Developing new practices
In understanding which of the existing
practices require alteration, managers
should appreciate what barriers exist to
innovation and how habit and rule behaviour
may assist. There are essentially three components to developing new skills.
Cognition
Cognition enables sense to be made of
information and recognises that information
often requires interpretation and understanding to derive meaning:
information does not arrive in equal amounts
that can be acted on in the same way by
everyone, which is an assumption of standard economic analysis. Such an approach is equivalent to saying that
individuals have equal skills to support optimal decisions. They evidently do not
because individuals each have a framework
of understanding, or cognitive schema, which supports decision making. Such
schema give rise to perception and may,
themselves, be a function of habits and rules
previously used: in other words, the
experience of the individual. In this respect,
individuals should be valued for their experience in facilitating change.