Learning from experience

Abstract

Learning from experience assumes particular importance at times of fundamental transition because inherited learning becomes irrelevant or misleading. The current fundamental transition is from work for the production of knowledge to work for the production of identify/meaning (mentofacture to spiroculture). The accompanying transition in terms of learning from experience is from individual discovery of personal and environmental realities to collective meaning making. Examines the contemporary concern with “dialogue” as a core process of collective meaning making in organizational learning and proposes a process of meta‐dialogue as an approach to facilitating learning from experience in a way appropriate to the times. Meta‐dialogue involves sharing and reaching an understanding of the ways in which beliefs under discussion in dialogue can be believed to be true or useful.