
Teaching Smart People How to Learn (Harvard Business Review Classics)

When you observe people’s behavior and try to come up with rules that would make sense of it, you discover a very different theory of action—what I call the individual’s “theory-in-use.” Put simply, people consistently act inconsistently, unaware of the contradiction between their espoused theory and their theory-in-use, between the way they think
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People who rarely experience failure, however, end up not knowing how to deal with it effectively. And this serves to reinforce the normal human tendency to reason defensively. In
Chris Argyris • Teaching Smart People How to Learn (Harvard Business Review Classics)
First, most people define learning too narrowly as mere “problem solving,” so they focus on identifying and correcting errors in the external environment.
Chris Argyris • Teaching Smart People How to Learn (Harvard Business Review Classics)
Any company that aspires to succeed in the tougher business environment of the 1990s must first resolve a basic dilemma: success in the marketplace increasingly depends 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.
Chris Argyris • Teaching Smart People How to Learn (Harvard Business Review Classics)
The key to any educational experience designed to teach senior managers how to reason productively is to connect the program to real business problems.
Chris Argyris • Teaching Smart People How to Learn (Harvard Business Review Classics)
One of the paradoxes of human behavior, however, is that the master program people actually use is rarely the one they think they use.
Chris Argyris • Teaching Smart People How to Learn (Harvard Business Review Classics)
As long as efforts at learning and change focused on external organizational factors—job redesign, compensation programs, performance reviews, and leadership training—the professionals were enthusiastic participants. Indeed, creating new systems and structures was precisely the kind of challenge that well-educated, highly motivated professionals th
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Change has to start at the top because otherwise defensive senior managers are likely to disown any transformation in reasoning patterns coming from below.
Chris Argyris • Teaching Smart People How to Learn (Harvard Business Review Classics)
When people have the right attitudes and commitment, 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 h
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