What does it mean for an institution to learn? Governments, public agencies, companies, universities and international organisations constantly accumulate experience, preserve records, evaluate outcomes and reform their practices, yet none of these activities guarantees that genuine institutional learning has taken place. The Learning Institution, the second volume in the IDHUS Institutional Cognition series, explores how experience can travel through complex organisations, become institutional memory, return as feedback, acquire meaning through interpretation and ultimately produce persistent changes in the structures through which institutions perceive, decide and act.
Building on the foundations established in The Thinking Institution, this book introduces time and history into the study of Institutional Cognition. Through scientific research, historical cases and an accessible conceptual journey, it examines why institutions remember some experiences and forget others, how they can learn the wrong lessons, why adaptation should not be confused with learning or improvement, and how successful learning can itself become a constraint when yesterday’s solutions are embedded too deeply in today’s institutional architecture. The result is a new way of understanding the learning institution: not simply as an organisation capable of changing because of its past, but as one capable of preserving what experience has taught it while remaining open to learning again when the world changes.
Publication date: September 2026
ISBN:978-84-126269-8-8
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