Quotes About Learning

Mastery of creative tension transforms the way one views "failure." Failure is, simply, a shortfall, evidence of the gap between vision and current reality. Failure is an opportunity for learning—about inaccurate pictures of current reality, about strategies that didn't work as expected, about the clarity of the vision. Failures are not about our unworthiness or powerlessness.

Chris Argyris criticized "good communication that blocks learning," arguing that formal communication mechanisms like focus groups and organizational surveys in effect give employees mechanisms for letting management know what they think without taking any responsibility for problems and their role in doing something about them. These mechanisms fail because "they do not get people to reflect on their own work and behavior. They do not encourage individual accountability.

Failure is, simply, a shortfall, evidence of the gap between vision and current reality. Failure is an opportunity for learning—about inaccurate pictures of current reality, about strategies that didn't work as expected, about the clarity of the vision. Failures are not about our unworthiness or powerlessness.

Until you do the inner work of learning how to see with "your eyes and your heart open," as Kabat-Zinn puts it, deep problems will persist.

reflexive loop":

people get used to having experts who can solve their problems for them; people can then easily lose motivation to develop their own capacities.

Organizations learn only through individuals who learn.

Generative learning cannot be sustained in an organization if people's thinking is dominated by short-term events. If we focus on events, the best we can ever do is predict an event before it happens so that we can react optimally. But we cannot learn to create.

You cannot have a learning organization without shared vision. Without a pull toward some goal which people truly want to achieve, the forces in support of the status quo can be overwhelming.

The purpose of dialogue," Bohm suggests, "is to reveal the incoherence in our thought." There are three types of incoherence.

You cannot have a learning organization without shared vision. Without a pull toward some goal which people truly want to achieve, the forces in support of the status quo can be overwhelming. Vision establishes an overarching goal. The loftiness of the target compels new ways of thinking and acting.

Shared vision fosters risk taking and experimentation. When people are immersed in a vision, they often don't know how to do it. They run an experiment. They change direction and run another experiment. Everything is an experiment, but there is no ambiguity.

Herein lies the core learning dilemma that confronts organizations: we learn best from experience but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions. The most critical decisions made in organizations have systemwide consequences that stretch over years or decades.

Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) has brought me in touch with hundreds more such practitioners.

In a heated debate, the novice at working with mental models will have to make an effort to identify the assumptions he is making and why. Often the beginner's efforts in a discipline are characterized by time displacement: only after the debate, does one see one's assumptions clearly and distinguish them from the "data" and reasoning upon which they are based.

It's just not possible any longer to figure it out from the top, and have everyone else following the orders of the "grand strategist." The organizations that will truly excel in the future will be the organizations that discover how to tap people's commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in an organization.

When our actions have consequences beyond our learning horizon, it becomes impossible to learn from direct experience.

Learning organizations are possible because, deep down, we are all learners. No one has to teach an infant to learn. In fact, no one has to teach infants anything. They are intrinsically inquisitive, masterful learners who learn to walk, speak, and pretty much run their households all on their own.

We need to learn the disciplines that will help cultivate the wisdom of the group and larger social systems.

Great teachers create space for learning and invite people into that space.

leaders' work as teachers often starts with their recognition of an important capacity that is lacking in an organization.

Herein lies the core learning dilemma that confronts organizations: we learn best from experience but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions.

It cannot be stressed too much that team learning is a team skill. A group of talented individual learners will not necessarily produce a learning team, any more than a group of talented athletes will produce a great sports team. Learning teams learn how to learn together. If

It turns out that people can live very well with the situation where they make their case and yet another view is implemented, so long as the learning process is open and everyone acts with integrity.