Just to change things up, I thought I’d start my blog with an analogy (I know, how original). While you sit in your rooms/café’s/libraries reading this blog – thinking how quirky and exciting it is- I ask you to, just for a moment, enter an imaginative realm with me. In this realm, we, being a team of construction workers, have decided to build an extravagant mansion (I’m thinking Gatsby style… being a figment of my imagination, let’s add DiCaprio to the construction team; just to spice it up a little). We’ve decided to build this multibillion-dollar residence on a tropical island where the weather is notoriously known for it’s harsh winds and, just for the sake of dramatization, commonly destructive tsunamis. Halfway through the construction process a horrific -you guessed it- tsunami destroys the entire construction site. We have two options as a team:

1. We attempt to reconstruct the house using stronger and more durable materials with the risk of the entire project being destroyed. <– single loop learning

OR…as DiCaprio so judiciously suggests

2. We reassess the objective of building this house on this land and, after re evaluation, decide to alter the objective itself and construct the house on a piece of land more suitable for the project (even though it may be more costly and time consuming) <– double loop learning

I know you’re thinking, “ of course the second option, it would be silly to re attempt the construction on an untrustworthy piece of land.” That first option is an example of single loop learning. According to Chris Argyris’ theory, this kind of learning involves detecting errors and fixing them in a manner in which objectives remain the same. I personally think, in the long run, this kind of learning will become redundant. We’re living in a continuously changing world where we either adapt or remain dinosaurs stuck in what will soon be considered the “technological stone age” (yes, once again I’ve created my own phrase) as the world moves on to greater things. How are we to revolutionize the world when we refuse to alter our goal and objectives? To me, this double loop learning idea isn’t half bad. It’s a method of modifying objectives and processes after reassessing and re evaluating the effectiveness of your methods. Of course, it’ll mean having to get off our asses and work a little harder but the outcome is tremendously more effective. Most of us don’t even know how much we avoid double learning techniques in an attempt to achieve a sense of complacency in a safe and repetitive routine that is our lives. We ought to speculate and evaluate ourselves and question how much we want to progress and evolve alongside the rest of humanity.

With that, I wish you all a splendid day 🙂