Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Learning Most Leaders Skip
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled, The Learning Most Leaders Skip. Here we go. Today I want to sit with one sentence from Chris Argyris, because I think that most of us have lived inside it without ever naming it. Here's the quote, most people define learning too narrowly as mere problem solving. So they focus on identifying and correcting errors in the external environment. Errors in the external environment, not errors in the thinking that produced them. Argyris spent decades studying high performing professionals, the kind of people who get promoted fast and get praised often. And he found something almost paradoxical. These were frequently the worst learners in the room. Not because they were not smart. They were plenty smart. But smart people are often the least practiced at examining their own reasoning because they have rarely had to. Their answers usually worked. So they never built the muscle of asking whether the thinking behind the answer was sound. I'm going to give you a leadership moment that makes this concrete. Picture a leader whose team keeps missing deadlines. The leader digs in. finds a broken handoff between two departments, fixes the handoff, tightens the process. Deadlines improve for a quarter. Then they slip again in a slightly different place. The leader fixes that too. And a few months later, a third version of the same problem shows up wearing a different disguise. Here's a common misread. The leader believes they are learning because they keep solving problems. Each fix is real. Each fix works for a while. But this is single loop learning. You correct the visible error and leave the belief that generated it fully intact. If the leader never asks why they structured the team in a way that keeps producing broken handoffs, they will keep fixing symptoms forever and calling it growth. Here's the reframe. Learning is not the same as problem solving. Problem solving fixes what is in front of you. Learning changes what produced what was in front of you. That second kind, Our gear is called double loop learning. Instead of asking what went wrong out there, you ask what belief of mine produced that outcome. That is a much harder question because it puts your own judgment on the table instead of the process on the table. This is worth sitting with regardless of what tools you use to run your organization. But I will say this for anyone leading in a more AI enabled environment. These tools are remarkably good at the first kind of learning. They can scan a system, flag an anomaly, and suggest a fix faster than any team of analysts. That's genuinely useful. But no tool can examine the belief that shaped your original decision because it does not know what you believed. It only sees the outcome. The reflection on your own thinking is still entirely your job. And honestly, it might be the most valuable thing you do now that the external scanning has gotten so fast. Here's a carry forward reflection for you. Think of a problem you've solved more than once in your leadership. Not a one-time fire, but something that keeps returning in a new outfit. Ask yourself honestly what belief of yours might be producing it. Not what process is broken, what you believe that keeps building that process the same way. Remember this, fixing the external environment feels like learning, and often it is necessary work. But if the same kind of error keeps finding you, the invitation is not to fix faster. It is to look inward at the belief doing the producing. That's the learning most leaders skip, and it is the learning that actually compounds.