Experiential Learning as a Solution to a Familiar Army Problem

Australian Army units conduct a huge volume of training. Exercises are planned, activities are resourced, and soldiers are exposed to challenge, stress, and complexity. Yet a familiar frustration persists across formations: we often repeat the same mistakes, need to relearn the same lessons, and struggle to translate training experiences into lasting improvements in behaviour, leadership, and performance.

This is not a problem of effort or commitment. Army trains hard. The problem is more subtle – and more consequential. Experience alone does not guarantee learning.

Army leadership and training doctrine identifies this issue directly. It argues that unless experience is deliberately processed through structured reflection and application, learning is left to chance. The solution that the doctrine offers (but is seldom applied) is not more training, but better learning – through the disciplined use of the Experiential Learning Cycle.

The Problem: Activity Without Learning

Across Army, leaders can recognise the pattern:

• A demanding exercise exposes friction, poor communication, or weak decision‑making;
• An after‑action review identifies familiar issues;
• Units propose new procedures that will “fix it next time”;
• No one reads the AAR, new people post in and the next exercise produces similar outcomes so the cycle of not learning continues.

The cycle repeats – not because soldiers are incapable, but because learning, adaptation and evolution is incomplete.

Too often, training ends when the activity ends. Debriefs focus on what happened, not what it means. Reflection is rushed, inconsistent, or dominated by rank. Oftentimes, the important lessons are lost as loud voices take over. Occasionally, lessons are recorded but not translated into changed behaviour. Over time, this creates a culture where experience is mistaken for development.

For field grade officers and senior NCOs, this problem matters deeply. Army’s competitive advantage to win land battles rests on judgement, adaptability, trust, and leadership under pressure – qualities that cannot be programmed or briefed into existence through power point lectures. They must be learned, internalised, and rehearsed.

The Solution: Experiential Learning Done Properly

Army’s leadership and training doctrine publications describe experiential learning as more than “learning by doing”. It defines it as a cycle – a deliberate process through which experience is converted into insight and future action.

The experiential learning cycle consists of four stages:

1. Experiencing
2. Reflecting
3. Generalising
4. Applying

Crucially, the cycle is continuous. Learning only occurs when all four stages are completed.

Stage 1: Experiencing – Creating Meaningful Challenge

Army is strong at creating experiences. Field training, adventurous training, command appointments, and deployments all place soldiers in situations of uncertainty, stress, and consequence.

But not all experiences generate learning. The doctrine is explicit: experiences must involve active participation, real problem‑solving, and the possibility of error. If soldiers’ experiences are overly controlled, they are limited to just being passengers in their own experience, which robs them of their opportunities to really learn. If training is over‑controlled or overly prescriptive, soldiers comply – but they do not learn.

For leaders, this means designing training that allows:

• Decisions to matter
• Mistakes to occur
• Consequences to be felt

The discomfort that comes with this is not a flaw – it is a feature and the starting point of experiential learning.

Stage 2: Reflecting – Making Sense of the Experience

This is where many Army training events fall short.

Experience alone is insufficient. Without reflection, learning is accidental. Reflection allows individuals and teams to examine what happened, why it happened, and how they responded – emotionally, cognitively, and behaviourally.

Effective reflection is not a lecture. It is a facilitated conversation. Leaders ask questions, not provide answers. During well facilitated reflection the group should be talking significantly more than the leader who is facilitating the conversation. Here, leaders must be mature and confident in themselves that they can create an environment where they and their people set aside any rank constraints to allow honest sense‑making through respectful conversations together and amongst the group.

When reflection is done well, several things happen:

• Soldiers understand that mistakes are part of learning, not failure.
• Teams surface assumptions that shaped decisions.
• Individuals gain empathy for their fellow soldiers by better understanding others’ perspectives and lived experiences.
• Leaders gain insight into how fear, fatigue, and ambiguity influenced behaviour.
• The team improves understanding of itself.

For Army teams, reflection is where psychological safety and trust are built – or broken.

Stage 3: Generalising – Turning Experience into Insight

Reflection becomes learning only when it is generalised – when teams ask, “So what?”

Generalising connects the specific experience to broader contexts:

• What does this tell us about how we communicate under pressure?
• What does this reveal about our approach to mission command?
• How does this behaviour show up in barracks, not just the field?
• What would this look like if we behaved like this under different circumstances?

This stage is where Army leaders add the most value. It is where experience is linked to doctrine, values, leadership principles, and operational reality. Without generalisation, lessons remain trapped in the training area.

Stage 4: Applying – Changing What We Do Next Time

The final stage is application: “Now what?”

Learning is only proven when behaviour changes. Application requires individuals and teams to commit to doing something differently – and then testing that commitment in the next activity, exercise, or workplace interaction.

This stage often fails because it is deferred or forgotten. Effective teams make application explicit:

• What will we do differently next time?
• Who is responsible for reinforcing it?
• How will we know it worked?

In training contexts, teams may publicly commit to behavioural changes. In unit environments, this may translate to new decision‑making norms, communication practices, or leadership behaviours. This is better if it is included in an AAR – even better if someone actually reads them – but it will only work if the learning comes off the AAR and finds its way into SOPs or orders.

This means that someone needs to take ownership, responsibility, and lead (hint: that’ll probably be the leader).

Why This Matters: Benefits for Army Teams

When experiential learning and reflective practice are applied deliberately, the benefits are significant and cumulative.

1. Better Decision‑Making Under Pressure. Structured reflection helps individuals understand how they think under stress. Over time, this builds judgement, not just competence – an essential capability for operations in complex environments.
2. Stronger Teams and Trust. Teams that reflect together develop shared understanding. They learn how each member responds to challenge, which builds trust and reduces friction when it matters most.
3. Improved Leadership at all levels. Experiential learning develops leaders by allowing them to test behaviours, receive feedback, and adapt. It accelerates leadership growth far more effectively than instruction alone.
4. Increased Adaptability and Initiative. By focusing on learning rather than compliance, teams become more comfortable with uncertainty. This supports mission command by reinforcing intent‑based thinking and disciplined initiative.
5. Reduced Repetition of Mistakes. Perhaps most importantly, experiential learning breaks the cycle of relearning the same lessons. Teams that complete the learning cycle improve between activities, not just during them.

The Leader’s Role: From Instructor to Facilitator

The experiential learning cycle places a clear responsibility on leaders. Officers and NCOs are not just trainers – they are facilitators of learning.

This does not require complex tools. The doctrine offers a simple framework:

• Do the experience!
• Ask: What happened?
• Ask: So what does that mean?
• Ask: Now what are you going to do about it?

Used consistently, these questions change the quality of learning across a unit. There are other tools as well, but this four stage process for experiential learning is something every leader can use for significant individual and team development.

Conclusion: Training Is Not Enough

Army will always train hard. That is not in question. The challenge for leaders is ensuring that training produces learning, not just experience.

Experiential learning offers a solution to a persistent problem: it provides a disciplined way to convert experience into insight, insight into action, and action into improved performance.

For Army teams operating in environments defined by friction, uncertainty, and risk, that conversion is not a luxury. It is a necessity.