Generative learning - E.Schein

 Adaptive learning is applying the same old concepts or skills in new ways. 

Generative learning or what Argyris and Schon (1974, 1996) call "double loop learning," what Bateson (1972) called "deutero-learning," and what Michael (1973) called "learning to learn" requires the learner 

• to reframe, 
• to develop new concepts and points of view, 
• to cognitively re-define old categories and 
• to change standards of judgment. 

 Such changes increase the learner's capacity to deal with situations in new ways and lay the basis for developing radically new skills (Senge, 1990).

Most generative learning involves questioning one's basic assumptions, and this is an inherently anxiety provoking process that will be resisted. 

At the extreme this resistance takes the form of simply not grasping what the new concepts are and dismissing them as irrelevant. 

For the learning process to begin, requires either some incentives and/or some constraints that keep the learner in the learning situation. 

If the incentive is to learn and the learner is inwardly motivated to go through the pain of learning, so much the better. 

But the key is that the learner must remain in the situation even though it becomes painful at times. 

Organizational Learning as Cognitive Re-definition: Coercive Persuasion Revisited
Edgar H. Schein , MIT Sloan School of Management
http://www.solonline.org/res/wp/10010.html