Experiential Learning

Doing something is not the same as learning from it.

There is a persistent idea that you learn by doing, and like most persistent ideas it is half right. A person who has done a thing a thousand times is indeed different from a person who has only read about it, and nobody would argue otherwise. But doing on its own, without anything happening around it, does not quite produce what we normally mean by learning. You can drive for forty years and still be making the same small errors you made in your twenties, because nobody ever prompted you to notice them. You can run the same kind of meeting a hundred times without getting any better at running meetings. The experience was there. The learning was not.

A psychologist named David Kolb described a cycle with four parts. You have an experience. You reflect on it, which means actually stopping and thinking about what happened. You pull out a principle from it, which means turning the specific into the general. And then you go back and deliberately try something different, which turns the principle back into a specific. Most programs that claim to be experiential only ever fund the first part. They give people a task, a simulation, a field trip, a lab, and then they move on to the next topic before the reflection or the abstraction or the testing has happened. The experience becomes a consumable rather than a teacher. When you think of something you got genuinely better at as an adult, how much of the improvement came from doing it and how much from quietly noticing afterward what had actually happened?

Last week we said experience needs reflection to become learning. This week we look at why even good ideas can fail to land if the way they are presented is too noisy.