At Toyota Academy, you can find a distinction between adaptive learning and generative learning. Adaptive learning is about coping, which is the first stage of the three steps in organizational learning1. Adaptive or single-loop learning is very useful in continuous improvement because it merely improves upon a set of solutions that are already functioning well.
Second-loop learning requires a different approach because it involves new ways of looking at the world. Generative learning provides this approach and lets you enter deutero learning as well. Both are necessary in strategic planning processes.
Human extensions
In organizations and societies, learning is always connected to human extension, the process of enabling us to do things with our bodies and minds that were previously impossible. All the tools and methods we apply in our organizations are human extension, and they represent sizeable investments in human development, both as individuals and as communities.
Adaptive learning improves performance using an existing set of functional solutions or human extensions. A set of functional solutions include aspects of physical and mental (language) activity, virtual and social solutions, and often solutions for training and research and development as well.
So moving to a new set of human extensions is a massive task compared to continuous improvement.
Moving to generative learning
Generative learning is very different from adaptive learning in that it works best when we leave behind all existing assumptions and try to reinvent an organization. It is very useful in situations that demand an entirely new set of solutions.
New solutions are based on many different kinds of expertise, so you have to be the expert in what is best for your organization and the people within it. However, even with that expertise, you probably won’t be able to simply enforce adherence to these new solutions. The best way to persuade others to subscribe to your vision is through inclusive dialogue.
In most organizations, this is a highly unusual approach to learning, so it requires a very conscious approach from top management and especially HR. But after having successfully navigated their first generative learning process, many people view it as one of their greatest achievements. Most of the literature on organizational learning highlights generative learning.
Principles in generative learning
There are some Galilean shifts involved in generative learning:
- The whole defines the parts; each person must understand the whole in order to understand their own role within it
- Language is used to create new worlds, not to describe them
- Learning is a social process achieved through communication
- Spoken and detailed stories are the most effective method of learning
Get started!
If you want to try generative learning, try to implement Appreciative Inquiry in all the meetings and conversations in your organization. Introduce a new way of looking at the world that is in complete contrast to the principles of the Enlightenment, which is at the heart of continuous improvement:
- Good science is written, not spoken
- Good science is global, not local
- Good science is timeless, not fixed in time
- Good science defines and uses words in an unambiguous way
John F. Kennedy started a generative learning process by saying: ‘This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.’ The United States of America did not have the set of solutions that could meet this goal when he said it. But they did it.
- Argyris, 1977 ↩
