English · livello B2. Leggi il testo in inglese e allena la comprensione. Il video con audio e sottotitoli sincronizzati è in arrivo sul canale YouTube.
Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. The same might be said of institutions. Organisations — universities, hospitals, governments, corporations — develop cultures, practices, and assumptions that can become invisible to the people who inhabit them. The longer an institution has existed and the more successful it has been, the harder it typically is for its members to question its premises. What works is taken as evidence that the current approach is correct rather than as evidence that the current approach is sufficient for current conditions, which is a different claim.
The organisational theorist Chris Argyris distinguished between single-loop and double-loop learning. Single-loop learning occurs when an institution detects and corrects an error without questioning the underlying norms and assumptions that produced it. Double-loop learning occurs when the norms themselves are questioned. Most institutional learning is single-loop: organisations get better at doing what they already do, without asking whether what they do is the right thing to do.
The difficulty of double-loop learning is partly cognitive — it requires the suspension of the assumptions through which experience is currently being interpreted, which is uncomfortable and disorienting. It is also political. The norms and assumptions that govern an institution are not neutral. They tend to serve certain interests and to be defended by the people whose interests they serve. Questioning them is not simply an intellectual exercise. It is an intervention in a power structure.
This is why genuine institutional self-examination rarely occurs voluntarily. It is typically triggered by crisis — a failure so dramatic that it cannot be explained away by single-loop adjustments. By that point, the costs of not having examined the institution earlier are already substantial.
The alternative — creating structures that routinely surface and challenge institutional assumptions before crisis demands it — is available but difficult. It requires both the psychological safety to speak critically and the political will to act on what the criticism reveals. These are not conditions that most institutions create for themselves.
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