View

32

Teaching smart people how to learn Argyris C 1991 Harvard Business Review

Link

Essay /Article

Individuals

In general

Learning

The healthcare services industry is well supplied with a workforce of highly intelligent and highly educated healthcare professionals and other staff. This paper points out however that such individuals are not always as adept at learning new information or adapting to new circumstances as might be expected. It is reckoned that this is because they have usually had successful careers with not much opportunity to learn from failure, are therefore more adept at "single loop" learning which may serve them well enough for direct problem solving but less so at the sort of "double loop" learning that is needed when the assumptions that have been used to frame the problem need to be reconsidered.