Organizational learning is crucial to competitiveness but hard to sustain.

We draw on a decade of research across a range of industries.

Consider Toyota, renowned for continuous improvement. It lost sight of that goal in its push to become the world’s largest automaker—and had to recall 9 million vehicles as a result.

Let’s look at why it’s so hard to become and remain a “learning organization”—and how companies can do better.

Four deeply held biases are at the heart of the struggle:

• toward success
• action
• fitting in
• and experts

They give rise to a host of behaviors that interfere with learning.

But leaders who recognize the biases can use concrete tactics to combat them.

We explore those tactics as we look at each bias.