Guides and Rules of the Road 127learning
‘Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to
drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.’
Lord Brougham, 1778–1868, when Lord Chancellor of England
I like this quote, but I would replace ‘education’ with ‘learn-
ing’. It makes it more personal and immediate, and separate
from schooling. Learning is how we become leaders and
how we develop others as leaders. How does it happen?
Learning is another sort of journey towards greater skill in
order to get better results. We start with some purpose in
mind – to gain promotion, to finish a project, to understand
ourselves better, to solve a problem or to improve a skill.
When we start, a gap exists between what we know and what
we want or need to know. Learning crosses that gap – once
on the other side, we know it, we have evidence of success.
So we plan, decide and act to get what we want. We get
results (not always what we wanted) and constantly evaluate
whether the results have brought us any nearer our goal. If
they do, we do more of them. If they do not, we do less of
them (if we have any sense) or try something different.
Learning forms a circle like a wheel that transports us to-
wards our goal.
Simple Learning
FeedbackDifferenceGoal DecisionActionDesired state