Business integration in a learning organization: the role of management development

Explores difficulties involved in business integration by providing data from an in‐depth scholarly consulting project. Focuses on the barriers that exist and emerge in the form of defensive actions and routines that tend to undermine existing core competencies as well as the formation of new core competencies. These individual and organizational barriers tend to inhibit the very kind of organizational learning critical for sustainable competitive advantage, i.e. the ability of an organization to double‐loop learn, and to reframe and reshape its competence in an evolving business environment. Argues that a kind of management development in action is required to help managers address the defensive routines in the organization or articulate and disseminate workable solutions they find in the midst of practice. This kind of management development helps practitioners to interpenetrate each others’ theories of practice and goes beyond the traditional stance of many organization and management developers to focus on “process”. Management development in action requires an integration of “process” and “content” and reframes the debate between these two positions by proposing an inquiring and designing stance towards causal reasoning in action.