A recent Farnam Street article, Avoiding Bad Decisions (9 Mar 2021), is about the 5 biggest reasons we make bad decisions. Here’s number 4 …

” We fail to learn

You know the person that sits beside you at work that has twenty years of experience but keeps making the same mistakes over and over? They don’t have twenty years of experience—they have one year of experience repeated twenty times. If you can’t learn, you can’t get better.

Most of us can observe and react accordingly. But to truly learn from our experiences, we must reflect on our reactions. Reflection has to be part of your process, not something you might do if you have time. Don’t use the excuse of being too busy or get too invested in protecting your ego. In short, we can’t learn from experience without reflection. Only reflection allows us to distill experience into something we can learn from to make better decisions in the future.

Warning signs you’re not learning:

• You’re too busy to reflect.
• You don’t keep track of your decisions.
• You can’t calibrate your own decision-making.

The rule: Be less busy. Keep a learning journal. Reflect every day.”

QUESTION:
How are you helping your people to learn from their failures – and successes? How are you helping them take time to reflect on their daily work experiences.

FIND OUT MORE:
In section 11 Encourage reflective practices of MWL 2021 we consider how you can work with individuals and their managers to get the most out of – and learn from – the daily work through adopting reflective practices.

JOIN THE ONLINE WORKSHOP – where we discuss this topic in more detail.
Modern Training Part 2
12 April – 7 May 2021