Learning By Accommodation

As for learning itself, according to the prevailing views, you are supposed to learn only during a particular part of your life: the school (university) years. This learning time is a time of fun, without too much responsibility. Then you move into real life, into work at a company where you apply your knowledge. Play stops and hard reality takes over. You are paid for what you know. The more you know (or have learned), the more you should earn. Education is not a vehicle for expanding your capability, but simply a credential for bettering your lot.

Having more knowledge may ultimately mean that you becomes a leader. Then, at last, people will listen to you. They will be convinced by your logical arguments and the superior array of facts at your disposal. If they still do not carry out your commands (assuming that you have explained them clearly, reasonably, and calmly), it is probably because other people in the organization - wittingly or otherwise – put barriers in the way. It is your job to have those removed. Leadership has little to do with learning as decision making does. Indeed, when a leader says, “I learned something I didn’t know before,” it detracts from his or her ability to appear certain and thus to inspire confidence. Thus a leader who learns is a leader who is unsure.

This attitude is a cartoon of intelligent human life. It portrays people as cars: you start at a service station (university) and feel up your “brain tank” with knowledge. Then you use your intellectual fuel to advance down life’s highway. This view reflected in the way we recruit, remunerate, and promote people. There is no place at the top for an actor who seeks to anticipate outside events by, for example, bringing people together to look at developments that might turn into a crisis. There is no room for someone who admits that he or she does not have all the answers. The idea that the company itself could do some learning of its own does not enter into anyone’s mind.

I could easily see for myself that problem solving (and decision making) was a learning process. It was, in fact, hardly individual at all. It was primarily a social process, simple, unheroic, and unscientific.

Suppose that you and I are part of a team, holding meetings to make a decision. Look closely at what happens during such a meeting. We talk. Ideally, we talk freely and openly. If we have any hope of reaching a decision, we know the meeting can’t be dominated by one person - certainly not by the boss. We know that nobody in the room has any solution at hand. We will have to struggle together to find an answer to a situation that concerns us all. If the meeting is to be affective, therefore, none of us can lose patience with the thought processes of our colleagues.

A modern business can no longer run by a few people who think and many people who do what they are told - the traditional military command-and-control model. Today, decisions cannot be made in the old authoritarian manner. They need interaction, intuitive reflection, and the fostering of collaborative mental models. They need play. They need creativity. They need learning. This massage goes against the traditional way in which most people look at their career position. They do not think their job in terms of learning. They feel that their leadership depends on their “knowing” - their ability to project self-assured confidence in their own information. The corollary notion, that “the best way to learn is through play,” makes the message even less palatable.

To have to learn something meant you didn’t know it in the first place, and for people who are grown up in authoritarian environment, it was consider much better to lie and give an answer - any answer - than to admit you don’t know. This attitude is still ingrained in many companies - sometimes deeply ingrained.

Ultimately, if companies do not embrace the hypothesis of “accelerating learning” and the concept of “play” - of creativity - they will suffer the serious long-term effect of learning more slowly than their competitors.

The activity most people have in mind when they think of learning - being exposed to facts and assimilating them intellectually. In this activity, there are ready-made ideas and structures that fit the situation. These ideas can be transmitted from one individual to another. This is the learning activity of the traditional lecture hall or classroom; it is so prevalent that many of us are conditioned to equate learning with teaching.

In company, the closest one gets to teaching is when an expert or a consultant stands up in a management meeting and doles out his or her wisdom. This teaching is not the dominant method for training in companies. That’s just as well – it shows that in companies, when performance counts, people recognize that teaching is an ineffective route to learning.

The other type of learning, as Piaget puts it, is learning by accommodation. In this type of learning, you undergo an internal structural change in your beliefs, ideas, and attitudes. When we learn by assimilation, says Piaget, the lectures and books of conventional school learning are sufficient. But learning by accommodation requires much more. It is an experiential process by which you participate fully, with all your intellect and heart, not knowing what the final result will be, but knowing that you will be different when you come out the other end. This interrelationship with the environment actually makes you grow, survive, and develop your potential. Someone who undergoes a course of military training, for example, will no longer think or act the same way as before; the same is true for someone who goes through the rigors of in-depth professional school or corporations.