All knowledge is imperfect and incomplete. Societies, human capabilities, social relations, resources, and technologies, all change. Even very ancient ideas have to be restated using modern language and metaphors to make them meaningful to the current age. Thus, how knowledge evolves is more important than what knowledge exists already.
Fads and fashions are media for knowledge development. They are a societal form of brainstorming where people try on new ideas, often quickly discarding those that do not work well; yet retaining others. Fads and fashions are processes by which knowledge accumulates and spreads. They draw upon aspirations, enthusiasm, fear, greed, mass media, social influence, and social pressure to inform people about new ideas and to induce them to investigate the value of these new ideas. Fads and fashions also make people aware that knowledge deteriorates, and they facilitate the discarding of obsolete ideas. People who discover the deficiencies of old ideas do so gradually and surrounded by other people who are making similar discoveries. The prevalence of so many fads and fashions provides constant reminders that knowledge is transitory, and there are usually several alternative ideas being offered as replacements for obsolete older ones (Abrahamson and Fairchild, 2009; Scarbrough and Swan, 2001).
At a microscopic level, the very process of change both produces knowledge and makes it obsolete. As people attempt change, they take fresh looks at what they have been doing, they develop new perceptions and make discoveries, and some of these have lasting value. The discoveries include deficiencies in older knowledge, and the process of discovery can be exhilarating. As a result, adoption of a new business technology can improve performance even if the new technology per se is not a meaningful improvement or if the ‘technology’ is a very ambiguous assortment of ideas with little practical content (Ogbonna and Harris, 2002). People who are struggling with very difficult, possibly unsolvable, problems need visions of possible improvement to keep them going.
Fads and fashions not only help to update knowledge; they help to formulate future knowledge by fostering mutation (Heusinkveld and Benders, 2001). Benders and Van Veen (2001: 37) argued that ‘a certain degree of conceptual ambiguity’ gives a business technique ‘interpretive viability’ that frees adopters to redefine what the technique means and entails. Senge’s TLO possesses such conceptual ambiguity (Ortenblad, 2007). Jackson (2000: 207) inferred that The Fifth Discipline uses stories, parables, and well-established theoretical arguments to dramatize a ‘socially rooted vision’ that encourages readers to see themselves as ‘actively engaged in building a learning organization.’ TLO captures the fluidity of knowledge. Even if a fad, it is capable of dispersing and seeping into the very fabric of a firm. By choosing among the book’s numerous stories and aphorisms, readers can adapt TLO to a multitude of complex contexts.
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