Learn through Experience
Main goal: Learning by doing
New entrepreneurs don’t like to think about failure and are quick in trying to forget what happened and just move on. While experienced entrepreneurs reflect on mishaps and understand failure as a learning exercise. Every entrepreneur goes through many mistakes, this is part of being an entrepreneur. If you can’t learn from any mistake you will make during your journey, you wasted a lot of time and effort on nothing
Not only bad experiences are lessons learned, but also good experiences hold a lot of information you can extract and learn from. Don’t just call it luck. Understand what happened and how you can repeat this process to get the most value out of it. This requires a very analytical approach. Something you can learn.
But you can learn from mistakes other entrepreneurs made as well. Having a mentor and coach is a great way to learn from their experiences so you don’t have to make the same mistakes.
In short, learning through experience is about:
- Using any initiative for value creation as a learning opportunity
- Learning with others, including peers and mentors
- Reflecting and learning from both success and failure (your own and other people’s)
Let’s look at each skill and see what each level will bring you:
Reflect
| Level | Ability |
| 1 | I can find examples of great failures that have created value. |
| 2 | I can provide examples of temporary failures that have led to valuable achievements. |
| 3 | I can reflect on failures (mine and other people’s), identify their causes and learn from them. |
| 4 | I can judge if and how I have achieved my goals so that I can evaluate my performance and learn from it. |
| 5 | I can reflect on my (or my team’s) achievements and temporary failures as things develop so as to learn and improve my ability to create value. |
| 6 | I can help others reflect on their achievements and temporary failures by providing honest and constructive feedback. |
| 7 | I can take my team or the organisation to a higher level of performance, based on the feedback collected and by learning lessons from achievements and failures. |
| 8 | N/A |
Learn To Learn
| Level | Ability |
| 1 | I can provide examples that show that my abilities and competence have increased with experience. |
| 2 | I can anticipate that my abilities and competence will grow with experience, through both successes and failures. |
| 3 | I can reflect on the relevance of my learning pathways for my future opportunities and choices. |
| 4 | I am always looking for opportunities to improve my strengths and reduce or compensate for my weaknesses. |
| 5 | I can find and choose opportunities to overcome my (or my team’s) weaknesses and to develop my (or my team’s) strengths. |
| 6 | I can help others develop their strengths and reduce or compensate for their weaknesses. |
| 7 | I can identify opportunities for self-improvement in my organisation and beyond. |
| 8 | I can design and put in place a strategy for my venture to continue to generate value. |
Learn From Experience
| Level | Ability |
| 1 | I can recognise what I have learnt from taking part in value-creating activities. |
| 2 | I can reflect on my experience in taking part in value-creating activities and learn from it. |
| 3 | I can reflect on my interaction with others (including peers and mentors) and learn from them. |
| 4 | I can filter the feedback provided by others and keep the good from it. |
| 5 | I can integrate lifelong learning into my personal development strategy and career progress. |
| 6 | I can help others reflect on their interaction with other people and help them learn from this interaction. |
| 7 | I can learn from the impact monitoring and evaluation activities that I have designed to track the progress of my value-creating activity. |
| 8 | I can learn lessons from monitoring and evaluation processes and establish them in my organisation’s learning processes. |
