Learning Agility & Leadership

When High Performance Hides Low Learning Agility

Silse Martell

October 29, 2026

Someone can keep delivering excellent results while becoming progressively less prepared for what comes next.

“Success is a lousy teacher,” Bill Gates wrote in The Road Ahead. “It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” He went on to describe success as an unreliable guide to the future.

The distinction between high performance and Learning Agility matters because they do not tell us the same thing. Performance shows how successfully someone is operating under current conditions. Learning Agility helps us understand how that person seeks feedback, experiments, reflects and adapts when those conditions change.

Organizations naturally recognize and reward high performance. They promote people who consistently deliver, entrust them with greater responsibility and identify them as possible future leaders. These are often sensible decisions, but performance can also conceal a risk.

Someone may continue delivering excellent results because they have become exceptionally good at operating in conditions they understand. Their expertise is deep, their relationships are strong, and their judgment has been reinforced by years of positive outcomes. At the same time, they may be seeking less feedback, taking fewer risks and relying more heavily on approaches that worked in the past.

The danger is not necessarily that high performers suddenly stop performing. It is that their continued success can prevent the organization—and sometimes the performers themselves—from noticing that they have stopped learning.

In brief

High performance and Learning Agility are related, but they are not interchangeable. A person may deliver excellent results because their expertise and established methods fit the current environment. Learning Agility becomes visible when the environment changes and the person must seek new information, question assumptions, experiment, learn from feedback and adjust their behavior.

Organizations should therefore consider both current performance and Learning Agility when making decisions about promotion, succession and future potential.

How success creates its own evidence

When an approach repeatedly produces good results, continuing to use it is perfectly rational. Success tells us that our judgment was sound, our decisions were effective and our expertise mattered. It builds confidence and helps us recognize patterns more quickly. Over time, we need less conscious effort to do what once required concentration, which is an important part of how expertise develops.

Success, however, can also become self-confirming. The more often an approach works, the less reason we feel to question it. We may seek less contradictory information and become increasingly certain about which details matter and which can safely be ignored.

Eventually, we may stop distinguishing between:

What we know to be true;
What was true under particular conditions;
What we have simply stopped questioning.

Research has documented this pattern. In The Paradox of Success, Pino Audia, Edwin Locke and Ken Smith examined what happened after significant environmental change. Their archival and experimental studies found that greater past success encouraged greater persistence with established strategies, which subsequently contributed to declining performance.

The underlying problem was not an absence of competence, but confidence in a competence that had been repeatedly validated by the past.

Why successful people can struggle to learn

Chris Argyris explored a similar dynamic at the individual level in his classic Harvard Business Review article, Teaching Smart People How to Learn.

Argyris observed that many successful professionals had rarely experienced meaningful failure. They had become highly capable of solving problems in the external environment but were often much less practiced at examining their own reasoning.

When something went wrong, they could become defensive. Rather than explore how their assumptions or actions might have contributed to the outcome, they explained the problem in ways that protected their existing self-image.

This does not always look like obvious resistance. A defensive high performer may sound confident, experienced and decisive, offering persuasive explanations for why a different approach would not work. Because their track record gives those explanations credibility, other people may also become reluctant to challenge them.

Success can therefore protect people from the discomfort that might otherwise provoke learning. That is what makes low Learning Agility particularly difficult to detect in someone who continues to perform well.

The competency trap: when expertise becomes a constraint

Organizational scholars Barbara Levitt and James March described a related phenomenon as the competency trap.

When a familiar method produces positive results, people continue using it. Repetition makes them even more competent, so the method becomes increasingly efficient and rewarding. Alternatives initially appear less effective because people have less experience with them. As a result, these alternatives receive less attention, investment and practice.

The familiar approach keeps winning, not necessarily because it remains the best option, but because it has accumulated the advantage of experience.

High performance can become a closed loop in which success produces repetition, repetition produces expertise, and expertise makes alternative approaches appear increasingly unnecessary.

James March later framed this challenge as the tension between exploitation and exploration. Exploitation involves refining what we already know, increasing efficiency, applying experience and producing reliable results. Exploration involves testing unfamiliar possibilities, questioning assumptions and accepting uncertainty.

People and organizations need both. The difficulty is that exploitation produces faster and more predictable rewards, while exploration introduces the possibility of looking less competent before becoming more capable.

For high performers whose reputations have been built on reliable delivery, choosing exploration can feel like a significant professional risk. It may require what we have previously described as the courage to become a rookie again.

Adobe changed while the business was still succeeding

Adobe offers a more useful example than the familiar stories of companies that failed to respond to change.

By the beginning of the 2010s, Adobe had built a highly successful business selling packaged versions of products such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat. Customers purchased a version and later decided whether to pay for an upgrade.

Although this model continued to generate results, Adobe’s leadership recognized that the future of software was moving toward cloud-based services and continuous relationships with customers. Instead of waiting for its existing model to collapse, the company decided to disrupt it.

Adobe moved away from packaged software releases and toward Creative Cloud, where customers paid subscriptions for continuously updated products. The transition threatened short-term performance, required new technological and commercial capabilities, and generated significant customer resistance. Thousands of customers reportedly signed a petition opposing the decision, but Adobe continued with the transformation.

Years later, CEO Shantanu Narayen described the thinking behind the decision. A successful technology company, he argued, must be able to look around the corner and form a view about how the world is changing. Leaders must remain dissatisfied with the status quo, even when that status quo is still producing results.

