Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning

The classic paper on the tension between exploring (trying new things, experimenting, searching for alternatives) and exploiting (optimising what already works, refining, executing). Organisations need to do both but tend to fall out of balance. Push agentic AI into the centre of the organisation and it is forced to explore on every front at once — each team can try more, faster, which strains the mechanisms of exploitation and coherence. March gives the language to talk about that tension without collapsing it into a binary.