Cognition in the Wild Ch. 8: "Organizational Learning"

Theme of the reading
Social organization has computational consequences. How do social organizations change? The commonsense answer to this question is that people re-design social organizations to make them work better. This chapter shows that this is not always the case. In adapting to the loss of the gyrocompass, the navigation team changed its internal organization. The changes were not guided by any representation of the overall activity of the team. This chapter shows how adaptive change emerges from the interactions of a complex set of factors, some of which are inside the actors, and some of which are in their environment for action.

Getting ready to read
Definitions:

Reading
Orienting questions and issues to keep in mind:

What does it mean to say that the organization of the computation is driven by the patterns of availability of data in the task environment?
The team tries out 13 different orderings of the terms to be added to compute true bearings of landmarks. What forces contribute to the changes of those orderings?
What properties make the final solution so stable?