Abstract
Crises trigger both learning and unlearning at both intra-organizational and inter-organizational levels. This article stresses the need to facilitate unlearning for effective crisis management and shows how we could use mindfulness practice to enhance unlearning and transformative learning in a crisis. This study proposes the conceptualization of mindful unlearning in crisis with different mechanisms to foster unlearning in three stages of crisis (pre-crisis, during-crisis, and post-crisis). These mechanisms include mindful awareness of impermanence and sensual processing (pre-crisis stage), mindful awareness of interdependence and right intention (crisis management stage), and mindful awareness of transiency and past experiences (post-crisis stage).
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all segments of lives (Verma and Gustafsson, 2020)
We argue how mindfulness practices can facilitate unlearning and contribute to several reactions and responses needed in the crisis management process identified by Pearson and Clair (1998)
Organizations learn and unlearn from their own experiences and others’ experiences in crisis (Akgün et al, 2007; Smith and Elliott, 2007), in this article, we focused on the different mechanisms that facilitate the unlearning process at both intra- and inter-organizational levels
Summary
Organization’s relational systems, affecting the systems’ cohesion, flexibility, and communication (Kahn et al, 2013). At the inter-organizational level, the appreciation of impermanence promotes awareness over unexpected and unprecedented changes through the rise and fall of the process of dependence arising (Schroeder, 2004) that may be beyond one organization’s control Such understanding can help organizations acknowledge the importance of mutual exchanges of ideas, resources, and knowledge to collaboratively govern potential shared problems caused by any crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, facilitating awareness of relational context (Knoppen et al, 2011). Setting aside and unlearning organizational routines, ideologies, instrumental agendas, and practices that are no longer relevant in the relational context of a crisis like the pandemic is needed Such an approach would facilitate trust and reciprocity in communication to enhance information sharing for collective action and learning (Diani, 2003) in crisis management. Such approaches will undoubtedly involve both inter- and intra-organizational efforts to cultivate resilient ecological systems to cope with potential future crises
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