Pluralistic ignorance and the need to unlearn, learn, and relearn in Supply Chain Management – Atoapem Frimpong Barimah writes

Introduction

Pluralistic ignorance occurs when people privately question or reject a group norm but mistakenly believe that most others support it (Mendes, Lopez-Valeiras & Lunkes, 2017). Because each person remains silent, the group’s false perception of consensus becomes self-reinforcing.

In supply chain management, this dynamic can allow outdated routines to survive. Employees, suppliers, and managers may doubt a forecast, sourcing policy, inventory assumption, or resilience plan, yet continue to support it publicly because they believe that senior leaders or other supply-chain partners endorse it. The direct literature linking pluralistic ignorance to supply chain management is still limited; research has not yet adequately connected the phenomenon’s causes and consequences to organizational management processes (Mendes et al., 2017).

When silence makes obsolete practices look rational

Supply chains depend on distributed knowledge. Information about supplier constraints, quality failures, demand changes, transport bottlenecks, and customer requirements is dispersed across functions and organizational boundaries. When people do not voice concerns, decision-makers receive an incomplete picture of reality.

Research on pluralistic ignorance in organizational settings shows that employees may suppress their genuine opinions when they believe their views are in the minority. This weakens knowledge sharing and can reduce the quality of group decisions because the adopted solution may not have genuine support across the organization (Chumg, 2024).

The same mechanism can operate between companies. A buyer may assume that a supplier accepts a delivery requirement; the supplier may assume that the buyer understands a capacity constraint; and both may avoid raising the issue because they believe the other side already has the necessary information. In supply-failure studies, these “hidden expectations” are described as a relational problem in which both parties have incomplete information about the other’s intentions and preferences (Kauppi et al., 2023). The result is not necessarily deception. It may be a shared failure to question assumptions.

This is particularly dangerous when a supply chain is successful for long enough to normalize a particular way of working. Low-cost sourcing, long lead times, single sourcing, narrow supplier relationships, or functionally isolated decision-making may become treated as common sense. The challenge is not merely to acquire new information. It is to make the organization willing to recognize that familiar knowledge may no longer fit its environment.

Unlearning is a strategic capability

Unlearning is the deliberate questioning and abandonment of knowledge, beliefs, or routines that obstruct adaptation. In supply chains, it may involve replacing adversarial supplier relationships with strategic collaboration, treating logistics as a source of business value rather than only a cost centre, or abandoning reactive risk management in favour of visibility beyond the first tier.

Practitioner evidence gathered during the COVID-19 period identified long lead times tied to offshore sourcing and “I win, you lose” supplier relationships as practices that organizations needed to reconsider (“Unlearning Supply Chain Management”, 2021).

Academic work in food supply chains makes the case more cautious. Strategic unlearning can enable product and process innovation, business-model change, sustainability, and responses to emerging customer requirements. Yet unlearning can also destroy knowledge that remains essential. Manning, Morris and Birchmore (2023) argue that organizations must manage unlearning, learning, and relearning as an integrated knowledge process rather than simply discarding the past.

This distinction matters because resilience is not the same as constant change. A resilient supply chain must know which routines are obsolete, which capabilities should be retained, and which new practices require testing before they are scaled. A 2026 study found that resilience and robustness emerged from multiple configurations of absorptive capacity, unlearning, resource reconfiguration, and supply-chain memory; no single capability was universally sufficient (Alvarenga & Andrade Guedes, 2026).

Learning across the Supply-Chain Network

Learning in supply chain management is interorganizational. It occurs between focal businesses, suppliers, customers, logistics providers, and other partners.

Silvestre, Gong, Bessant and Blome (2023) describe four forms of supply-chain learning: captive, consortium, selective, and distributed. Their concept of the “learning supply chain” goes beyond occasional training or post-event reviews. The entire network continuously develops and diffuses knowledge through different learning arrangements (Silvestre et al., 2023).

This perspective exposes a weakness in organizations affected by pluralistic ignorance. If silence is mistaken for agreement, learning networks become channels for reproducing established assumptions rather than challenging them. Learning can even be harmful when organizations absorb outdated or irrelevant knowledge. Supply-chain learning research warns that the wrong knowledge can direct a supply chain toward inappropriate actions or overload its capacity to identify information that is more relevant to its strategy and context (Silvestre et al., 2023).

The design of the network also matters. A simulation study of a multi-tier supply chain found that better communication and rewards for participating companies could reduce learning costs and increase knowledge spillovers. Training, technology support, and supplier preferences were also found to shape learning behaviour across the network (Gong et al., 2024). These findings suggest that companies cannot rely on goodwill alone. They must create incentives and communication structures that make it worthwhile to disclose problems, exchange knowledge, and challenge dominant assumptions.

Relearning after disruption

Relearning means turning revised understanding into dependable practice. A supply chain may recognize that its supplier map is incomplete, learn about an alternative source, and still fail to change its operating model. Relearning closes that gap by incorporating new knowledge into planning, contracts, routines, performance measures, and relationships.

Studies on paradox cognition and supply-chain resilience support this iterative view. A study of 277 Chinese manufacturers found that paradox cognition, or the ability to recognize and work through competing demands, enhanced organizational unlearning, which then promoted both proactive and reactive dimensions of supply-chain resilience. Market turbulence strengthened the relationship between paradox cognition and unlearning (Zhang, Zhang & Feng, 2024).

The implication is that resilience depends partly on the ability to hold competing objectives together: efficiency and flexibility, standardization and experimentation, cost control and redundancy, and local optimization and system-wide performance.

The evidence also counsels against treating unlearning as a guaranteed solution. In a survey of organizations in Germany and Austria during the COVID-19 crisis, organizational learning positively affected resilience, particularly adaptive capacity, but the proposed moderating effect of unlearning was not supported (Orth & Schuldis, 2021). The supply-chain lesson is to treat unlearning as a capability to be developed and evaluated, not as an automatic source of resilience.

Building a culture that can change its mind

Supply-chain leaders can reduce pluralistic ignorance by making disagreement visible and safe. Useful routines include anonymous challenge channels, rotating “devil’s advocate” roles, pre-mortems for sourcing and continuity plans, structured reviews of weak signals, and post-disruption discussions organized around three questions: what should stop, what should continue, and what should be redesigned?

These mechanisms work only when leaders distinguish silence from consensus. A meeting in which nobody objects does not demonstrate that a plan is understood or supported. Leaders should ask for independent judgments before group discussion, disclose uncertainty, invite evidence that would change the decision, and reward early escalation rather than retrospective blame. Such practices are consistent with studies showing that pluralistic ignorance is intensified by weak dialogue, restricted feedback, and power asymmetries, while inclusive and empowering leadership can help curb it (Mendes et al., 2017; Chumg, 2024).

Supply chains need to expose false consensus, unlearn routines that no longer fit, learn from partners and weak signals, and relearn by embedding tested alternatives. But they must preserve critical memory and avoid confusing novelty with improvement. Resilience comes from disciplined renewal: knowing when to challenge the status quo, what to retain, and how to make new knowledge usable across the entire supply-chain network.