Learn Your Way to Success: How to Customize Your Professional Learning Plan to Accelerate Your Career

CHAPTER 5EXPERIMENTING: LEARN FROM TRIAL AND ERROR

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge … observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.

—Denis Diderot

Think back to the model of the Four Stages of Learning (see Figure 1-1). Stage 4 of learning is wisdom. Wisdom is developed through dialogue, demonstration, experience, intuition, and experimentation. As you gain experience in using your knowledge and skills, you may think of new ways of applying your learning and experience and experiment to see what happens if you change one or more parameters. Also, remember that before you get to wisdom, you have to pass ...