Developing guiding principles: An organizational learning perspective

Guiding principles are knowledge structures that call to mind collective narratives with emotional content, and are articulated and used heuristically to guide decision-making in organizations. In this paper, we draw on the organizational learning literature to explore how 1) guiding principles become integrated in management teams through discursive processes of social learning, and 2) how process techniques from the realm of organizational learning can be used to facilitate the development of guiding principles. We propose that guiding principle development may be facilitated using process techniques similar to those proposed for integrating organizational learning, namely: dialogical processes involving processes of inquiry, divergence and convergence. We explore our theoretical findings through use of an illustrative case study of guiding principles development in a European telecommunications firm.