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The new but now familiar techniques of corporate communication--focus groups, surveys, management-by-walking-around--can block organizational learning even as they help solve certain kinds of problems. These techniques do help gather simple, single-loop information. But they also promote defensive reasoning by encouraging employees to believe that their proper role is to criticize management while the proper role of management is to take action and fix whatever is wrong. Managers focus so earnestly on "positive" values--employee satisfaction, upbeat attitude, high morale--that it would strike them as destructive to make demands on employee self-awareness. Yet employees dig deeper and harder into the truth when the task of scrutinizing the organization includes looking at their own roles, responsibilities, and potential contributions to corrective action.