Concurrent experience and improvements in focal and supportive routines : inside U.S. nursing homes’ experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic

Organizational learning theory has long recognized the advantages of sequential repetition, since successive events allow organizations multiple opportunities to iteratively refine their approaches. In many situations, though, events unfold so quickly that they can overlap, becoming more clustered or concurrent rather than sequential and successive. This raises a tension; this might impede learning by reducing the time available to examine outcomes and update routines after each round, or it may instead motivate organizations to learn and get better out of necessity since less room exists for error. This study responds by distinguishing between the effects of concurrent experiences on different sets of routines. The study predicts that learning in the focal area will suffer, but that learning on supportive and ancillary routines will be enhanced as organizations experiment and explore for broader ways to build resilience under these challenging circumstances. Tests on nursing homes' responses to clustered outbreaks during the COVID-19 pandemic provide strong support for the prediction about focal outcomes and partial support for the prediction about supportive outcomes. The study contributes to learning theory by advancing work on timing and demonstrating how organizations can learn to build resilience even if they cannot always learn to get better.