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.

As a result, many professionals have extremely “brittle” personalities. When suddenly faced with a situation they cannot immediately handle, they tend to fall apart.

One of the paradoxes of human behavior, however, is that the master program people actually use is rarely the one they think they use.

Change has to start at the top because otherwise defensive senior managers are likely to disown any transformation in reasoning patterns coming from below.

The key to any educational experience designed to teach senior managers how to reason productively is to connect the program to real business problems.

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.

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.

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

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