Learning to learn at work

There are two basic ways in which we learn. The first is planned, and clearly conscious. For example, we might choose to read a book to find out how to improve our management skills or sign up for a course to learn about health and safety. The second is unconscious learning through our experience of life on a daily basis. This way of learning can feel intuitive – ‘I just know this is the best way for us to do it’ – which makes it hard to be clear about what exactly we have learned.

We all have the ability to learn from our experiences, otherwise we would make the same mistakes repeatedly and find it impossible to adapt to change. However, most of us do, indeed, have the capacity to make the same mistakes over and over, and often find change painful and difficult. Looking more broadly, learning to learn from our experiences has the capacity to make our lives more purposeful and fulfilling. Peter Honey and Alan Mumford have been enormously influential in demonstrating how we can learn to learn through experience¹. Building on the ideas of David Kolb² they developed a four-stage learning cycle (see diagram). They demonstrated that if we are actually going to learn, rather than repeat mistakes, then we have to go through all the stages. Maria is a very busy arts centre manager; she is always on the go. However, she doesn’t actually learn from her experiences because she does not make time to reflect on and make sense of what she has been doing, and then to modify her behaviour and actions next time.

Honey and Mumford also linked each of the four stages of the learning cycle with a particular learning style, shown in brackets in the diagram. Crucially, they found that not only do we have to go through each of the four stages in order to learn effectively, but that each of us will have a strong preference for one learning style.

Activists, like Maria, like to take direct action. Reflectors like to think about things in detail before taking action. Theorists like to see how things fit into an overall pattern. Pragmatists like to see how things work in practice. It is not just Activists like Maria who can get stuck: I worked with a marketing manager who adored thinking about and analysing data (he was a Theorist), but there was never much action as a result of all this.

So, how can we learn to learn at work? In the first instance, I would strongly recommend that you find out your preferred learning style and then put a plan together that addresses how you are going to strengthen your less-developed styles. (You can do this at http://www.peterhoney.com for about £10). If others in your organisation do this too, and you share your results, then it will also improve your collective effectiveness because you are more likely to value the differences between you, and place more importance on learning with and from each other. If you do get to this stage, of wanting to improve how you learn together, then you may want to think about introducing action learning sets.

Action learning was developed by Reg Revans as the best way to help managers learn, and it is based on his idea that ‘there can be no learning without action and no (sober and deliberate) action without learning’. Mike Pedler³ explains that action learning sets bring people together to work on and through problems of leadership and management in the organisation that have previously been intractable. Action learning sets seek to cultivate an environment where learning is uninhibited – so the organisational culture needs to be one where people are encouraged to have a say and be entrepreneurial. The members of the set will meet regularly to work through the problem that each member brings, using reflection and questioning, and guided by a facilitator (who could come from within your organisation, or the role could be rotated among group members). Each of the four stages of Honey and Mumford’s learning cycle is gone through, which means that fresh insight will be obtained, and a new way forward will be found. Thus, having group members who have a variety in their preferred learning styles becomes important, and group members have an opportunity to improve their under-utilised styles.

Learning to learn spends most of its time in the ‘important but not urgent’ quadrant. However, if we can find the personal resources to give it attention, then the benefits are potentially enormous.