Learning and Communication

One of the biggest constraints to change is our lack of willingness or capacity to learn, because we don't have the time or because we think we already know what needs to be known to get the job done – or because it's someone else's business. This reliance on others to generate knowledge and find answers, the researchers and academics, encourages more divisions between those who do and those who think, which makes the assimilation of learning more difficult. Learning is ‘a growth of experience’, a process of discovery. It's not about the dissemination of answers, from one group who have them to another who don't, but about finding your own answers in action. We often lack the motivation to assimilate new knowledge because things are OK, more or less, as they are and so ‘…ignore great bodies of experience, any clearly analysed instance of which might present us with a very real necessity for change’. ¹