If leaders possess the ability to learn effectively from experience, everything else takes care of itself.

Contemporary organizations are seeking leaders who are authentic, adaptable, open to change, and resilient in the face of adversity. What ties these qualities together? At the end of the day it is all about learning! If leaders possess the ability to learn effectively from experience, everything else takes care of itself.

However, the ability to learn is a surprisingly rare skill, and it isn’t nurtured in most business environments. Research suggests that only a small percentage of managers are innately gifted with the capability to learn in a way that supports navigating in choppy waters, handling first time conditions and seeing the novel problems that lie around corners.

Those who are not innately gifted learners have to build new routines that move them outside their comfort zone and away from the tried and true when confronting challenges not previously seen. As leaders build greater capacity to handle tomorrow as well as today, it is equally important that the organization gets unstuck and moves to embed learning into major systems and processes. Organizations that learn from experience reinforce leaders who do the same. In turn, leaders who learn from experience are less likely to let their organizations get stuck.

Such leaders and organizations are able to recognize changes in customer need, master the upside of technological capability, and see opportunities in economic shifts – but they are far too few in number.

Surveys of top executives conducted by major consulting firms have consistently cited a supply-demand gap in leadership talent. Recently, Boston Consulting Group reported leaders needing to be more agile and adaptable and IBM cited the lack of the ability to handle the growing complexity and volatility of current challenges.

Today’s format for creating leaders looks like this: organizations seek intelligent, skilled and motivated people, who they then teach the competencies needed to relate and lead. But few organizations teach people how to extract more learning from their experiences in a self-directed way.

The knowing-doing gap

So why is it so difficult to leverage experience and grow learners and organizations? Why don’t we see more emphasis on learning from experience? With all the research and understanding of the power and importance of experience as the teacher, why have organizations spent the lion’s share of their time and resources on the delivery of training and the development of competencies—rather than on creating adaptability, nurturing the ability to learn, building resiliency and developing competence?

Part of the answer lies in an “unwitting collusion” that stands squarely in the way of learning from experience. Despite our best intentions, our emphasis on performance has driven out the potential teaching power of experience. We know that most business cultures reinforces short-term performance, but there are other forces that make learning difficult. Number one, powerful learning is hard work! It often involves “going against the grain”, a predictable decrement in short-term performance, and the feelings of loss that come with letting go of tools and strategies that generated success and rewards in the past. While it ultimately yields the rewards of growth, accomplishment, and success that we all seek - it also comes packaged with such feelings as risk, discomfort, and trepidation. Combine these factors with the rapid pace of our world and the pressure-filled demand for constant performance, and it is easy to see why people keep doing what they already know how to do!

We say we want others to tackle and learn from new situations, but we feel most comfortable assigning them tasks we know they can accomplish. We encourage them to “let go and learn” even as we punish them for the inevitable slips in performance that are part and parcel of the learning process. We push people to change, but fail to align the organization to support them through the process. As individuals, we fall into the trap of shying away from experiences that might expose any shortfalls in performance, and fail to recognize when our established routines and patterns are not well suited for the complexity and ambiguity of a world in constant flux. The inevitable result is a leadership pipeline filled with “high potentials” who are woefully unprepared to lead in the complex environment unfolding before them.

The best leaders and organizations are continuous learners with a deliberate, disciplined and systematic approach to make experience matter.



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Kerry Bunker, Ph.D., is a former senior fellow at the Center for Creative Leadership. He is a leading researcher on learning how to learn, author of two books, 40 publications and the popular Harvard Business Review article, The Young and the Clueless.

Art Gechman, Ph.D., is a former C-suite executive for a Fortune World 50 U.S. subsidiary and a senior consultant at three leading consulting firms. He is an advisor to executives at companies such as Shell Oil Company and Dow Chemical.

Jim Rush, Ph.D., was the Chief Learning Officer for Marsh, Inc. and the Bank of Montreal and a professor at the Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario. He is an expert on strategic and organizational transformation.