ABC of Action Learning

Reg Revans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138433182
• eBook ISBN: 9781351961332
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Psychology

'Learning involves doing...Since action learning suggests that we may best master whatever unknown challenge appears by working with others who seek to triumph in the same way, its programmes should be collectively designed and launched by those who hope to profit from them.' Reg Revans based his theories of Action Learning on 30 years of work and observation. This revised and updated reissue of the definitive text, ABC of Action Learning, is a clear, easily read primer for anyone wishing to learn about and apply his methods. It offers a succinct, practical guide to integrating action learning into every-day situations, and enhancing the practical and managerial skills of the workforce.

1 The Characteristic Assumptions of Action Learning

In any epoch of rapid change those organizations unable to adapt are soon in trouble. Adaptation is achieved only by learning, namely, by being able to do tomorrow that which might have been unnecessary today, or to be able to do today what was unnecessary last week.

PROGRAMMED KNOWLEDGE

The organization that continues to express only the ideas of the past is not learning, and training systems intended to develop our young may do little more than to make them proficient in yesterday’s technique. Thus learning cannot be solely the acquisition of new programmed knowledge, howsoever important the possession of that knowledge may be. When none can say what the morrow shall bring forth, none can tell what stock of programmed propositions is most economically applicable; the teaching institutions can do no more than offer their own selections.

But all managers will be caught up by the currents of change, and swept into new unknowns never before encountered, let alone lived through and explored. In such conditions, nobody can say what programmed knowledge those in such predicaments may need, since their first obligation will be to search what they are able to perceive as their new environment.

In such exploration of the unfamiliar too great a reliance upon inappropriate programmed knowledge may become a fatal weakness: the idolization of the past has been the downfall of countless traditions – and a tradition on its deathbed may be guaranteed to deflect attention from what is killing it. So it is that the subjective aspects of searching the unfamiliar, or of learning to pose useful and discriminating questions in conditions of ignorance, risk and confusion, must become as well understood, and as effectively employed, by managers as are all the syllabuses of programmed instruction.

THE LEARNING EQUATION

Action learning takes up from the start the need to help managers – and all others who engage in management – acquire this insight into the posing of questions by the simple device of setting them to tackle real problems that have so far defied solution. We may structure our argument from the outset by identifying the acquisition of programmed knowledge as P, and of questioning insight as Q, so writing the Learning Equation as:

In this, our principal interest is in Q, the idea of action learning. We do NOT reject P; it is the stuff of traditional instruction.

TWENTY ASSUMPTIONS OF ACTION LEARNING

The inalienable assumptions of action learning programmes are set out below; procedural recommendations, or logistics, follow next.

1. Learning is cradled in the task. The primary occupation of managers is to treat their problems (or to seize their opportunities) and these may be defined as the conditions that either obstruct or advance the attainment of their goals. Managers, in other words, must make up their minds about what to do and settle for doing it. All secondary activity should be linked as closely as possible to this everyday task.

For this simple reason, action learning is cradled in the very task itself, asking whether that task can be done so that, merely by reflecting upon how it currently seems to be done, the very doing of it supplies the learning generally offered far from the scenes of managerial activity.

2. Formal instruction is not sufficient. This does not imply that action learning rejects all formal instruction (P). It merely recognizes that such instruction, aimed at imparting what is normally known to others and often classified in such ways as to test by written examination how much has been imparted, cannot of itself stimulate the posing of insightful questions (Q) in other fields altogether, of which some may be so ill-defined as to suggest, at the outset, no branch of programmed knowledge worth exploring.

On the contrary, action learning recognizes that, in the absence of such insight, the use to which a wealth of programmed knowledge may be put is limited. That which may be known cannot be applied until insightful questions have been asked; P may be necessary, but, in the absence of Q, cannot be sufficient. As was said by a distinguished authority: ‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil’. (Matt. Chapter 5 v. 17)

3. Problems require Insightful Questions. Traditional instruction (P) prepares for the treatment of puzzles, or difficulties from which escapes are thought to be known (troubles with programmed solutions), even although the escape or solution may be hard to discover, and calls for the skill of experts. Action learning, on the other hand, deals with the resolution of problems (and the acceptance of opportunities) about which no single course of action is to be justified by any code of programmed knowledge, so that different managers, all reasonable, experienced and sober, might set out by treating them in markedly different ways.

Problems and opportunities are treated by leaders who must be aware of their own value systems, differing between individuals, and of the influences of their past personal experiences. These will strongly influence their subjective judgements and, hence, their predisposing willingness to take risks. Such risks are diminished to the extent that further discriminating questions are posed and answered; this demands exploratory insight (Q).

4. Learning involves doing. Managerial learning implies an ability to carry out the solution of the problem as well as to specify that solution. The difference is more subtle than is often understood, otherwise case methods, business games and the like would scarcely have been so long at work to bring management education to its present condition.

The confusion tends to arise because so much managerial action is necessarily an exchange of words (issue of instructions, agreement to pay, approval of measure, and so forth) that the distinctions between getting something done and talking about getting it done may be simply overlooked. However this may be, there is an observable difference between consulting past reports of the Olympic Games to decide that one may need to clear two metres forty to win the next high jump, on the one hand, and, on the other, actually sailing over that height before the crowd in the stadium. It is likewise not enough that the manager should be able to specify such-and-such a way of resolving their difficulty; he or she must be able to effectuate it as part of their contractual mission.

5. Learning is voluntary. Any person, whether manager or not, changes their observable behaviour, or learns in the sense in which that word is used here, only if they wish to do so.

