Teaching Smart People How to Learn

Teaching Smart People How to Learn

Any company that intends to succeed in today’s tough business environment must first resolve a basic dilemma: success in the marketplace increasingly depends on learning, yet most people don’t know how to learn. What’s more perplexing, those members of the organization that many assume to be the best at learning are, in fact, not very good at it. The well-educated, high-powered, professionals, who occupy key leadership positions in the company, are those very people I speak of. Most companies not only have tremendous difficulty addressing this learning dilemma; they aren’t even aware that it exists. The main reason they are unaware is that they misunderstand what learning is and how to bring it about.

First, most people define learning only as problem solving, so they focus on identifying and correcting errors in the external environment. To engage in successful learning, managers and employees must also look inward. They need to reflect critically on their own behavior, identify the ways they often inadvertently contribute to the organization’s problems, and then change how they act. In particular, they must learn how the vary way they go about defining and solving problems can be a source of problems in its own right. This book describes two types of learning: single-loop learning and double-loop learning. Single-loop learning is as simple as solving a problem. Double-loop learning is not only solving that problem, but also understanding why the problem occurs, and preventing the problem from happening again. Highly-skilled professionals are often very good at single-loop learning. After all, they have spent much of their lives acquiring academic credentials, mastering a number of intellectual disciplines, and applying those disciplines to solve real-world problems. Ironically, this very fact helps explain why professionals are often so bad at double-loop learning. Since they almost always succeed,...