Teaching Smart People How to Learn By Fr. Virgilio H. Delfin

Teaching Smart People How to Learn

            The author, Chris Argyris, looks at human behavior patterns that block learning in organizations, explains why well-educated professionals are prone to these patterns and tells how companies can improve the ability of their managers and employees to learn.

The misunderstanding of what learning is and how to bring it about lead the organizations to two mistakes in dealing with efforts to become a learning organization.  First, is that most people define learning as problem solving.  With this they focus on identifying and correlating errors in the external environment.  The author said that learning persists only if people in the organization look inwardly at themselves.  Second, the author coined the terms “single loop” and “double loop” learning.  “Single loop” learning is about discovering the reason of one’s participation in the company while “double loop” learning is exploring at the other ways to participation in the company’s performance.  The fact is many highly skilled professionals are very good in “single loop” learning and this is because they always experience success in what they do that they rarely experience failure.  Hence, they never learned how to learn from failure.  The result is when failure comes they become defensive, answer every criticism rationally and blame others for the failure.  Defensive reasoning can block learning.

But the situation described above is not a hopeless case.  Companies can learn how to resolve the learning dilemma.  Managers and employees must be taught how to undergo the transition from “single loop” learning to “double loop” learning.  This can be done by teaching people how to reason about their behavior in new and more effective ways in order to break down their defenses that block learning.  In most cases, companies hire employees on the basis of what the person knows as stated and evidenced by his credentials.  This is the starting point but this is not the final line of the story.  Companies should institute measures to train their employees so that their ability to learn will be opened and that the company would have the competitive advantage in their operations.  As the author said, this is not just about how the employees feel, because we might be thinking that the shift from intellectual pride to emotional maturity would easily bring personnel to that great ability to learn.  It is not the case.

For a “single loop” learner, it is easier to point out our fingers to the weakness of others in the organization than to examine ourselves if we also have the same weakness or even worse.  Another area of concern is the inability to embody what are being said in words.  In the study conducted by the author, when the group being studied evaluated their performance in the just concluded client engagement, the professionals were very open in criticizing the weaknesses of their manager and that of the clients but never able to identify their weaknesses as a form of participation to the “less-than-perfect” performance.  What is to be discovered in this study is that the professionals were truthful in what they were saying during the evaluation  process, they were just unaware that they were not able to identify their own shortcomings or even if they did, they refuse to discuss or openly admit it for fear of being judged as a failure.  It is more dangerous if the professionals are afraid not only of failure but of being afraid of the fear of having failed.  This is a more serious situation.

And so to deal with this learning dilemma it is being suggested to shift from defensive reasoning to productive reasoning.  This can be done first, by identifying the inconsistencies between the personnel’s espoused and actual theories of action.  It has been found out that there are times people espoused a theory of action which is very commendable and yet when their actual actions are observed they are doing the other way around.  Second, they should face the fact that they unconsciously design and implement actions that they do not intend; and third, people can learn how to identify what individuals and groups do to create organizational defenses and how these defenses contribute to an organization’s problems.

These changes should begin at the top.  To progress in this, senior managers should be aware of their own defensive reasoning attitudes.  They have to own any transformation in reasoning that would come from below in order to make both sides meet together at the center: that is, top level managers transforming themselves as middle managers do the same.  These transformative decisions should be connected to real business problems the company is facing to make the change both factual and actual.  

When I was appointed President of the school where I am now serving, slowly we put in place trainings and seminars as well as performance evaluation and remuneration review with the end in view of achieving our goals and teaching our personnel how to learn and transforming my school into a learning organization most especially that our vision states that “we are a community of learners”.   We have ORNEFS (Orientation of New Faculty & Staff); FIST (Faculty In-Service Training) for the faculty; RIKAS (Retooling: Ideas, Knowledge, Attitudes & Skills) for office designees; DESIMAL (Developing Skills in Management & leadership) for middle administrators; NTPTP (Non-Teaching Personnel Training Program) for the maintenance and staff; Retreats and Recollections; Improvement in the Personnel Study Assistance Program (PESAP); the Personnel-Performance Appraisal System (P-PAS); Personnel Awards & Recognition Program (PARP) but such are not enough to make all the personnel open for learning.  There were those who chose to severe themselves from the school and others have to be terminated because of their inability to transform themselves into learning individuals.

I conducted a continuing study for three school years and produced the Religious Formation Program for the Personnel (REFORM Personnel Program) so as to teach them how to learn.  This was re-enforced in the Basic Ecclesial Community (BEC) gatherings we have for the personnel.  They are broken into smaller groups where they can express themselves to train them how to be truthful to their feelings and emotions and slowly transform them from rationalizing to owning their participation to our shortcomings and be able to identify measures to improve performance in future operations.

This is not an easy thing to do.  We need to have leaders who can en-flesh what I am espousing and so the executives were also trained how to look at themselves not only in critical thinking but also in emotional maturity both in the feeling stage and in the expressing stage. 

With these changes, as Argyris said in the last part of the article, “They are not just solving problems but developing a far deeper and more textured understanding of their role as members of the organization.”