The Bricoleur’s Manifesto: Returning to the Rhythm of Natural Learning

Jonathan Reams

The “Big Idea” Summary

The industrial “conduit” model of leader training—which treats knowledge like a packet to be downloaded—has a limited range of usefulness. To get a better return on investment, using a Natural Learning process can unlock deeper, more sustainable leader development. The result can allow us to navigate complexity with the same intuitive ease as breathing.

A friend and colleague recently described me as a “mad scientist.”

We were recording a podcast, and he was introducing me to the audience. He talked about how I had recently stepped away from the formal structures of academia to build something new. That meant learning to ‘vibe code,’ to build a platform, to design a website and tinker with algorithms. It was a real compliment, painting a picture of a playful experimenter in a lab coat.

But as I reflected on that description later—while sweating through a workout at the gym, listening to a podcast about the “knowing-doing gap”—I realized I felt less like a scientist and more like a bricoleur.

A bricoleur is a French term for a handyman who makes do with whatever materials are at hand. Unlike the engineer who has a detailed blueprint and specific tools, the bricoleur looks at the messy reality in front of them—the broken fence, the leaking pipe, the complex human organization—and asks, “What do I have close at hand to try and make this work?”

For decades, I have been a bricoleur in the field of leadership development. I have gathered tools from developmental psychology, organizational change, neuroscience, learning, coaching, counseling and philosophy. I have drawn on theories from Robert Kegan, Kurt Fischer, Bill Torbert, Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, David Bohm to name just a few. I have done this because what I observed over time is that the standard assumptions and methods behind most leader development programs are behind the times. They do give some people some value some of the time. However, they fall short of meeting the deeper needs of leaders.

We are all inundated with noise. Podcasts, LinkedIn think-pieces, 5-step frameworks for “transformational leadership.” While there can be bits of value, it can be hidden behind a wall of static. We consume it, we nod our heads and feel the recognition of wanting to do better, and then we go back to our desks and do exactly what we did yesterday.

Why is there such a profound gap between what we know about leadership and what we actually do?

I believe that one key reason is because we have forgotten how to learn. Or, more accurately, we have let a rigid, industrial model of education suppress our Natural Learning capability.

The Illusion of the “Conduit”

In the academic world, and by extension the corporate training world, we often fall prey to what linguist Michael Reddy called the “conduit metaphor.”

This points to one of the fundamental assumptions in play here. An empiricist, materialist worldview has shaped much of how modern science interprets data. Everything gets reduced to material parts. One result is that we treat knowledge like a physical object. We pack it into a box (a lecture, a book, a PowerPoint deck, a TEDx talk, a podcast) and we send it down the conduit to the receiver (the student, the leader). If the receiver opens the box and doesn’t “get it,” we assume the problem is with them. They weren’t paying attention. They aren’t smart enough.

However, if we change our starting position, (assumptions, worldview), we can open up several new avenues for how we approach training and development. (More implications of this in later writings). For example, I’ve learned a lot from diving deep into Dynamic Skill Theory, a framework for understanding how human abilities actually grow in context. It shows clearly that knowledge is not conveyed through a conduit. You cannot simply “download” knowledge about how to navigate a complex political conflict or manage your own reactive emotions and expect to suddenly have new capacities to act on this knowledge.

When we try to force-feed leadership skills through this conduit, it feels unnatural. We might want to be good learners and do our best to adapt and figure it out, but it ends up feeling like holding your breath. It creates a kind of cognitive indigestion where we are full of concepts but starved for capacity.

The Neuroscience of Learning

Natural Learning is different. It is as fundamental to your biology as breathing, walking, or eating. You were born with a brain designed to navigate the unknown, not by absorbing abstract data, but by engaging in a dynamic cycle of prediction and refinement.

Modern neuroscience, specifically the theory of Predictive Processing, suggests that our brains are not passive receivers of information. They are active prediction engines.

