The other day, we were sitting around the table in the coffee shop trying to help Joe-Bob get himself out of a fix he was in. We were also trying to keep from laughing at him because it was such a greenhorn mistake. Now, all of that wouldn’t be too bad, but Joe-Bob has been working in his business for 20 years and should have graduated to a whole new level of mistakes. Unfortunately, Joe-Bob is a (fictional) example of someone we probably all know, someone we may see every time we look in the mirror. Joe-Bob is an example of someone who doesn’t have the wisdom of 20 years of experience, because they’ve had one year of experience 20 times…

Experience is what happens when we try something new, a new pricing structure, a new advertising campaign, or a new marketing channel. Sometimes the experience is positive - the pricing structure better reflects the quality of our service and we not only improve our margins, but we increase our sales as well. Sometimes the experience is so-so, our new advertising campaign hits the breakeven point, but only gets a little above that. Sometimes the experience is like Joe-Bob’s, a negative one, we try a new marketing channel and get no leads from it.

Experience happens every time we try something, it happens to anyone who is at all active, all the time. Wisdom, however, is what we can accumulate to take us to those higher levels, the levels that Joe-Bob has yet to reach despite all his time in his business.

How do we turn experience into wisdom? By closing the learning cycle. If you do an Internet search on “Learning cycle” you’ll get a million hits (just like anything) and most of them were invented by Doctors with PhD’s and MEd’s and such after their name. I’m sure a lot of papers and dissertations have been written on them to advance academic careers and I wish them all the joy of their accomplishments. But one thing I learned from my stay in the Ivory Tower - just because a doctor of something invented it, doesn’t mean it’s right, and even if it is right, they tend to be under pressures that make it hard for them to make something useful to those of us out in the field where we get mud on our boots and dirt in our eyes. Something else those years gave me, however, was my own Doctor of Management - so now I have a license to make up my own models (or customizations of models) and since I’m not trying to advance my academic career, I can make it as useful as I want…

So what does a closed learning cycle, a wisdom generating cycle, look like? Well, maybe it would be best to start with what Joe-Bob’s non-wisdom generating experiences look like.

I don’t think anyone would argue with me that before we do anything, we think about it first - even if it is just getting an idea and not thinking it through (like the famous “Red Neck’s Last Words” - “Hey, Vern, look at this…”). So whether it is a budding Solomon, or just Joe-Bob, the first step is going to be to think of something to do.

After we think of what we’re going do, including the planning (however shallow that is), the next obvious thing is that we do something.

Now, I know that is blindingly obvious and a lot of people who are Outstanding In Their Field of academics would like to yank my Doctorate card for daring to call this a model, but remember, I’m trying to talk to people out standing in their field of life, and I think blinding flashes of the obvious are good things. But to throw the academics a bone, maybe we should at least put an arrow in it…

So this is Joe-Bob’s experience engine, Think->Do, Think->Do, Think->Do, year after year, the same “lessons” over and over with little or no learning taking place, little or no wisdom being accumulated. Joe-Bob is like a battery-operated robot at the bottom of a staircase - walk into the stairs, bounce back, walk into the stairs, bounce back, over and over again. How do we break out of that mindless repetition? We do the same thing that Architects, Doctors, and many other professionals do in their practice, we close the learning cycle with a Review.

One of the things practicing professionals do on a regular basis, one of the reasons they call it a practice, is that they review their actions to see what they can learn from them. Doctors review cases - their own and others, sometimes alone, often in a group, to see what they did well, what they could have done better, and what they can do in general to improve their ability to practice medicine in the future. In the Air Force, we would have a “Hot Wash” after each major exercise or event and everyone - including the commander (if s/he was a good one) would be honest about what went well and what each individual could do, in their own sphere of action, to make a similar activity go better next time. Each and every one of us can do the same thing.

When you are thinking about doing something new, plan, at least a little, and include time afterward to review what you can learn from the action. After you’ve completed the advertising campaign, sale, hired the new person, or whatever, sit down with everyone concerned and have a hot wash review. This can be especially valuable if you have someone (like a coach) who wasn’t part of the action sit in and help keep the discussion above the line (personal ownership, accountability, and responsibility) instead of it dropping into a finger-pointing session that is a waste of everyone’s time.

Walk through the action - what went well, what should we do better next time, what should we not do that we did this time, what should we do next time that we didn’t do this time? Keep everyone focused on “I did/didn’t…” and “Next time I can…” Then capture what you’ve learned in scripts, procedures, or at least notes for the next time you try that.

By adding a review to close the learning cycle loop every time, you will cycle up the stairs, one stair at a time, gaining wisdom with every experience. It won’t stop you from making mistakes, but it will close the door on one level of mistakes, lock in the value you can get there, and open up your vistas to a whole new universe of mistakes - no, not mistakes, opportunities to learn. Here’s to your wisdom generating success and wisdom generating opportunities to learn. Who knows, maybe we’ll call you Solomon one of these days…