Why there is a LIMIT to grow?

Powerful learning proportional to direct experience

The most important and useful learning comes from direct experience. Indeed we learn eating, crawling, walking and communication through direct trial and error – through taking an action and seeing the consequences of that action; then taking a new and different action.

But what happens when we can no longer observe the consequences of our action?

When our actions have consequences beyond our learning horizon? It becomes impossible to learn from different experiences.

Example 1: A high tech company grows rapidly because of its ability to introduce new products. New products grow, revenues grow, the R&D budget grows, and the engineering and research staff grows. Eventually, this grown current technical staff becomes increasingly complex and difficult to manage. The management burden often falls on senior engineers, who in turn have less time to spend on engineering. Diverting the most experienced engineers from Engineering to Management results in longer product development times, which slows down the introduction of new products.

Here when the senior engineering staff no longer can observe the consequences of their actions learning would eventually stopped and developing cycles get elongated.

Example 2: When a professional organization, such as consultancy firm grows very rapidly when it is small, providing outstanding solutions, results, promotions and opportunities. But firm gets larger, its growth level slows perhaps it starts to saturate its market niche. Or it might reach a size when the senior consultants are no longer working and interested in doing the direct jobs.

Here too when the senior consultants no longer can observe the consequences of their actions learning would eventually stopped and solutions providing cycles gets longer and consulting organization becomes non-profitable.

Limits of growth is governed by our direct experiences and actions, we must make an effort to learn more from direct experience then and then we grow further in any field otherwise we will be “A boiled frog”.

If we place a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will immediately try to jump out and it may be successful in doing that. But if we place the frog in room temperature water, now if we gradually turn on the heat source slowly the water temperature raising frog may enjoy the warmth and after some time frog will do nothing until he is unable to jump out of the pot.

Through time we generally start working on indirect things like the frog where we do not add any direct value, experience and we are not aware of the consequences of the indirect actions, which will lead us to “LIMIT OUR GROWTH”.

So we must recognize all those situations, contexts and scenarios when our actions are too distant from direct experiences we must refrain and put an effort to gain more direct experience and “NO LIMIT TO OUR GROWTH”.