As a university student, learning is something that I should never lack of–otherwise my college life is just not achieving its desired purpose. However, sadly, today after going through a lecture in HR2002, I started to question how deep and meaningful my past learning in NUS, in early was.

According to Peter M. Senge, Organisms and organizations are susceptible to the following learning disabilities:

"I am my position" -- with this disability, individual units in the organization focus too closely on their own positions and responsibilities, thus missing out on bigger pictures and inter-unity.
"The enemy is out there" -- the disability enables us to find an external agent to blame ("no one can catch a ball in that darned field", "the customers betrayed us")
"The illusion of taking charge" -- when reactivity is mistaken as proactivity
"The fixation on events" -- when conversations and media are dominated by short-term events, leading to "event" explanations (instead of "pattern" explanations that describe longer-term events)
"The parable of the boiled frog" -- where we do not see gradual changes, much like a frog in a pot will relax into drowsiness as its water is slowly heated
"The delusion of learning from experience" -- because some effects are beyond the current limits our awareness (e.g., effects in time, non-linear effects), we do not experience many of the effects of our actions
"The myth of the management team" -- with this disability, management protects itself from the threat of appearing uncertain or ignorant in the face of collective inquiry, resulting in "skilled incompetence" ("people who are incredibly proficient at keeping themselves from learning")

Well, I am not officially in any corporate environment for now but I believe some of these rules can also be applied to, and in fact, closely related and very meaningful to individuals just like me.

1. “I am my position” – a good example for this is learning process of the module HR2002. Since I already have this very fixed mindset that I am going to be a programmer/developer in the near future, the definition, strong focus within myself prohibits me from learning much out of this module. In fact, I was not paying much attention for this module most of the time. But principles, rules and general knowledge introduced in this module could be very useful in the future and even for now, enhancing soft skills, which is included in this module too, is also essential to study and job-seeking. Even for the field of programming, I will make excuses for myself if I encounter subjects that do not interest me much – this is also related to the 2nd point – I am always finding excuses to basically exclude me from any responsibility of not-learning. So a focus on what we do is definitely important but that does not mean we can just ignore everything else. In the case of compulsory training program or module, just try our best to absorb more for not wasting time and expanding our vision.

2. “The enemy is out there” – Yes the world is a fierce place but our excuses make it sound like a much worse place and us much better people. There is a saying that successful people do not find excuses but methods. Blaming others does not really get anything done – except creating an image of grinch for ourselves in others’ eyes. Well, sadly, this can be related to myself again: last semester I did not pay much attention and spend much effort to EE3204 and I was complaining to several of my friends that the lecturers did not successfully get me interested into that subject – network. Honestly I am curious about Network, previously and now. Yet, I was not very used to teaching styles of both lecturers – and it seems that I am learning that for them and therefore I did not take it seriously. Some other friends said the lecturers are good and they got good grades in the end. So a pretended enemy does not only give me a bad score but also cause that I am still not good at network, which is becoming more and more vital these days in development.

3. “The illusion of taking charge” – For this one I am not very experienced I guess. However, the idea of being proactive does require more than just being busy with stuff at our hands but also about observing and thinking deeply about what is happening and take actions according to what may happen next. There will be many things to take care of, in fact, more than we can handle. But being proactive means that we need to prioritize and focus, so that we will be able to go deep to the essence of problems.

4. “The fixation on events” – There are four types of stuff in our life(important and urgent, urgent and but trivial, important and long-term, long-term and trivial) and we usually believe that whatever is urgent should be taken care of first. So our attention is grabbed by these events all the time and eventually we may come to realization that some gradual change has fundamentally changed the world and where we are.

5. “The parable of the boiled frog” – Do look out for slow self-killing.

6. “The delusion of learning from experience” – Although this is really applicable to organizations where our actions’ eventual outcome may not be immediately observable, or completely not observable with just our own eyes, it can also be useful for individuals. So I used to work very hard, continuously for like more than 18 hours to finish projects before deadlines and in the end I often get good grades anyway. But I failed to see the outcome of this bad habit – sitting for too long continuously eventually leads to my back pain now. So whatever works, or does not work may not just work or do not work next time just because we have had similar experience before, and this fact is even re-enforced when it comes to big organizations where actions’ impact is mostly not immediate and leads to many side effects too.

7. “The myth of the management team” – We have the management team/team leader to take care of decision-making stage and that means we can just sit back and relax? Being proactive can also mean that we take ourselves to the leaders’ positions and think for the organization as a system. In this case, we will not only develop more systematical thinking but also have more promotion opportunities.

Well, 1 is telling us to broaden our views; 2 is about being courageous about trying and picking up new things; 3 requires us to see the essence of problems we are facing; 4 and 5 are suggesting that we should prioritize our daily events, start to think about bigger picture in a longer term; 6 is telling us to rethink about our past experiences; 7 is asking us to think as a leader.

Of course, things are easily said than done and there is just a long way ahead of me for learning, learning about my professional skills, learning about soft skills, learning about technical knowledge in other fields …

A very related and also inspiring article talking about this subject Wordpress article