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Do you know what it means to be a parent?
While nearly everyone has some concept of the nature of parenthood, the knowledge gained through actually being a parent is entirely different than a textbook understanding of the matter. Experience is a great teacher because it allows learners to develop a unique understanding of any subject. Unlike the academic model of learning, experience creates mastery of new skills and behaviours instead of simple information acquisition.
Many educators and psychologists have developed different models of experiential learning, each with its own unique value. This is the first in a series of posts in which we outline these models.
The Do & Reflect Experiential Learning Model
We all have experiences every day, but do we always learn from them? If you have ever found yourself in the same sticky situation more than once, then you understand that experience alone is not always enough. We keep being given the same lessons in life until we learn from them.
The “Do-and-Reflect” model of learning asks learners to look back at an experience and reflect on the lessons it contained. These reflections may take the form of private journal entries or they may involve public discussion. From a trainer’s point of view, the key is to facilitate quality reflection and discussion.
The “Do-and-Reflect” model is a cycle, not a one-way process. Learners are encouraged to feed their reflections back into future actions. In this way, lessons learned from past experiences lead to refined ways of working in the future.
“To keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result is insane”
—Albert Einstein
Learners can also step into the process at the reflection (rather than the doing) stage. When they find themselves having to make a tough decision, they can draw on similar situations they have faced before and the lessons that have already learned about what does and doesn’t work in those situations.
Confucius
The idea of learning through experience dates back as far as (if not further than) the ancient words of Confucius and is the foundation of the centuries-old formal apprenticeship model. This simple model of experiential learning is based on picking up knowledge and skills by having a go. In essence, it is about:
- Learning through doing
- Mastery through practice
“I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and understand.”
—Confucius
Learning through doing is not limited to learning a trade. Research by the Center for Creative Leadership suggests that up to 70% of leadership development occurs through on-the-job experiences. A simple, powerful and inexpensive way to develop people in your organisation is simply to broaden their on-the-job experiences. However, not all experiences are equally developmental. Development is most likely to occur when the experience:
- Places the learner into situations they are not familiar with, such as working in different departments, with new people and where they experience new perspectives on the organisation.
- Requires people to step up and take responsibility for influencing others and achieving success when there is a real possibility of failure that will be noticed by people who count.
- Involves additional pressures such as tight deadlines, apparent paradoxes, internal politics, high levels of ambiguity, a lack of credibility and limited resources.
John Dewey, a psychologist who is considered by many to be the founder of modern experiential learning, developed a three-stage model of learning. Dewey’s model is focused on slowing down the decision-making process so that lessons from past experience can inform judgments about what to do in current situations. The process involves:
- Sizing up the situation at hand through objective observation.
- Drawing forth knowledge about such situations by recalling similar past experiences (both your own and those of the people around you).
- Judging how to proceed, based on this knowledge.
This simple model has profound implications because it makes explicit a process for honing intuitive decision-making skills.
Kurt Lewin, whom many consider to be the father of modern social psychology and the study of organisational behaviour, developed a four-stage model of action-research. This model has been adapted by many others, the most notable of whom is David Kolb. The cycle starts when you encounter a problem within your workplace. You then:
Kurt Lewin's Model
- Reflect on what you know about situations like this.
- Plan how you intend to proceed.
- Act out your plan.
- Observe the results your actions bring.
However, like the simple two-step model Deborah described in an earlier article, Lewin’s four-stage model is a cycle, not a linear process. As you observe the results of your actions, you reflect on what is working, what is not, and what refinements you need to make. These reflections may even lead you to reshape your understanding of the phenomenon you are dealing with, be it leading change, dealing with difficult staff or what it takes to deliver the results that matter most to your boss. As a result of your reflections, you refine your plans and enact these refinements. These may be small changes to the way you are dealing with your original challenge, or they may be sweeping changes due to a fundamental change in your perception of the challenge. After enacting these changes, you again observe the results being achieved and the cycle continues again.
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.
David Kolb’s learning styles grew from Kurt Lewin’s four-stage model. Kolb believed that to be truly effective, learning requires moving through all four stages in the model. In each stage, one must use a distinct set of learning strategies. In the context of learning to be a leader, the strategies apply as follows:
- Experiencing what it is like to be a leader.
- Reflecting on what you have experienced and observed.
- Forming beliefs about what it means to lead well.
- Testing the usefulness of these beliefs in new situations.
To enact and learn from each strategy, you need to draw on different abilities, including:
- Being disciplined enough to execute ideas and turn good intentions into action.
- Being open to reflecting on what you have experienced from a variety of perspectives.
- Using inductive reasoning to distil your reflections into mental models of what it means to lead well.
- Using intuition and deductive reasoning to identify situations in which you can experiment with these ideas.