Here is a simplified version (though the science is beautifully complex): At every moment, your brain is generating a model of the world. It predicts what is about to happen. When you walk down the sidewalk, your brain predicts where other people coming towards you might go, (like bumping into you if absorbed in their phone), and seamlessly guides your movements to avoid collisions and get where you want to go. Likewise, when you walk into a meeting, your brain predicts the social dynamics, tensions, potential under the surface agendas and the likely outcomes based on your past experiences.

When you act, you are testing that prediction. If the meeting goes exactly as expected, your model is reinforced. But if something unexpected happens—a colleague snaps at you, a strategy falls flat, or your adversary suddenly takes your side—your brain registers a “prediction error.”

This error is not a failure. It is the raw material of growth.

With Natural Learning, we take that error and we use it to update our internal model. We adjust. We refine. We try again. This is how you learned to walk. You didn’t attend a seminar on “The Physics of Vertical Equilibrium.” You stood up, your brain predicted balance, gravity proved you wrong (prediction error), you fell, and your brain updated the model. Tilt less to the left next time.

This process is fluid. It flows like water. It doesn’t require brute force; it requires attention.

The Learning Loop: A Structure for the Flow

The project I am building—and the invitation to participate with us that I am extending to you through this series of essays—is an attempt to operationalize this natural rhythm. At Adeptify, (the brand we are using for this project), we call it the Learning Loop.

The Learning Loop is not a corporate tool or a productivity hack. It is a scaffold, a structured process to slow down predictive processing enough to notice, begin to understand, and refine your predictions.

It follows a rhythm that mimics the brain’s natural cycle:

1. The Goal: We set a compass heading based on key fundamental skills everyone uses (for cohort programs) or what resonates with you in your context (for personalized assessments and debriefs. Not what HR says you should fix).
2. Distinctions: We tune your attention (like a tuning fork) to notice more subtle granularity in your experience.
3. Experimentation: You engage your curiosity by testing out some small aspect of the goal in your everyday context. Opportunities are all around you!
4. Reflection: You look at data from your experiments, especially the prediction errors, and update the model to refine the goal and loop through the cycle again.

Invitation to be a Bricoleur

I am constantly running these learning loops to understand the process. I’m very much in the middle of it all, looking to keep moving in the direction of the goal of democratizing development by making something that can work better for more leaders. My early attempts at applying these theories were certainly crude and mixed with many of the assumptions about learning and development I noted above. It’s an ongoing struggle to bridge the gap between the rich set of theories and the messy reality of designing and delivering a leader development program that can work on scale.

What has helped me a lot, and motivated me to start publishing these essays, is the ongoing conversations and feedback from the little community of inquiry and practice Adeptify is hosting. My default tendency is to hide in the lab and play mad scientist, but the bricoleur tells me to take whatever I can find at hand now and apply the learning loop process to share more explicitly what has been going on in the lab.

In the coming essays, I want to play tour guide and walk with those of you interested in coming along through the territory I’m exploring. The plan is to examine a couple more fundamental background topics, like what is optimal support for learning and going into more depth on the neuroscience of learning. Then I plan to walk through each step in the Learning Loop process in more detail.

By the time we journey through this territory, I’m hoping we will have generated a deeper appreciation of the adaptive challenges in going beyond the conduit model of leader training, mapped out some preliminary markers in how we might apply natural learning in this context, and have fun along the way!

I invite you to join me in the adventure and share this with others you feel it might resonate with. Let’s see what we can build with what we have at hand.

Reflection Loops

1. Where in your leadership life do you feel the “conduit metaphor” at work—where you have received information about what to do, but find yourself struggling to actually do it?
2. Think of a recent “prediction error”—a moment where a meeting or conversation didn’t go as you expected. Did you treat it as a failure, or as data to update your internal model? (Think fixed versus growth mindset).
3. If you were to approach your development like a “bricoleur” (using whatever is at hand) rather than waiting for a blueprint, what is one small experiment you might try tomorrow?