The Corporate Culture Survival Guide: New and Revised Edition

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CULTURAL LEARNING, UNLEARNING, AND TRANSFORMATIVE CHANGE

In order to understand the creation and evolution of culture and to manage culture change and transformation, you must understand learning and change theory in general. It is especially important to understand how learning and change work with human systems, in which the learners are adults who may have to unlearn something before they can learn something new. The fundamental reason why people sometimes “resist change” is that the new behavior to be learned requires some unlearning that they may be unwilling or unable to do. Adult learning is, therefore, fundamentally different from childhood learning, where everything learned is new. A model of learning and change that works for organizational ...