Understanding Action Learning

Judy O'NEIL, Victoria J. MARSICK

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9780814430002
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

As much as adult learners can absorb in a classroom, they learn and retain a lot more on the job. Action Learning, or AL, can be based on any of several different schools of thought, and there is much debate as to which is ideal. The authors advocate tailoring the best attributes of each approach to the specific purpose and the learning environment. Drawing on theory from Self-Directed Learning, Learning from Experience, and Transformative Learning, Understanding Action Learning enables the reader to make an informed decision about which approach or combination to use in his or her organization, and provides: * a theoretical model that explains the different approaches to AL, and a framework for identifying which approach to use* a focus on co-design in creating Action Learning programs* practical tools, assessments, and exercises* illuminating stories and case studies from the fieldCombining top-shelf research with real-world experience, Understanding Action Learning is a crucial resource for adult educators everywhere.

CHAPTER ONE

Deciding if Action Learning Is
Right for Your Organization

“The wisest mind has something yet to learn.”

—George Santayana

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there!”

—Lewis Carroll

Leadership development has taken front-and-center stage in organizations today, and Action Learning (AL) has become a preferred approach to developing leaders in many organizations.¹ There are a number of reasons for this preference: a rapid and ever-changing global work environment,² a desire on the part of organizations to see development efforts produce tangible outcomes, and a recognition that people are more motivated to learn when the experience is relevant to their lives.³ Despite its growing popularity, AL by its very definition—learning by doing real work—means many things to many people. We are writing this book to help practitioners make sense of some of the more frequently used versions of AL so that they can choose among them when launching AL in their organizations.

We also offer lessons from experience—our own and that of others—to provide rules of thumb in working through the many challenges that arise from AL. Learning from real work is typically as messy during development initiatives as it is in the real world. It is this strength—real world work carried out within a protected environment that allows people to make and learn from mistakes—that makes AL attractive but also makes it much harder to plan for, control, and contain. Real work appeals to managers who can get more excited about a challenge that stretches them and helps them grow while also contributing to the organization. Real work means results now and less difficulty in “transferring learning back home.” Real work has real consequences that typically surface and highlight complications that extend to other people and parts of the organization. So real work also means that designers have to think differently about how to help managers learn from messy situations. We are writing this book for these planners, designers, and implementers of AL initiatives.

What Is Action Learning?

Although many organizations “do” AL, what they do looks very different. So it is hard to come to agreement about what AL really is. Its essence—learning by doing—has become a central feature of almost any good learning design that requires application and skill in addition to knowledge of facts.⁴ Even universities, the guardians of facts, bring action into their classrooms, via case studies, role playing, and analyses of one’s experience. E-learning may be text centered, but interactive tools make it easy to swap stories of action, work on simulations, and even engage in virtual activities. Face-to-face training is often based on application activities with feedback. And at the extreme of the action continuum are adventure training, ropes courses, games, and other kinds of experience-centered activities typically linked to self-insight and application debriefs.

We cannot intend to settle, once and for all, what may be a fruitless debate about “the gold standard” in AL.⁵ But it should be helpful to look at several different ways in which AL has been defined and understood in order to lay the groundwork for a road map that practitioners can use to make choices about how to design and implement AL in their own settings.

How Did the Process of Action Learning
Come to Be?

AL is not a fad, a passing wave, but a process with a long and rich history. A review of that history can help a practitioner better understand the decisions and choices that may need to be made to use AL in an organization. We start our discussion of AL with Reginald Revans.

Reg Revans, recognized in many circles outside of the United States as the father of AL, was first exposed to AL concepts as he was studying for his doctoral dissertation under J. J. Thomson, the father of the electron and Nobel Prize winner at the Cavendish Laboratories. Thomson held weekly meetings with more than a dozen current and future Nobel laureates in which they would share both successes and failures—what Revans called “struggling with the unknown.”⁶ But Revans’s early life probably informed his penchant for learning through action. His mother worked as a volunteer in a local hospital and was interested in the then-revolutionary ideas of Florence Nightingale.

His father worked as His Majesty’s principal surveyor of mercantile shipping and was heavily involved in the sinking of Titanic. The family lived by the docks, and Revans recalled a steady stream of sailors coming to his home to report on their experiences aboard the ill-fated liner. Revans recalls asking his father which lesson was the most important to be learnt from the tragedy. His father eventually said that we must learn to distinguish between ‘cleverness’ and ‘wisdom.’ Perhaps this reply prompted the young Revans to discern the importance of asking ‘why’ questions that seek understanding, rather than ‘what’ questions that yield mere information.⁷

Revans’s work with the coal mines and hospitals in England led him to recognize that the knowledge needed by these workers to solve their problems had to be a product of their action rather than just the study of books. Revans was considered a renegade by universities but was embraced by leaders of business and industry. It was clear that AL led to economic savings and increased productivity, results that spoke for themselves. The approach that Revans refined over many years emphasized fresh insight through questioning. He maintained that questions free up one’s mind to think in new ways about a challenging problem about which reasonable people would disagree and which cannot easily be solved by a known expert solution.

In 1940, Revans served as Director of Education of the National Coal Board in England. In this position, he became an advocate for the interweaving of education and industry and the blending of theory and practice. He thought that since people who engaged in similar work tended to encounter similar difficulties, they could offer practical solutions to one another. He felt that the mine managers should learn with and from one another.⁸

He organized the managers of coal mines into small groups, meeting with them in the coal fields near their own pits. They worked on coal field problems, visited each other’s pits, and worked as consultants to one another. There was an increase in output of up to 30 percent in mines with these prototype AL groups.⁹

Revans was also interested in the problems of the health services and hospitals in England. He designed a program in which staff from one hospital visited another in small groups to look at their operating systems. The program was called the Hospital Intercommunication Study and ended up addressing forty separate projects or problems.¹⁰ The program placed staff in a position of visiting a new environment, examining systems removed from their own expertise. Recommendations from the study resulted in a major drop in the mortality rate, shorter hospital stays, and improved employee morale.¹¹ Revans and his associates carried this concept he eventually referred to as AL to many other countries during the 70s and 80s.

While Revans and his associates were spreading his AL concept, similar but separate work was being carried out in Lund, Sweden. Lennart Rohlin was equally disgruntled with the limits of conventional management training in his country. In 1976, he led a group of academics and consultants who were dissatisfied with management and leadership development in Sweden to create their own brand of AL through the Management Institute in Lund (MiL). The group developed an open-ended process that came to be named Action Reflection Learning™¹² A hallmark of MiL’s approach has been experiences that jolt people outside of their typical ways of understanding the world. Arts, sports, outdoor treks, or adventure training can be central to MiL’s programs, as are journeys to other countries where the unexpected is turned into fertile territory for questioning one’s own values, beliefs, and ways of working. The mindset of MiL involves using all the senses to interrupt mental models that prevent managers from seeing the world, and their problems, with fresh eyes and innovative solutions.

MiL’s approach developed concurrently with that of Revans, and so, too, did AL approaches in other Scandinavian countries. Where was the United States when this ferment of AL was growing? Early efforts to introduce AL were not successful. Raelin suspected two reasons for the early resistance.

First, it may well be that this co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Dedication
• Advisory Board
• Editorial Board
• About the Authors
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Deciding if Action Learning Is Right for Your Organization
• Chapter 2 Co-Designing an Action Learning Program to Ensure Results
• Chapter 3 Implementation Strategies for Success
• Chapter 4 What Action Learning Coaches Do
• Chapter 5 Evaluating Action Learning
• Chapter 6 Pulling It All Together: Co-Designing Action Learning for Your Organization
• Theory Appendix
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright