ABSTRACT
Productive reasoning is especially difficult for people in dynamic environments because it requires them to reexamine their basic assumptions and to test their judgments against changing conditions. It requires time, attention, and focus, scarce commodities in contemporary organizations where people operate under the stress of time constraints and multiple and conflicting demands on limited resources. The discrepancy between the two types of causality leads to error in reasoning and consequently inhibits learning in organizational practice. There are at least two ways to correct error. The first way is to change the behavior. The second way is to change the governing values that lead to counterproductive behavior. Each error represents a mismatch between what people publicly state as their intentions and what they actually are able to produce. Discovery of errors or mismatches between stated intentions and actions creates the basis for learning, which uses error as a point of departure from the status quo.
