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Published in May 2023

When reading the book HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Lifelong Learning from 2021, which is a collection of papers about learning in organisations, I came across this article.

The findings might not be surprising, but still useful to keep in mind in a professional context.

”Highly skilled professionals are frequently very good at single-loop learning. After all, they have spent much of their lives acquiring academic credentials, mastering one or a number of intellectual disciplines, and applying those disciplines to solve real-world problems. But ironically, this very fact helps explain why professionals are often so bad at double-loop learning.”

The good thing is that it doesn’t have to be that way. Everybody can train themselves to reason more or less objectively, or “productively”, instead of just blaming everyone and everything else.

“People can be taught how to recognize the reasoning they use when they design and implement their actions. They can begin to identify the inconsistencies between their espoused and actual theories of action. They can face up to the fact that they unconsciously design and implement actions that they do not intend.”

I liked how easy it can be to improve the communication in such a situation. The suggested approach reminded me, that in school, we used to get the task to debate a subject from different angles, finding arguments for and against something, and then draw a conclusion based on this reasoning process. The “productive reasoning” approach is similar, just that the actual analysis is an interactive team exercise.

“One simple approach I have used to get this process started is to have participants produce a kind of rudimentary case study. The subject is a real business problem that the manager either wants to deal with or has tried unsuccessfully to address in the past. Writing the actual case usually takes less than an hour. But then the case becomes the focal point of an extended analysis. […]

The case became the catalyst for a discussion in which the CEO learned several things about the way he acted with his management team.”

While this might work best in a team setting, once you understand that you should question your assumptions about others maybe more often, you can also use this way of thinking and reasoning in many other situations.

“They are learning about their own group dynamics and addressing some generic problems in client-consultant relationships. […]

They are not just solving problems but developing a far deeper and more textured understanding of their role as members of the organization. They are laying the groundwork for continuous improvement that is truly continuous. They are learning how to learn.”

(Prompt for Craiyon to generate the header image: “Personal Learning for Knowledge Workers with Productive Reasoning.” / Style: Drawing.)