Organizational unlearning and digital transformation : a conceptual approach

Modern organizations are expected to react quickly to changes occurring in their dynamic and uncertain environment and to demonstrate openness, transparency and accountability to their clients, as well as to provide them with effective and high quality services. This means that organizations need to provide services in new conditions and in accordance with new rules and they need to adopt market behaviours. In particular, much emphasis is put on improving efficiency of using resources, on meeting various social challenges, including demographic pressure, overcrowding of cities, and social and geographical inequality. In practice, this makes decision-makers face new challenges that lead to the search for solutions enabling the achievement of the above objectives. It requires from the organization the ability to constantly search for uniqueness, introduce innovations, flexibility, the ability to acquire and allocate resources or quickly adapt to changes. However, the organization reaching for existing, proven strategies, competences, ideas, norms, values and knowledge becomes less effective or not effective at all. Obsolete knowledge can shape organizational routines, which may inhibit the reception, evaluation and value of new market and technological information, block the organization’s adoption of new knowledge, lead to perception rigidity, which results in organizations recognizing changes more slowly. In response, organizations must learn to consciously dispose of unnecessary knowledge in order to adapt to new information. Organizational unlearning is a process that eliminates unnecessary and harmful elements from organizational memory. Organizational unlearning is necessary for organizations to recognize change, learn, survive and compete. In a sense, organizational unlearning and digital transformation are based on change. Based on existing literature, we identify the relationship between organizational unlearning and digital transformation. This paper aims at constructing a conceptual framework to the relationships between the organizational unlearning with a breakdown into individual, group and organizational level in digital transformation. To construct the conceptual relation among the organizational unlearning and digital transformation, the literature review was mainly used for this study. This paper presents the conceptual model led by organizational unlearning and digital transformation.