Enseñar A La Gente

Teaching Smart People How to Learn
Chris Argyris

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Chris Argyris James Bryant Conant Professor Harvard Business School

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© 1991 Harvard Business Review. Distributed by The New York Times Special Features/Syndication Sales.

ny company that aspires to succeed in the tougher business environment of the 1990s must rst resolve a basic dilemma: success in the marketplace increasinglydepends on learning, yet most people don’t know how to learn. What’s more, those members of the organization that many assume to be the best at learning are, in fact, not very good at it. I am talking about the well-educated, high-powered, high-commitment professionals who occupy key leadership positions in the modern corporation. Most companies not only have tremendous dif culty addressing thislearning dilemma; they aren’t even aware that it exists. The reason: they misunderstand what learning is and how to bring it about. As a result, they tend to make two mistakes in their efforts to become a learning organization. First, most people de ne learning too narrowly as mere ‘‘problem solving,’’ so they focus on identifying and correcting errors in the external environment. Solving problems isimportant. But if learning is to persist, managers and employees must also look inward. They need to re ect critically on their own behavior, identify the ways they often inadvertently contribute to the organization’s problems, and then change how they act. In particular, they must learn how the very way they go about de ning and solving problems can be a source of problems in its own right. Ihave coined the terms ‘‘single loop’’ and ‘‘double loop’’ learning to capture this crucial distinction. To give a simple analogy: a thermostat that automatically turns on the heat whenever the temperature in a room drops below 68 degrees is a good example of single-loop learning. A thermostat that could ask, ‘‘Why am I set at 68 degrees?’’ and then explore whether or not some other temperature mightmore economically achieve the goal of heating the room would be engaging in double-loop learning. 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 veryfact helps explain why professionals are often so bad at double-loop learning. Put simply, because many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure. So whenever their single-loop learning strategies go wrong, they become defensive, screen out criticism, and put the‘‘blame’’ on anyone and everyone but themselves. In short, their ability to learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it the most. The propensity among professionals to behave defensively helps shed light on the second mistake that companies make about learning. The common assumption is that getting people to learn is largely a matter of motivation. When people have the right attitudes andcommitment, learning automatically follows. So companies focus on creating new organizational structures—compensation programs, performance reviews, corporate cultures, and the like—that are designed to create motivated and committed employees. But effective double-loop learning is not simply a function of how people feel. It is a re ection of how they think—that is, the cognitive rules orreasoning they use to design

Volume 4, Number 2, REFLECTIONS

and implement their actions. Think of these rules as a kind of ‘‘master program’’ stored in the brain, governing all behavior. Defensive reasoning can block learning even when the individual commitment to it is high, just as a computer program with hidden bugs can produce results exactly the opposite of what its designers had...