Learning to Learn: The Highest Form of Resilience
Most leaders know they should learn from their experience. Fewer have examined how they learn — what actually makes experience developmental for them, as opposed to simply accumulative. Even fewer have deliberately invested in improving that process itself.
This is the territory of what researchers call triple-loop learning, or deutero-learning: learning how to learn. It is the highest and most generative form of learning available to leaders and organisations, and it is the capability that most reliably produces resilience that compounds over time rather than resilience that simply responds to each disruption as it arrives.
The Three Levels of Learning
The distinction between the three levels of learning is practical and worth understanding precisely.
Single-loop learning is the most common. Something goes wrong, the error is identified and corrected, and the leader or organisation returns to the previous pattern with a specific adjustment. The underlying system — the values, assumptions and ways of operating that produced the error — is not examined. The response is: what do I need to do differently next time?
Double-loop learning goes deeper. When something goes wrong, the leader examines not just the specific action that failed but the assumption or belief that led to it. The response is: why did I do it that way in the first place, and is that still the right operating principle? This level of learning produces more durable change because it addresses the system rather than the symptom.
Triple-loop learning goes deeper still. It examines the learning process itself: how do I learn, what enables my learning, what obstructs it, and how can I improve the quality of learning I extract from my experience? This level of learning is rare in leadership practice — and it is the one that determines whether a leader compounds their capability over time or plateaus.
“Single-loop learning fixes the error. Double-loop learning fixes the system. Triple-loop learning improves the capacity to learn from both.”
How are you role modelling triple-loop learning? Photo A-C-T Unsplash
Why This Matters for Resilience
The 2022 systematic review by Evenseth, Sydnes and Gausdal, covering 59 studies on organisational learning and resilience, found that triple-loop learning — learning about learning processes — is essential for developing genuine organisational resilience. Specifically, it is what prevents organisations from falling into "pathological learning cycles" — the patterns where the same disruptions produce the same inadequate responses, repeatedly, because the capacity to learn from them has not itself been developed.
The Resilience Engine’s research on adaptability confirms the individual-level equivalent: those who actively and consistently engage with developing their adaptability — not just applying it, but reflecting on how they develop it — operate at higher levels of resilience over time. The consistent engagement is the triple-loop practice.
The Three Resilience Wheel Questions as a Triple-Loop Tool
The three Resilience Wheel reflective questions are specifically designed to operate at all three levels simultaneously:
The first question — what has been serving me well behaviourally — is a single-loop question. It identifies what is working.
The second question — what has not been serving me well — begins to move towards double-loop territory. It prompts examination of patterns that are not working, which leads naturally to asking why those patterns exist and what they are based on.
The third question — how can I do more of the behaviours in the first answer — is the triple-loop prompt. It asks not just what to change, but how to make the change more likely to stick, which is a question about the learning process itself.
Used consistently, these three questions build the reflective practice that is triple-loop learning in its most accessible, sustainable form. Ten minutes. Honest answers. Consistent use. The compounding effect over months and years is significant.
What Triple-Loop Learning Looks Like in an Organisation
At organisational level, triple-loop learning shows up in specific practices. Post-disruption reviews that ask not just "what did we learn?" but "how well did we learn from this, and what would make our learning more effective next time?" Leadership cultures where the quality of reflection is as valued as the quality of delivery. Diagnostic architectures — like the three Resilience Wheel diagnostics — that create a baseline, track change over time, and surface not just where the organisation is, but whether its capacity to develop is itself improving.
Organisations that have developed triple-loop learning do not simply recover from disruption. They emerge from each disruption with a genuinely stronger capacity to navigate the next one. This is what "Springing Forward with Learning" means at organisational scale: not just moving forward, but moving forward with an improved ability to learn from whatever comes next.
Ready to have a conversation?
Start with the Leadership Resilience Diagnostic — a structured, honest snapshot across The Resilience Wheel.
Leadership Resilience Diagnostic:
theresiliencecoach.co.uk/resilient-leadership-diagnostic
Book an introductory call: