Trident University International What Is Action Learning and Regular Meetings Pretend that you are a leadership development coach assigned to help some org

Trident University International What Is Action Learning and Regular Meetings Pretend that you are a leadership development coach assigned to help some organizations fix their action learning programs. For each of the scenarios below, explain what you think went wrong and how it could be fixed based on what you have learned about action learning in the background readings. For each of the three scenarios, explain your diagnosis and use at least one citation from the required readings to support your diagnosis. A group of 20 from different departments from within an organization is put together to form an action learning set. At their meetings, every person is allowed to present and receive feedback from other set members and their coach. At first they are allowed to present and receive feedback for a half hour each but group members become exhausted from 10 hour meetings. Then this time is cut to 5 minutes per person but group members feel they are unable to learn or get adequate feedback from their coach and other group members in this amount of time.A CEO picks an important problem for an action learning group consisting of five senior managers. The group meets every month for a full day for nine months. After nine months, each group member feels that they have learned a lot from receiving feedback every month and has improved several areas of their leadership skills. The group presents to the CEO a detailed plan along with steps they have already taken to help solve the problem and the results they have seen. But the CEO is upset because they didn’t come up with the solution the wanted and orders the group out of his office.A group of several managers is put together to form an action learning set. The group members are very motivated to start this program and excited about the possibilities for developing their skills. The facilitator for the action learning program is a top assistant to the CEO. During group meetings, team members are reluctant to discuss difficulties they are facing in their tasks. Whenever a team member gives a presentation, they tend to only discuss positive experiences and they never criticize the organization. TRANSCRIPT
Terry Kristiansen
Align Corporate Learning With Strategy Setting
One great example that I have to talk about, where we successfully aligned our learning to achieve a
business objective, is something that we called the President’s Challenge. The President’s Challenge
was an action learning program that was designed specifically because we had a business issue at
hand. The business issue was that we were changing or we were adding to our existing growth
strategy and we didn’t really have a clear plan of what that was going to be. We just knew that we
needed to do that.
The idea of putting an action learning team was something new that our education group brought to
our president. Working in this way had the possibility of really, fairly quickly, coming up with some
pretty great ideas for him to select from. And, hope upon hope, what if one could really be selected to
make a difference in the company? So he was really game for that and aligned all the other
executives around it. We’d never done it before. Could fourteen high-potential people from around
the company really come together in teams, two competing teams, and come up with something that
would be the new growth initiative for our company?
The process or the learning experience from that was so phenomenal. We had a three month period.
We brought the participants in for one week where consultants provided a great program of
assessments and background and looked at how they worked in teams. We also had executive
sponsors for each team. That was very key because it put more executives into the battlefield of
action learning and allowed them to see the process in action and also contribute to that and gain an
ownership from it and provide direction to the teams.
So three months later they come back for a week and they’re kind of polishing up their presentations,
doing a run through of them and then finally they deliver them. Our executives, many of them were
just coming back from a trip from Japan, but they felt this was so important they literally got off the
airplane from a twenty-two hour flight from Japan, listened to these presentations and were blown
away by the depth to which this cross-functional team of people could go to understand the issues,
investigate them, come up with their solution, and all in all, do a really, really outstanding job.
So it was tremendously successful and successful in that those ideas were put into action. It was a
real business issue of the company that would take us in a new growth direction. One of the projects
in particular was funded immediately with some seed money and both of them popped up on the top
six company initiatives. One of the initiatives actually landed us an account, the biggest account in
the company’s history. So we think we had a tremendously successful program run that is still
delivering results today.
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Facilitating action learning:
an overview
Chapter overview
e
This chapter considers the facilitation challenge posed by Revans’ radical
ideas. For situations in which there are no right answers, action learners
are encouraged to avoid the advice of experts and to seek advice first from
their peers and fellow set members. The requirement for the set to be a
peer learning community, and for set members to be in charge of their own
actions and learning, poses an intriguing challenge for any facilitator. The
trick for the facilitator is to be helpful without succumbing to an expert role
thus taking the power and focus away from the set members.
Preceding and following on from the questions of set facilitation are
two other groups of challenges concerning: first, the initiation of action
learning and the creation of the right organizational conditions for
success; and secondly, the harvesting and dissemination of organizational
and professional learning.
This chapter provides an overview of these three main aspects of the action
learning adviser’s role: the initiator or accoucheur, the set facilitator and the
developer of wider organizational and professional learning. It also considers
the model of self-managed action learning which Revans often seemed to
prefer – and discusses the development of the action learning adviser.
This chapter contains:
•
•
•
Introduction
Revans on facilitation
The three roles of the action learning adviser:
the accoucheur
the set adviser or facilitator
the developer of organizational and professional learning
•
•
Self-managed action learning
The irresistible rise of the facilitator
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Facilitating action learning: a practitioner’s guide
•
•
Learning to become an action learning adviser
My practice notes 2
Introduction
Definitions of action learning don’t usually mention the adviser or facilitator role – it is the set, the set members, the challenges being tackled and
the learning from this action that are important.
Although the role of the facilitator is now considered to be important,
it had no place in Revans’ early descriptions of action learning. The set
adviser or facilitator role dates from the mid-1970s, when Revans was
working alongside others including David Casey, David Pearce, Jean
Lawrence and Bob Garratt on the pioneering programmes established in
the UK’s General Electric Company (Casey and Pearce 1977).
Since this time, and despite Revans’ misgivings and frequent warnings, the role has usually been seen as a critical component of action
learning. The popularity of the set advising role can be ascribed to a
number of possible reasons including the commonly accepted view that
such specialists can add value to the workings of a set, especially in the
early stages, to the more cynical perspective that action learning provides
attractive career development for erstwhile teachers and trainers. Revans
did accept the role somewhat reluctantly as detailed below, but he always
preferred the term ‘adviser’ to emphasize its advisory and non-executive
status. By contrast he made frequent injunctions against the language of
facilitation – which can be read literally as making things easy – which no
experienced adviser would ever promise. He even lampooned the term
facilitator, once dubbing it ‘fer-silly-taters’.1
One by-product of the widespread usage of the facilitator in action
learning programmes has been the frequent appearance of accounts of this
role, its skills and practices. Many authors have assumed it to be a specialized form of small group facilitation; although from this starting point,
interpretations can proceed in quite different directions. McGill and Beaty
(2001) and McGill and Brockbank (2004) for example emphasize the value
of interpersonal and reflective skills in the facilitator and especially the
understanding of group dynamics in the set. Marquardt (2004; 2009) on
the other hand makes his facilitator an activist ‘coach’ who takes a strong
lead in questioning and guiding members in their learning.
1 For any non-Northerners, ‘taters’ = potatoes.
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Facilitating action learning: an overview
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In our view the set facilitator or set adviser role is but one part of a much
wider action learning adviser role. We also think that it has been overemphasized at the expense of other, more important and more challenging
aspects. Our position is based on Revans’ ambition for action learning,
involving as it does, action and learning on the intractable problems
facing communities, organizations and societies – a task that requires much
more than the facilitation of small groups. To realize his vision a different
perspective is needed on the role of the adviser in action learning.
In this book we use both the terms ‘adviser’ and ‘facilitator’. Whilst
‘facilitation’ and ‘facilitator’ are by far the much better known terms, they
are also mainly used in the context of meetings and projects where the
intentions and dynamics are different to those of action learning. In line
with this common usage, we use the terms facilitator, facilitation and
facilitating especially in relation to working with the action learning set.
Revans on facilitation
Revans’ ideas about the education of managers represent a radical challenge to traditional business school practice. When, in 1965, the London
and Manchester Business Schools were being established, their offer to
managers was based (as now) on the MBA model. Revans was strongly
opposed to this import from the USA because of its unquestioning
reliance upon received wisdom and expert knowledge. Instead, he said,
the focus should be on helping managers themselves to learn how to solve
problems (1966: 5; 1980: 197).
Revans saw an important role for the adviser in introducing action
learning to organizations and in helping the sets to get started. However,
he had doubts fearing that the role of facilitator would become an expert
role in itself. He foresaw that management teachers might soon begin to
call themselves facilitators, and whilst this was to be welcomed if it was a
genuine conversion, he feared that they would not change their spots and
would continue, under a new guise, to deploy their expert roles. Because of
this, he was at pains to stress that action learning set members, individually
and collectively, should control their own affairs, so as to avoid ‘yet another
round of dependence upon ambiguous facilitators’ (2011: 9, original emphasis).
The three roles of the action learning adviser
However, a further analysis of Revans’ thoughts on the role of the action
learning adviser reveals three important aspects or parts of this role
(Figure 2.1).
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Facilitating action learning: a practitioner’s guide
Figure 2.1
The three roles of the action learning adviser
The accoucheur
Revans recognized the importance of someone to introduce action
learning to any organization or system. To help with the introduction and
induction processes he used the term ‘accoucheur’: ‘No organisation is
likely to embrace action learning unless there is some person within it
ready to fight on its behalf. . . . This useful intermediary we may call the
accoucheur – the managerial midwife who sees that their organisation
gives birth to a new idea’ (2011: 98–9).
However, Revans envisaged this role as being carried out by a sympathetic manager. He thought that this task of introducing action learning
was one best suited to a senior person in any given system or organization, and not as work for outside professionals.
