[DSRP Evidence](https://dsrpevidence.org/)

# "A Buddhist, a Systems Thinker, and a Learning Professional Walk Into a Bar..."

## Details

**Authors** Pompa, Carlos

**Year** 2026

**Publisher** Learning Realities (Substack)

**Kind of work** article

**Discipline** Education

**Secondary disciplines** Business & Management

**Kind of engagement** public

**Applied** false

[Read it](https://learningrealities.substack.com/p/a-buddhist-a-systems-thinker-and)

## In authors' words

### What they set out to do (purpose)

To argue that Buddhism, systems thinking and workplace learning are pursuing one question, how a person can understand and relate better to reality, and to offer the Cabreras' Love Reality Loop as the shared frame for it.

### How they did it (methods)

A short argumentative blog post for learning and development practitioners. It states the common question, introduces Derek and Laura Cabrera's Love Reality Loop as a diagram of the gap between a person's mental model and reality, supports the premise that mental models are necessarily incomplete with Peter Senge's claim in The Fifth Discipline that all such maps are flawed in some way, and illustrates the gap with the author's own tennis game, where his self-image as a player does not match his results until feedback makes the difference visible.

### What they found (results)

Pompa concludes that the work is not to perfect a mental model but to narrow the distance between it and reality, that the loop therefore never terminates, and that its value lies in its simplicity and in the line it draws between stubborn obsession and actual learning. He states that DSRP theory supplies the structure for understanding how mental models work and how they change.

## Commentary

### In short

A learning and development blog post that builds its argument on the Cabreras' Love Reality Loop, treating the gap between mental model and reality as the object of all learning, and crediting DSRP with supplying the structure of mental models.

### In more detail

The post's organizing device is the Cabreras' Love Reality Loop, which Pompa credits to Derek and Laura Cabrera and uses as the frame for a claim about Buddhism, systems thinking and corporate learning alike: each is an attempt to close the distance between what a person takes to be the case and what is the case. Senge supplies the supporting premise that every mental model is flawed, which turns the goal from accuracy in the absolute to accuracy relative to the last iteration. The tennis illustration is the post's only extended example and is doing real work in it: Pompa's picture of himself as a player survives until the scoreline and a coach's feedback force a revision, which is the loop running once. Pompa writes that DSRP theory provides the structure to understand how mental models work and how they change, and does not define the patterns or apply them. A reader learns what Pompa takes DSRP to be for, and sees one of the Cabreras' models used as the spine of an argument.

### Response

Pompa uses the Love Reality Loop for the thing it was built to show, which is that a mental model and the reality it models are two different objects and that learning is the work of closing the distance between them. The Senge pairing is apt, since the loop presupposes that no model arrives finished, and the tennis example makes the gap concrete in a way that abstract statements of the same point do not. The post's one claim about DSRP, that it supplies the structure of how mental models work and change, is the right relation between the two: the loop says there is a gap, and the four patterns are what a mental model is built out of and what changes when it changes.

**Patterns it shows** D, S, R, P

**Added** 2026-10-21

**How to cite this** Pompa, Carlos (2026). "A Buddhist, a Systems Thinker, and a Learning Professional Walk Into a Bar...". Learning Realities (Substack).