Ali Hosseini
14 December 2017
BUS 604
HBR Article Summary/ Discussion: Teaching Smart People How to Learn
1. In this article, Chris Argyris talks about defensive reasoning and the fear of failure as
one of the main reasons Individuals in power are not good at learning. This way of thinking
resonates in the decision making and reasoning abilities of midlevel and front-line management
and can severely affect the ability of a company to fix an efficiency or behavior flaw. The author
continues to explain how the single loop learning mechanism taught and repeated in the academic
setting contributes to the ability of managers and teams to solve and acknowledge internal flaws.
The main learning dilemma is that managers are motivated on improving external factors of
