Imagine you are part of a leadership team at an organization and you begin to notice more people showing up late to weekly staff meetings or missing them entirely. Suppose the leadership team convenes and discusses potential adjustments. Perhaps the time is inconvenient – it’s too early, your team posits – so you push the start time back an hour. But the problem doesn’t meaningfully improve over the next few weeks, so you reconvene to discuss an alternative solution. The new theory is that these meetings are too frequent, so you scale back to once every other week. The first meeting at the new cadence is well-attended, but after a month or two, you realize you’re essentially back where you started.
This time when the leadership team meets, you land on a different approach. You try out hybrid meetings because maybe it’s hard for people to attend in person. Or you start sending the agendas out ahead of time and ask staff to come with questions. Maybe you provide snacks – people love free food! Or you go the opposite direction and implement a punitive policy for lateness and absences. But… you guessed it: nothing really changes.
This example illustrates a common trap for organizations, groups, and individuals: the limits of single-loop learning. Most of us are far more practiced, familiar, and comfortable with this kind of feedback loop, where undesirable results prompt us to change our actions in search of an improved outcome. If the results don’t change, we conclude that we simply need to try a different action.
When single-loop learning leaves us in an endless cycle, double-loop learning can interrupt it. Coined by Chris Argyris, an organizational development theorist, double-loop learning requires us to recognize and interrogate our underlying mental models that lead to our actions.
This can be a deeply uncomfortable process. It can unsettle things we’ve long held as unquestionable truths, so obvious we’ve never recognized them as distinct paradigms but, plainly, how things are. They usually require more effort, time, and resources to uncover – and certainly to adjust – but the benefits can be substantial.
Consider our opening example: double-loop learning might call into question the assumption that there should be a recurring staff meeting at all; is gathering this group of people regularly based on an actual need or is it just accepted as “what you do”? Is the conventional structure of a leadership-driven, agenda-based meeting serving this group or was it simply the default? Do leaders know how staff are experiencing these meetings or are they guessing without acknowledging it?
Double-loop learning has tremendous payoff, but it also asks a lot of us. It requires humility, the recognition that our underlying beliefs are just that – beliefs – and may not be correct or shared by everyone. It requires curiosity, often extending inquiry to a wider net of those who are impacted by a challenge. And it requires us to slow down, which can feel nearly impossible in a fast-moving environment.
We make so many decisions, take so many small actions every day. It’s not a surprise that single-loop learning has become habituated. Even merely adjusting our actions can consume energy, a precious and limited resource. And sometimes single-loop learning is perfectly sufficient and there is no need to investigate the assumptions underneath. But there are metaphorical riches to be mined when we expand the feedback loop and receive the gift, which, admittedly, may not always feel like a gift, of understanding the world in a profoundly new way – and then seeing profoundly different results. Wherever you choose to apply it – in your workplace, your family, friend groups or other communities, I suspect it will be well worth the effort.