This paper is principally an appreciation of Gregory Bateson’s `levels of learning’; a reconnection with, and latest attempt to fathom, a framework that has influenced my thinking for years. This is also part of an intellectual project to develop a systemic understanding of learning for management development and Higher Education contexts.

The purpose is to explore Bateson’s framework as a vehicle for indicating multiple possibilities of learning from experience. Bateson’s framework may also synthesise a variety of ideas about `learning to learn’, and represent an intersection of disparate literatures of education, management learning, organisational learning, and transformative learning.