This study of Arctic expedition cruise operators navigating in sea ice around Svalbard examines how organizations respond to radical ecological shifts that threaten the relevance of tacit, ecologically-embedded knowledge (TEEK) that is tuned to, and creating value from, a focal ecological system. Grounding insights in an exploratory agent-based model built on ethnographic research, this study examines the relationship between tacit and data-derived contributions to organizational learning in volatile contexts. Findings show that organizations’ ecologically-embedded capabilities provide operational stability but the relationship between cumulative operational experience decouples from TEEK accrual in high decay scenarios. We find that these organizations are, therefore, more likely to increasingly complement operational decisions by data-derived knowledge, even in circumstances when tacit knowledge would act as a better buffer against uncertainties. These insights contribute to organizational learning theory by extending it to contexts where global climate warming-driven ecological volatility has the capacity to fundamentally disrupt the alignment between environmental contexts and embedded expertise.
