Any company that aspires to succeed in the tougher business environment of the 1990s
must !rst resolve a basic dilemma: success in the marketplace increasingly depends
on learning, yet most people don’t know how to learn. What’s more, those members of
the organization that many assume to be the best at learning are, in fact, not very good
at it. I am talking about the well-educated, high-powered, high-commitment professionals
who occupy key leadership positions in the modern corporation.
Most companies not only have tremendous dif!culty addressing this learning dilemma;
they aren’t even aware that it exists. The reason: they misunderstand what learning
is and how to bring it about. As a result, they tend to make two mistakes in their
efforts to become a learning organization.
First, most people de!ne learning too narrowly as mere ‘‘problem solving,’’ so they
focus on identifying and correcting errors in the external environment. Solving problems
is important. But if learning is to persist, managers and employees must also look inward.
They need to re"ect critically on their own behavior, identify the ways they often inadvertently
contribute to the organization’s problems, and then change how they act. In
particular, they must learn how the very way they go about de!ning and solving problems
can be a source of problems in its own right.
I have coined the terms ‘‘single loop’’ and ‘‘double loop’’ learning to capture this
crucial distinction. To give a simple analogy: a thermostat that automatically turns on the
heat whenever the temperature in a room drops below 68 degrees is a good example of
single-loop learning. A thermostat that could ask, ‘‘Why am I set at 68 degrees?’’ and then
explore whether or not some other temperature might more economically achieve the goal
of heating the room would be engaging in double-loop learning.
Highly skilled professionals are frequently very good at single-loop learning. A