Double loop thinking
Rather than repeatedly intervening at the tactical level, are your assumptions and mental models requiring an update?
Double loop thinking has come up several times through this blog — firstly with foxes and hedgehogs and again when looking at systems for learning. This meta thinking concept , ie thinking about thinking, is one well worth delving into further.
Double loop thinkers focus on beliefs and assumptions about the value of the intended outcome. Like the single loop thinker, the focus is still primarily on what the organization is or isn’t doing to meet the needs of …customers. However, where single loop thinking focuses on the current structure and its operation, double loop thinking takes an important step forward. It no longer focuses solely on what has been happening; double loop thinking digs deeper and asks,
“What are our beliefs and assumptions about the system we’re operating in? Could it be that those assumptions are part of the problem?” (Jack Lannom — Linkedin)
The excellent essay “Teaching smart people how to learn ” identifies that:
Problem solving is an example of single loop learning. You identify an error and apply a particular remedy to correct it. But genuine learning involves an extra step, in which you reflect on your assumptions and test the validity of your hypotheses.
Achieving this double-loop learning is more than a matter of motivation — you have to reflect on the way you think. Failure forces you to reflect on your assumptions and inferences.
Which is why an organization’s smartest and most successful employees are often such poor learners: they haven’t had the opportunity for introspection that failure affords. So when they do fail — or merely underperform — they can be surprisingly defensive. Instead of critically examining their own behavior, they cast blame outward — on anyone or anything they can. (Argris)
Carroll, Rudolph and Hatakenaka, write in their paper “Organizational Learning from Experience in High-Hazard Industries: Problem Investigations as Off-line Reflective Practice”,
Learning from experience, the cyclical interplay of thinking and doing, is increasingly important as organizations struggle to cope with rapidly changing environments and more complex and interdependent sets of knowledge… What are the differences between learning practices that focus on control, elimination of surprises, and single-loop incremental “fixing” of problems with those that focus on deep or radical learning, double-loop challenging of assumptions, and discovery of new opportunities?
They introduce a four-stage model of organizational learning which identifies a framework where double loop learning applies:
(1) local learning by decentralized individuals and work groups,
(2) constrained learning in a context of compliance with rules,
(3) open learning prompted by acknowledgement of doubt and desire to learn, and
(4) deep learning based on skillful inquiry and systemic mental models.
Shane Parish highlight how a personal reflection acts as a method of double loop thinking:
Many of us are so focused on solving problems as they arise that we don’t take the time to reflect on them after we’ve dealt with them, and this omission dramatically limits our ability to learn from the experiences…
Reflection, however, is an example of a… first-order negative, second-order positive. It’s got very visible short-term costs — it takes time and honest self-assessment about our shortcomings — but pays off in spades in the future.
References
Carroll, John S., Rudolph, Jenny W. and Hatakenaka, Sachi, “Organizational Learning from Experience in High-Hazard Industries: Problem Investigations as Off-line Reflective Practice”, MIT Sloan Working Paper №4359–02, April 2002. Available online at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=305718
Jack Lannom — “Single loop and Double loop Thinking — Linkedin
Organisational Learning — Single and Double Loop learning