Adobe did not reinvent itself because it had stopped performing. It did so because its leaders understood that current performance was no guarantee of future relevance.

The company’s transformation illustrates what Learning Agility can look like at an organizational level: gathering information about a changing environment, challenging a successful formula, accepting performance risk, experimenting with a different model and adjusting as new evidence emerges.

It also reminds us that Learning Agility is not something a person or organization demonstrates once and then possesses permanently. Every significant change in the environment creates another test.

Why high performance is not the same as future potential

Organizations often use performance as evidence of potential because performance is visible and comparatively easy to measure. The difficulty is that the capabilities required to succeed in one role may be very different from those required in the next.

Research by Alan Benson, Danielle Li and Kelly Shue provides striking evidence of this distinction. Using data on salespeople and managers across numerous companies, they found that organizations were more likely to promote their highest-performing salespeople.

Yet strong sales performance before promotion was negatively associated with the person’s subsequent value added as a manager. The researchers estimated that a promotion policy focused more directly on managerial potential could have produced substantially better managerial performance.

This does not mean that excellent salespeople cannot become excellent managers. It means that success in sales and success in management depend, at least partly, on different behaviors. The ability to deliver strong individual results does not automatically demonstrate an ability to develop others, collaborate, seek feedback, adapt a leadership style or learn in a more complex role.

The same distinction applies throughout an organization. Performance tells us how effectively someone is delivering in their current context, while potential concerns their capacity to meet demands that may not yet exist. Learning Agility helps us understand how a person may make that transition.

What performance reviews may not reveal

A conventional performance review may demonstrate that someone exceeds targets, possesses deep expertise and delivers reliably. It may not tell us:

Whether they seek feedback before a problem becomes visible;
Whether they question the assumptions behind a successful decision;
Whether they gather information that contradicts their preferred interpretation;
Whether they can operate without the protection of established expertise;
Whether they experiment when the outcome is uncertain;
Whether they change their approach when circumstances change;
Whether they can learn from other people rather than relying only on their own experience;
How quickly they convert a new insight into different behavior.

These capabilities become particularly important when someone enters a larger role, encounters an unfamiliar problem or leads through a disruption for which experience offers no reliable script.

How organizations can assess Learning Agility

None of this diminishes the importance of high performance. Organizations need people who can execute, deliver and apply their expertise. Nor should Learning Agility become another subjective label used to overlook results or justify a manager’s personal preferences.

Performance and Learning Agility answer different questions.

Learning Agility is the ability and willingness to learn from experience and apply that learning when facing new, difficult or uncertain situations. Rather than treating it as an abstract personality characteristic, the Burke Learning Agility Assessment examines the observable behaviors through which people learn and adapt.

The assessment measures nine dimensions:

Flexibility;
Speed;
Experimenting;
Performance Risk Taking;
Interpersonal Risk Taking;
Collaborating;
Information Gathering;
Feedback Seeking;
Reflecting.

Together, these dimensions help us understand how a person approaches novelty, uncertainty and change.

A high performer may also be highly learning agile. When that happens, the combination is powerful: the person can deliver today while continuing to expand their capacity for tomorrow. Organizations should not, however, assume the presence of Learning Agility simply because they can see evidence of performance.

Assessment provides an additional lens. It helps organizations distinguish between someone who is succeeding because familiar conditions continue to favor established strengths and someone who can carry those strengths forward, question them when necessary and develop new ones when the situation demands it.

That distinction matters in decisions about promotion, succession, leadership development and future potential.

Why success deserves interrogation

The lesson is not that experience becomes irrelevant or that successful methods should be abandoned simply because they are familiar. Success should instead provoke reflection as seriously as failure does.

Organizations and leaders should ask why something worked, which parts of the result came from sound judgment and which depended on favorable conditions. They should examine the assumptions they may now be treating as facts, consider what they are becoming better at and notice what they may no longer be learning.

Performance tells us what someone has accomplished under the conditions they have encountered. Learning Agility helps us understand how they may behave when those conditions no longer cooperate.

Organizations need both perspectives because the people delivering the strongest results today are not automatically the people most prepared to lead through what comes next. Success deserves recognition, but if it is going to remain relevant, it also deserves interrogation.

Frequently asked questions

Is high performance the same as high potential?

No. High performance shows how effectively someone is delivering in their current role and environment. Future potential involves the capacity to meet larger, different or still-unknown demands. Past performance is relevant evidence, but it cannot answer the potential question on its own.

Can a high performer have low Learning Agility?

Yes. A person may continue producing excellent results by relying on deep expertise, established relationships and proven methods. Low Learning Agility may remain hidden until the role or environment changes and the person must question assumptions, seek feedback or develop a different approach.

Why can success make learning more difficult?

Success reinforces the behaviors and assumptions that produced it. As people become more confident in a familiar approach, they may seek less contradictory information, experiment less often and become more defensive when their established reasoning is challenged.

How can organizations assess Learning Agility?

Organizations can examine how people behave when facing novelty, uncertainty and change. The Burke Learning Agility Assessment evaluates observable behaviors across nine dimensions: Flexibility, Speed, Experimenting, Performance Risk Taking, Interpersonal Risk Taking, Collaborating, Information Gathering, Feedback Seeking and Reflecting.

Why should Learning Agility be considered in promotion decisions?

The skills that produce outstanding performance in one role may not be the same skills required in the next. Assessing Learning Agility adds evidence about how a person is likely to learn when their existing expertise is no longer sufficient.

To learn more, explore the Burke Learning Agility Assessment or discover how to become certified in the Burke methodology.