Double-loop learning

These two things are easy to confuse.

Chris Argyris, the Harvard scholar, made a distinction decades ago between what became known as single loop and double loop learning.

In simple terms, single-loop learning says we didn't achieve the result.

What do we need to change to achieve it? Double-loop learning goes deeper.

To explore that, we have to look at the theoretical frameworks of Chris Argyris and Donald Schoen.

Specifically, their concepts of single-loop and double-loop learning.

This is where we transition from individual neurobiology to systemic structural adaptation.

Exactly.

Surviving genuine disruption demands double loop learning.

It requires a resilient leadership structure possessing the emotional intelligence to look at a catastrophic failure, resist the urge to apply a quick single loop patch, and instead dismantle their own foundational business models to rebuild them from scratch.

So single-loop learning might ensure you survive the financial quarter, but double-loop learning is the only mechanism that ensures you survive the decade.

That's a great way to put it.

Or if there is action needed, exploring what that action could be.

Yeah, and so there's this concept of double-loop learning that was sort of where we got to before we started, picked up the mics.

Right, so double-loop learning.

You've explained this to me briefly already, and I found this great.

So are you happy just to re-explain it?

Okay, let me flow.

All right, so the concept of double-loop learning came out of the work of Chris Argyris and Don Schoen at Harvard and MIT.

And they were looking at how is it that organizations, again, continue to see the same problems arise.

And what was occurring was that they were using the same mental model to solve problems.

One is it's mostly, at least now, pattern recognition.

I mean, we're looking at creating more sentient approaches to AI, et cetera, in the future.

Even then, I'm questioning whether or not it will have the capability of doing what we talk about, about double-loop learning.

And the reason for that is because it's trained on the mental models that we currently are using that's creating the patterns in society that we're currently seeing.