Dr Henry Campion  

If you think learning is about encountering an unfamiliar situation, working out what to do about it, and then acting - think again! What we actually do is to rummage through our previous experiences to find the closest match to the one we're facing, and then act and see what happens. If it works, the action we expected - predicted - would be effective is confirmed. If not, we have made a prediction error, and must learn a new way of dealing with the situation, and update our experience bank accordingly.

 

In coaching and coach co-vision/supervision this has profound implications, as my article 'Predictive Processing: A Common Mechanism for Learning in Coaching Practice' in the May 2025 issue of the Philosophy of Coaching Journal seeks to demonstrate: see https://lnkd.in/e_HD2P8d.

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This generic framework* (inspired by Popovic & Jinks, 2014) illustrates how the principles of predictive processing discussed in the article might play out in practice. It is not intended as yet another model of coaching, but for comparison with existing approaches to see how far they draw on the principles of predictive processing and to highlight opportunities for further refinement.