Praxis Paper 16. We’re Too Much in ‘To Do’ Mode.

International development organisations are continually urged to do things better by learning more from their experiences. For this, organisational learning capacity does not just happen: it requires a conscious effort, which at its core involves jointly making sense of experiences. This Praxis Paper takes the stand that self-knowledge is an essential first step in improving your own learning processes. At the same time, the way people commonly understand ‘learning’ inhibits them from reflecting on their experiences and thereby learning from them. Therefore supporting people and organisations to reflect on their own learning processes and capacity is central to assisting people and organisations to learn. Action research, in which the researcher and respondents in an organisation jointly make sense of their organisational learning, can then be seen as a valuable way of promoting the learning capacity of the organisation.