Responding to "Teaching Smart People How to Learn, by Chris Argyris"

The biggest obstacle to learning and improving performance for highly trained intelligent business people is the same one almost everyone faces when presented with difficulties in their lives. Whenever anyone is forced to examine their own failings we default to "defensive reasoning", blaming our failures and imperfections on the behavior of other parties involved instead of examining the one thing we can actually control, our own behavior. Argyris states that the defensive reasoning instinct of highly trained professionals, successful people in general, is rarely activated because these individuals have experienced nothing but success and therefore cannot respond effectively to failure. I would like to add further that intelligent successful individuals are rarely challenged in their assertions because of their glowing track record, their opinions are taken for granted as being correct and uncontestable, contributing to inefficient learning cycles in personnel circles where personal improvement is badly needed. For example, if an executive whose strategies have always been implemented smoothly and have proved lucrative proposes a new course of action that for the first time encounters failure and setback, who would have the courage to challenge the new directive? Most likely no one, and especially not a subordinate, or colleague. Therefore the company, instead of collecting feedback and making necessary changes in order to ensure the success of the directive, will continue to attempt to implement the imperfect strategy to the directive’s ultimate failure and the only response of the executive will be a defensive one and he will most likely blame all the others for “not giving me feedback” or “ineffectively implementing strategy because you are not as smart as I am.” Subordinates of the executive will then believe that they cannot do anything correctly in the eyes of their boss, and the structure of a formerly effective organization will digress and suffer.
Argyris states further that smart people “have not had to be concerned about failure and the attendant feelings of shame and guilt” because of their great successes in the past. This is off base because, in my opinion, it is this exact fear of failure that drives intelligent individuals. I believe that most smart people are driven totally by deep fear of failure brought on by the high expectations that they have experienced from parents, teachers, coaches, bosses, colleagues, subordinates and even society, throughout their lives. This fear of failure leads to feelings of guilt, at “letting down” your loved ones or colleagues, following events where the individual does not meet with success. When examining the lives of very successful people one often discovers that individual has had an experience that forced them to deal with their own fears of failure and how that affects their behavior and performance. For example Misty May-Treanor (two-time Olympic Gold medalist in Beach Volleyball), has spoken of her own attitude toward losing and how it changed after her mother’s death. Prior to her mother’s illness May would react counter-productively to losses or even minor mistakes, on the volleyball court, as she had a fear of disappointing her teammate, coach, and mother making small issues very large as her feelings of guilt would take over and detrimentally effect her subsequent performance. Through her mother’s illness, and death, May-Treanor realized that sometimes she was helpless to prevent or create certain situations and she was able to carry this learning experience from her personal life over to her volleyball career. She realized that one cannot control when an opponents serve renders you defenseless because it hits the net and drops into the sand, one can only be ready for the next point. Champions such as May-Treanor would not default to blaming the net for being too high, or the rule book for allowing a team to score a point on such an injustice, they just tell themselves to get past that event because they need to be ready for the next serve and dwelling in that “defensive reasoning” will make them unsuccessful in their next endeavor. Therefore one must not fear failure but welcome it, at least occasionally, because a person will learn more from failure and hardship than from continued success.
The main point Argyris is attempting to make throughout his examination is that to make change, or examine failure, one must first look at themselves and the behaviors they enacted which contributed to the failure knowingly or unknowingly. The first step to greater future success is always to look into a mirror identify internal factors that led to ineffective behavior and improve one self, then one can begin look out the window to help others improve so that the organizations’ next endeavor is a successful one.