Learning in Action

4

Experience

Practice makes perfect. Experience is the best teacher. Trained at the school of hard knocks. This mode of learning is so widely recognized it even has its own proverbs. All suggest that certain types of knowledge come only from participation and personal involvement—from doing things rather than studying or talking about them. We undertake new projects, carry out challenging tasks, and immerse ourselves in unfamiliar environments; then, we repeat the process, usually with considerably more success. These cycles of activity generate rich veins of information; when those veins are tapped, we learn from experience. The mining process may be unconscious or reflective, individual or organizational, spontaneous or planned; the goals, ...