The set adviser or facilitator
Whilst giving most legitimacy to the accoucheur role, Revans noted that
when it comes to the point of the sets beginning to meet: ‘there may be a
need when it [the set] is first formed for some supernumerary . . . brought
into speed the integration of the set’. But, so concerned is he about the
dangers of opening the door to such expert professionals that he quickly
attaches the rider: ‘Such a combiner . . . must contrive that it [the set] achieves
independence of them at the earliest possible moment’ (2011: 9) and goes on
to suggest that the job is probably best done by another manager with some
personal experience of action learning rather than any outside professional:
. . . [F]or a newly assembled set any need for an integrating agent,
to encourage among its mutually unacquainted members as
quickly as possible the ease and familiarity essential to selfdisclosure, can be met, not by engaging some professional
‘facilitator’ but by inviting an active manager, who has himself
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Facilitating action learning: an overview
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been through an exercise in action learning already, to work with
the new group for long enough to get them going. It is possible he
might want to join them as a substantive member . . .
(1982: 769)
Revans perhaps hopes here, that the manager, being unpaid and likely to
have other work to do, will not be inclined to hang around unnecessarily
and, as soon as possible, will either leave the set to get on with the work
themselves, or that they will join the set as an ordinary member.
Many action learning advisers try to observe Revans’ guidance in this
respect, especially those who propose the self-managed action learning
approach (SMAL – see below). The SMAL approach is close to Revans’
own vision for the set; that, with a little help, encouragement and instruction, the members will soon acquire the skills and confidence sets to facilitate themselves.
To sum up his views as best we can, Revans saw an important role for
the set adviser in introducing action learning to organizations and in
helping the sets to get started. His problems with the set facilitation
aspects of the adviser’s role were twofold:
•
•
The presence of such an authority figure conflicts with the notion
of an autonomous set and can prevent it becoming a peer learning
community. Revans was critical of an educational culture that he
saw as dominated by authority and dependency, and thought
that managers were most likely to learn ‘with and from each
other’ (1982: 767–8).
Whatever their good intentions in helping the set become
independent of them, facilitators will be seduced by the power of
the role, and retain their expert status in the set.
His position on the facilitation role in sets can be summed up in three
injunctions:
•
•
•
Peers are the best consultants. We need to talk to each other – as
equals – about our issues and questions.
Facilitation can be useful in helping people to get started on
action learning, but . . .
Beware of all ‘experts’ – especially including expert facilitators!
The developer of organizational and professional learning
Once action learning is established, with sets up and running and with
members engaged in action and learning on their chosen issues, the
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Facilitating action learning: a practitioner’s guide
question arises of how does any host organization or wider system benefit
from these efforts?
In addition to any substantive gains from problem solving and project
work, Revans describes ‘the multiplier effect’ as action learners address
their issues and share their findings in a wider ‘learning community’
(2011: 70–3). How is this to be brought about?
In his reflections on working with managers in Belgian companies he
discusses the difficulties of communication and the problems of access to
authority which are essential to bring about systemic change. To deal with
these difficulties he proposes the formation of ‘key groups’ of the people
outside the sets, who are most likely to be affected by any proposed actions
and without whom local action is likely to fail (1971: 80–94). Later he
calls this a structure of welcome, which is to be built within a system, via
the development of sponsors, clients, client groups and ‘supporting
assemblies’ (2011: 21–39). These welcoming structures serve not only to
support the action learning process, but also to facilitate organizational
learning.
Revans obviously understood that, without this support from leadership, the weight of expectations on individual set members to make an
organizational impact would be too great. Yet, it is not clear who he
expected to do this work of forming key groups and facilitating supporting
assemblies. In some projects he did this work himself, or relied upon resident management developers who may have invited him in in the first
place. His basic position is that all managers should take on this responsibility for bringing about the learning community, starting at the top.
Thus, in his blueprint for an organization which is able to learn, his first
prescription is: ‘That its chief executive places high among their own
responsibilities that of developing the enterprise as a learning system’
(2011: 117).
It is sometimes argued that Revans’ ambition for organizational
change and learning puts too much pressure on participants, or that it is
simply too difficult and time consuming. Additionally, ‘organizational
change’ is not the largely rational process that Revans sometimes appeared
to imagine, and the issue of organizational learning turns out to be a
complex and contested matter. Subsequently, given that there is already
so much change and turmoil, some action learning practitioners have
suggested what we really need is not more initiative taking but more
reflective space for sense making and critical appraisal (Rigg 2008). The
important development of critical action learning discussed in Chapter 6 is
part of this shift in focus.
Where the emphasis is on the facilitation of action learning sets, and
concerned with the development of members via ‘own job’ problems,
attention is likely to be focused on the face-to-face processes of facilitation
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in the set and less on organizational action and learning. A different
sort of facilitation is required to bring about a dialogue between action
learners and those responsible for the over…
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