Strategic Vision: A path from busy city streets to an open field, representing the balance between immediate tasks and future vision.

Unlock Your Business Potential: How to Use Company Memory to Sharpen Your Vision

"Discover how linking procedural memory with organizational learning can create clearer strategic focus and drive innovation."


In today’s rapidly changing business landscape, companies face the constant challenge of interpreting ambiguous signals from the environment. To achieve high performance, businesses need to understand what’s happening around them, both within their immediate focus and on the periphery. This means considering valuable, current, and potential customers.

Focal vision, the ability to concentrate on immediate needs and valuable customers, is essential for setting operational goals. However, it can also create limitations by narrowing the field of view. Peripheral vision, on the other hand, expands awareness to capture broader trends and potential disruptions. Companies that balance both types of vision are better positioned for long-term success.

This article explores how organizations can link their procedural memory—the knowledge of how to do things based on past experiences—with organizational learning to create a clearer strategic focus. By understanding and leveraging both focal and peripheral vision, businesses can build knowledge corridors that foster innovation and adaptability.

What are Knowledge Corridors?

Strategic Vision: A path from busy city streets to an open field, representing the balance between immediate tasks and future vision.

Knowledge corridors are the structures, routines, and values that allow managers to examine and act on new opportunities. They facilitate the integration of focal and peripheral vision, enabling organizations to:

In essence, knowledge corridors allow companies to interpret information in new ways and develop fresh insights about both current and potential customers. However, balancing the insights from different knowledge corridors can be challenging.
  • Reject or adopt new opportunities based on thorough examination.
  • Change the way perceptions are interpreted.
  • Create new knowledge about potential and valuable customers.
  • Consider alternative interpretations of information.
One approach to balancing these tensions is through ambidexterity, which involves punctuated equilibrium or sequential attention to exploration and exploitation. Other approaches include simultaneous exploration and exploitation. In essence, it is about creating a balanced pursuit of knowledge by aligning focal and peripheral visions.

Sharpening Strategic Direction

In conclusion, by focusing on both valuable current and potential future customers as sources of knowledge, firms can enhance learning processes. Integrating procedural memory with focal and peripheral vision enables organizations to achieve a strategic advantage, fostering innovation and adaptability in a continuously evolving business environment. By recognizing the value of both short-term gains and future possibilities, companies can navigate the market effectively and secure long-term success.

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