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Abstract
Organizations increasingly confront experience that cannot be fully trusted as a valid representation of reality. Yet, theories of organizational learning typically assume that experience is ontologically stable: events occur, outcomes are real, and causal relationships can be accurately inferred. We examine how organizations learn when these assumptions break down. Drawing on an ethnographic study of an elite UK military unit during largescale NATO training exercises, we discovered how simulated experience generates ontological ambiguity, which we define as ambiguity about the reality, causality, and intentionality of experience. We find that they respond to this ambiguity by splitting learning across a public-private frontier. Publicly, they stabilize ontologically ambiguous experience into narratives that preserve confidence, credibility, and coordinated action. Privately, some deliberately embrace and reintroduce ambiguity about reality, causality, and intentionality through doubt, questioning both the simulated experience and the narratives around it. This process gives rise to dubious knowledge, which is prospective knowledge held provisionally, useful enough to retain but not trusted enough to integrate fully into collective understanding. We extend organizational learning research beyond models centered on reducing ambiguity by theorizing how organizations learn when ontological ambiguity must be publicly stabilized yet privately embraced.
Keywords: ontological ambiguity, public vs. private learning, simulated experience, doubt
