Why don’t we learn through experience?

Hello! This is the next article in the series ‘Why don’t people learn?’. In my first article, I tried to put together some internal blocks that may be faced in acquiring knowledge. Another block that I want to share is ‘Gathering knowledge is a core activity during school and college days.’ Try to remember the last few weeks just before our last exam. All of us think ‘That’s it! No more exams or studying in my life. Do I have to read so much, mug up so much, write exams?’. Then we enter the work life and discover that now we need to apply what we learned while also continuously acquiring new knowledge. But are we ready for it? During our leadership development programs, many participants tell me that they find it hard to focus and read for a long time, which they were regularly doing during their college days. I think it is a matter of practice, and once you drive yourself to do it, you can start doing it.

As mentioned earlier, in our work life, we are supposed to put whatever we know to use. While we do that, we should also be learning trough experience. Then, why don’t people learn even through experience? In reality, all of us get to know things through experience. The question is whether we learn something new and whether we can apply this knowledge somewhere else.

I have often connected with audits of process and quality systems. Many organizations set up elaborate review processes and a process to draw up ‘lessons learnt’ and ‘best practices’ at regular intervals. If you take a look at the list of all of these, you will find that almost all of them are quite similar. If the writers of these sets of lessons learnt are different, it stands to reason that they are not learning from each other. Many times, the same person keeps learning (or claims to have learned) the same thing over and over again.

This leads us to the question- What could be the reasons that we do not learn from our experience? David A. Kolb in his 1984 book titled ‘Experiential Learning: experience as the source of learning and development’ gave us the ‘Experiential Leaning Theory’ (ELT) which talks about a learning cycle with four steps – Experience, Observation, Generalization, and Experimentation. Learning may be initiated from any steps, but has to go through all four steps for it to be internalized. What we will try to discuss in this and the next few articles, is where this cycle breaks and causes loss in learning.

To begin with, let us focus on experiencing. Let us say that I am going through an experience that I go through every single day, for example, going to work from my house. Although it is the same experience, different days may end up teaching me different things. It could be something about the weather that day, the traffic, something about my car or what I could do with my time in it. The RJ on the radio station that plays in the car pours some knowledge about the latest movie release, and so on. With more such inputs, there is the possibility that I would learn more.

Now, what would block that learning? The first possibility is ‘noise’. So many things are happening and there are so many sensory inputs that my senses stop collecting and sending them to my brain. If a person has to go through a complex experience, that person has to get ready so that ‘new’ inputs are manageable. The space walker that walks in zero gravity situation on Earth for hours goes through many drills before the spacecraft actually takes off. Each drill is an experience through which he has learnt something. People go through an experience without preparing for it. That means though they learn new things, those new things could have been learnt in a ‘simpler’ or ‘cheaper’ ways.

Whenever we go through an experience, we try to observe a few things and we choose not to observe many other things. What we observe and what we do not depends on our objectives. If I go for a trek, I will observe the quality of track, the inclines, the turns and shades if I love walking. If I have a special interest in birds, I will try to spot a new bird, look for nests etc.

Similarly, a young engineer in servicing accompanies the sales team to an exhibition, where his job is to set up the machine on first day and pack it again on last day. What he learns will depend on the objective in his mind. If the value of that experience is explained to him, he will probably look for more data in those days and come back as an enriched person. So, we can see that if the objective is not clear, learning is limited. Additionally, someone may have to ‘push’ the objective so that learning begins.

Since we know what is going to be learnt is based on what is observed, naturally, the question that follows is ‘Why don’t we observe?’ I plan to discuss the same in my next article. In the present article, let me raise two more thoughts about learning through experience.

The first is ‘Skill’ versus ‘New experience’. If the objective is the same, going through the same experience again and again will provide fewer data points unless special effort is taken to go through the experience more keenly. As you go through the experience repeatedly, you know more about the domain and thus, perform quicker and better. In other words, your skill improves. Such performance is desired by your boss. So, both you and your boss prefer to stick to same experiences. However, over time, you stop losing the ability to observe, assess, make mistakes, discuss and so on. This is because, for that experience, you simply do not need to do it to provide an acceptable level of performance. In many organizations, transferring people from one function/location/domain to the other is considered next to impossible. As time goes by, they are going to lose the ability to learn from experience. In fact, they are not going to be keen to take on new experiences in the first place.

The second is – Do I have to always have to go through an experience myself to learn? Do I have to fall every time or can I learn by watching others falling? Many experiences are ‘expensive’ in terms of time, effort, money, emotional stress, and so on. Of course, we can reduce some trauma by creating a less risky situation for experiencing. For more than a decade, I have been using simulations in my training programs. Managers can experience the impact of their decisions without suffering ‘actual loss’. Other method is by knowing about other people’s experiences. One can read about case studies, one can discuss the experiences of others during, say, industrial meets or discussions in canteens. Even in villager’s meets at the chawdi - the village meeting place – stories of experience get shared. But very few of us get to ‘know’ something from it and use it. Clearly, the data is reaching the people but they are not observing and absorbing that data.

Therefore, in the next article, let me focus on “Why don’t people observe?”.

It feels nice to know about what others are thinking about my thoughts. Please share your reactions, thoughts and ideas. I will be glad to know more about what you think!