Influential psychologist Jean Piaget published his first paper at the age of 11, was offered the curatorship of the Geneva museum’s mollusc collection whilst in high school, and achieved his doctorate at 21. Piaget theorised that people learn from different experiences in different ways. Specifically, we either assimilate or accommodate the lessons experience teaches us.
When we experience success (or at least when we are satisfied with what is going on around us), we interpret our experience in a way that assimilates new information into our existing beliefs and understandings. Yet, when we experience failure (or at least unexpected or undesirable results), we are forced to accommodate the experience by challenging and changing our beliefs about the situation, effective leadership and people.
Piaget's Experiential Learning Processes
This dichotomy has major implications for leadership development, because so much of the way people go about the work of leadership is guided by their beliefs.
Beliefs Drive Action (or inaction)
It is beliefs that drive our actions, and it is beliefs that keep from us acting in a different way. Imparting knowledge and developing skills will lead to nought if people do not believe they need to change or if their existing beliefs pull them back into familiar ways of leading.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
—Marcel Proust
Piaget pioneered the idea of surfacing and challenging existing beliefs as a way of promoting deep learning. His work underpins many later theories such as Argyris’s work on double-loop learning, Senge’s articulation of mental models and Schon’s loss of the stable state.
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