Roadblocks to Organizational Change: Managing Knowing and the Production of Ignorance in Organizations

Raising awareness and closing information gaps are seen as critical for organizational change. However, this process is far from straightforward. Research on denial and ignorance has begun to highlight the tactics and everyday practices that enable distancing, ignoring, and evasion, uncovering the ways fields, organizations, and individuals continually – and often creatively – arrive at not-knowing. Despite being pervasive and socially consequential, ignorance is understudied. Leveraging in-depth interviews and observations of participants in a women’s leadership development program over a three-year period, we outline a new theoretical approach for understanding how not-knowing is produced and sustained. In this talk, we share insights into ‘managing knowing,’ or how relevant but unwelcome, uncomfortable, or problematic information is not attended to, actively ignored, and kept out of mind. Through the framework of ‘managing knowing,’ we illuminate a hard-to-see barrier that can prevent organizational members from seeing and responding to difficult issues and stymies organizational change.