Anxiety of Learning: An Interview with Edgar H. Schein

Despite all of the time, money, and energy that executives pour into corporate change programs, the stark reality is that few companies ever succeed in genuinely reinventing themselves. That's because the people at those companies rarely master the art of transformational learning--that is, eagerly challenging deeply held assumptions about a company's processes and, in response, altering their thoughts and actions. Instead, most people just end up doing the same old things in superficially tweaked ways. Why is transformational learning so hard to achieve? HBR senior editor Diane Coutu explores this question with psychologist and MIT professor Edgar Schein, a world-renowned expert on organizational development. In sharp contrast to the optimistic rhetoric that permeates the debate on corporate learning and change, Schein is cautious about what companies can and cannot accomplish. Corporate culture can change, he says, but this kind of learning takes time, and it isn't fun. In this article, he describes two basic types of anxiety--learning anxiety and survival anxiety--that drive radical relearning in organizations. Schein's theories spring from his early research on how American prisoners of war in Korea were brainwashed by their captors. Heavy socialization is back in style in U.S. corporations today, Schein says, even if no one is calling it that.

• Organizational learning
• Organizational culture
• Change management
• Organizational change
• Job interviews
• Psychology and neuroscience