Past,Present and Possibility

Abstract

`Learning from experience' and `learning by doing' are truisms which serve to beguile rather than behove. They imply that by reflecting on practice, we may draw lessons from experience in an almost literal sense of an individual taking stock. Instead, it is argued here that learning is a social process (and practice) which is action-orienting: an analytic construction to make a particular sense of actions/events located in cultural, process and temporal terms. The case is made by contrasting our talk of learning and experience with our `doing' of learning and experience-while we talk of drawing on the lessons of experience, in practice we actually learn in order to forget. Hence, it is argued that we do not develop by adding another piece to the human/managerial jigsaw-however well-or ill-defined that might be. Rather, it is proposed that we `push back limitations'-that which James (1890) argued is the very small portion of our vital resources of which we actually make use-by coming to `know' them through extending the boundaries in making sense of `experience'.