These four abilities can be represented as two pairs of polar opposites:
Kolb's Polar Dimensions of Learning
Just as some people are more comfortable writing with their left hand, each of us has a preferred learning style. You can determine your learning style by identifying two preferences:
- Learning through concrete experience or reflective observation
- Learning through active experimentation or abstract conceptualization
Kolb's Learning Styles
Your learning style describes your preferred way of learning. However, Kolb argues that deep learning involves moving through all stages of Lewin’s model. Therefore, to maximise your learning requires breaking out of your preferred style. The importance of such versatility is even more apparent when you incorporate Dewey’s claim that stages can sometimes occur simultaneously and that you may need to move back and forth between stages in response to the situation before you.
Kolb developed the Learning Styles Inventory (LSI) to help people determine their learning style. You can purchase this tool in either online or paper formats through the Hay Group.
Chris Argyris, a professor of education and organizational behavior at Harvard, and the late Donald Schon, a professor at MIT, pioneered the idea of double-loop learning.
Single Loop Learning
Drawing on earlier work by John Dewey, Kurt Lewin and others, Argyris and Schon use the term single-loop learning to describe how people learn to adjust their actions in response to natural feedback on the success of those actions in achieving a desired result. They liken this style of learning to a thermostat that adjusts the degree of heating or cooling depending on the temperature of the room.
Single Loop Learning
The Way We Represent Reality
To understand double-loop learning, you first need to understand a little about how the human mind represents reality. We all carry within us beliefs about the world around us. These beliefs are like maps because they approximate reality without ever being a completely accurate and comprehensive picture of reality itself. Within the workplace, we hold generalized beliefs about “what is valued in this organization” and “how things get done around here”. We also hold more specific beliefs about events and people. These beliefs are important because they influence and constrain what we do and don’t do in the workplace.
Double-Loop Learning
Double-loop learning requires not only adjusting one’s actions, but also surfacing, challenging and adjusting the governing variables that are usually taken for granted—i.e., our beliefs or “mental maps of reality”. For example, in the thermostat example above, responses are limited to adjusting the frequency and length of time that your heater or air conditioner work to maintain the desired temperature. However, within the double-loop learning model you may also explore:
- Passive heating and cooling strategies such as insulation
- Dress codes to better suit the natural temperature
To engage in double-loop learning, you must look beyond the familiar methods of approaching the challenge at hand to embrace novel and creative solutions. Furthermore, you must be willing to let go of assumptions about “what and how things should be done”.
Double-loop learning adds a powerful dimension to previous experiential learning cycles. In previous models, learning was achieved through reflection on the success (or failure) of your actions. However, in the double-loop model, learning is realized through reflection on the validity and usefulness of your beliefs.
Double-Loop Learning
Implications For Leadership Development
For HR and L&D professionals interested in the practical implications of this model, you need to incorporate strategies such as those listed below into your learning interventions:
- Discern what leaders currently believe about leadership and the organization. Note that there is often a large gap between what leaders publicly “espouse” and the real beliefs that guide their actions. Identifying real beliefs requires observing how leaders act and then deducing why they acted that way.
- Involve leaders in co-analyzing their own behaviours and co-constructing a map of beliefs that they are willing to own. You can use both inquiry and confrontation to help leaders build and own their true maps of belief.
- Engage leaders in testing the accuracy and usefulness of their beliefs. Inquiry and confrontation work together.
- Help leaders to monitor the effect that their newly framed beliefs have on their actions, and in turn the impact these actions have on the results that they produce.
Appreciate Inquiry (AI) is the brainchild of doctoral student David Cooperrider and his advisor, Suresh Srivastva, who developed the concept during their involvement in the doctoral program in Organizational Behaviour at Case Western University. With its accentuation of the positive, AI is a significant departure from previous experiential learning models, which tended to focus on trying to learn and adjust behaviour by reflecting on what wasn’t working.
The four stages in appreciative inquiry are:
- Discovery—identifying existing strengths
- Dreaming—describing the best possible future imaginable
- Designing—a plan for change
- Destiny—implementing the plan to realise the dream
Appreciative inquiry is typically viewed as a tool for developing and changing entire organisations. However, the underlying concepts of learning and change are also relevant to helping individual leaders develop themselves. In fact, helping a leader to link their own development to events around them is the fundamental constant of all experiential learning models. AI is different in that it provides an affirmative, forward-thinking context for your development. For example, it asks you to focus on such questions as:
- What achievements am I most proud of? What personal strengths underpin those successes?
- Where do I see myself in five years? What will I be doing? What sort of leader do I really want to be?
- How can/will I use and build on my strengths to turn this dream into a reality?
Then, as you execute your plan, you regularly reflect on what you are doing that is helping you change and how this insight can move you ever closer to your dream.