One learns, or changes one’s behaviour, of one’s own volition and not at the will of others (unless under duress, bribery or other influences, which are not inspirations to learning in the sense here implied). Moreover, one may be cognitively aware of a need to behave differently and yet remain determined not to do so in practice. This is often the consequence of inadequate self-understanding, when the subject either does not know what they believe in, or, more profoundly, has not grasped the concept of belief.

6. Urgent problems or enticing opportunities provide the spur for learning. The menace of urgent problems, or the lure of enticing opportunities, are likely to reinforce a desire to learn, should behavioural change – or even fresh belief – be called for to clear up the problems or to bring forward the opportunities.

7. Action and feedback. In learning such new behaviour, persons must attack real problems, preferably ill-defined, or fertile opportunities, howsoever remote, in such manners as to remain continuously aware of their progress and of the influences determining that progress. In scientific jargon, any system that is to learn, whether an individual manager or a national cabinet, must regularly receive and interpret inputs about its own outputs.

8. The risk imperative. These attacks, whether upon problems or upon opportunities, must carry significant risk of penalty for failure.

Those who are not obliged to assess the risk to themselves of pursuing, or of trying to pursue, such-and-such lines of action cannot, by their indifference to the outcome, explore their own value systems nor identify any trustworthy pattern of their own beliefs. Non-risk exercises, such as case discussions, often motivated by exhibitionism or a need for social approval, may draw from some participants declarations of belief that, while not misleading those who hear them, can help only to deceive those who express them. Even US educators, such as Argyris, now criticise the case method.

9. Learning as re-interpreting past experience. Lasting behavioural change is more likely to follow the reinterpretation of past experiences than the acquisition of fresh knowledge.

Among senior managers, in particular, it is in rereading what is already scribbled on the cortical slate that leads to changed behaviour, rather than in copying out new messages upon it.

10. The contribution of peers. Such reinterpretations of past experience, being necessarily subjective, complex and ill-structured, are more likely to be intelligible through exchanges with other managers themselves anxious to learn by reordering their own perceptions than through discussions with non-managers (including teachers of management) not exposed to real risk in responsible action.

11. The central importance of the set. In consequence, managers readily learn to accept and to discharge their real-life responsibilities by contrived exchanges with other managers during the prosecution of real-life activities. They learn both to give to and to accept from other managers the criticism, advice and support needful to develop their own managerial powers, all in the course of identifying and treating their own personal tasks.

This is the argument for the centrality of the ‘set’ that is the cutting edge of every action learning programme, by whatever variety of names such programmes are now becoming known. It is particularly important that the set is kept mainly to the reporting, analysis and planning of real-time action continually being taken by the participants in their operational backgrounds.

So-called sets that meet to exchange feeling and opinions not immediately derived from a current undertaking to change some reality observable to others may be justified as ‘sensitivity training’, as an ‘encounter group’ and as a dozen other modish rituals. Unless, however, its discussions are based on the verifiable evidence of deliberated achievement it may be little more than an efficient (and expensive) means of replacing one set of misconceptions for another. Since it is easy to run, it will be widely on offer.

12. The place of expertise. The undue intervention of experts carrying no personal responsibility for the real-life actions that bring the set together is, at best, ambiguous; in general, opinionative; and, at worst, reactionary.

In action learning, as it is now accepted, expert advice (P), once the need for it has been defined, is increasingly sought from other participants (primarily interested to develop their own personal Q). In most programmes there is a sufficient access to P through the Q-seekers and their friends to make the ad hoc intervention of experts unnecessary. The quest for Q, indeed, becomes more fruitful when a participant is able to understand, by supplying another participant with P, how their colleague perceived that a quota of P was needed.

13. The responsibility of management teachers. The responsibility of management teachers in the development of action learning is to contrive, with those managers themselves and those with whom those same managers normally work, the conditions in which they may learn with and from each other by the exchanges described above.

It is particularly vital that these conditions respect the need for the management teachers themselves to learn from such contrivings. Only if their involvement is manifestly a learning experience for teachers of management subjects, helping them from the comments of the real-life managers to see more clearly the relevance of their programmed knowledge (P) to the solution of the problems on which participants are engaged, should such specialists be offered a continuing attachment to a set. Even this role for the professional teacher, all the same, is less satisfactory than to allow them to become a Q-seeking participant to tackle a project quite independent of all predisposing P knowledge.

14. Learning with and from each other. Exactly as managerial learning is a social exchange in which managers learn with and from each other during the diagnosis and treatment of real problems (and opportunities), so may teachers of management learn together, with either managers or other teachers.

This can be done by tackling the design, introduction, conduct and review of action learning programmes and by regularly meeting in sets intended from the outset to monitor what is going on in the substantive activities of the managers at work on the real-life problems and opportunities. This may be seen as action learning of the second order, or action learning to improve action learning, rather than, say, patient care or factory costs.

15. The facilitator role. To launch the set quickly into its discussions (and so to conserve the time of its participant managers), there may be a need when it is first formed for some supernumerary.

Such a combiner, brought in to speed the integration of the set must contrive that it achieves independence of them at the earliest possible moment, and open discussions between the substantive members of the set and the supernumerary to plan this should be pursued without embarrassment. It is vital that action learning takes advantage of our present disillusion with the academy to escape yet another round of dependence upon ambiguous facilitators. It may well be that, in the near future, any...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Editor’s Note
• 1 The Characteristic Assumptions of Action Learning
• 2 Essential Logistics
• 3 The Characteristics of the Manager
• 4 The Influence of Top Management
• 5 The Philosophy of Action Learning
• 6 What Action Learning is Not
• 7 Some Experiences of Launching Action Learning
• 8 The Enterprise as a Learning System
• 9 Annotated Bibliography
• 10 Further Information
• Index