.
- How
- Qualitative behavioral assessment and theoretical synthesis of manager learning patterns across 38 operational practices during a multi-year field experiment.
What to do
Implement mandatory visual displays and structured daily tracking logs to force managerial attention onto non-obvious operational metrics.
From the source
"Recent work by Schwartzstein (2012) and Hanna, Mullainathan, and Schwartzstein (2012) highlights, however, that cognitive limitations could prevent directors and managers from noting the impact of such variables that they had not thought important, so the information would be ignored."
541 Management in India QJE.pdf
Tagged
Nearby findings
- Psychological Costs of Application InitiationEconomics (general)
- Administrative Social Security Data Linkage for Earnings MeasurementEconomics (general)
- Agnostic Machine Learning Heterogeneity Detection in Field TrialsEconomics (general)
- Asymmetric Wealth Effect of Subsidized Index ContractsEconomics (general)