CONCLUSION
How I landed on this topic is by pondering, how on earth do companies have the slightest chance of reaching their goals for innovation, when they aren't the least bit tolerant of failure? Reimagining failure as the impetus for trial & error, a learning strategy practiced since childhood, it seems that failure is an extremely valuable resource that is just wasted. For its full value as a learning mechanism to be capitalized upon, the outdated notion that failure is the opposite of success must be amended, both in dictionaries and institutions. Punishing aberrations is one of the ways that companies shoot themselves in the foot, as this does not eradicate failure, but simply encourages employees to conceal it. Looking for ways to normalize error, I seized upon the possibility of promoting trust and feedback. Both are necessary to develop the capabilities of teams, as without trust, nobody is willing to share, and without feedback, nobody knows what is expected or where they stand. Even though companies stand to gain from promoting both, I left these potential directions aside once I had uncovered knowledge loss as another area impeding organizational learning, for which I designed a solution in response to IKEA’s needs. The solution I proposed succeeds in addressing the research question which looks at how to develop a failure supportive knowledge culture, but I recognize that divergence from my original construct leaves some loose strands.
My phenomenological inquiry shifted its focus based on my experiences in action. I had originally seen scale as a way to frame how learning by doing is impacted by a company’s size. Admittedly, this was based purely on an assumption and not derived from research, but from simple curiosity about the pros and cons of considerable scale as it relates to institutional learning. Additionally, this provided the logical frame of comparing small vs. large, in order to limit the scope of the project. Based on input from nearly a dozen interviewed, I can now make observations about the practices of small businesses, but having only looked at a couple of established companies does not provide sufficient knowledge for me to formulate a conclusion as to the impact of scale. So I looked for someone who has worked with many large companies to confirm or refute my hunch. Sineck (2019) confirms that 'scale breaks things', stating that once a company grows beyond 25 employees, it no longer feels like family, and at 150 or more employees, a high level of structure is required to replace improvised methods. Based on this, my premise probably has some validity, but not something my research is able to answer. I therefore suggest further research that looks at all the ways size matters.