Action learning - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Action learning is an educational process whereby the participant studies their own actions and experience

Experience

Experience as a general concept comprises knowledge of or skill in or observation of some thing or some event gained through involvement in or exposure to that thing or event....

in order to improve performance

Performance

A performance, in performing arts, generally comprises an event in which a performer or group of performers behave in a particular way for another group of people, the audience. Choral music and ballet are examples. Usually the performers participate in rehearsals beforehand. Afterwards audience...

. Learners acquire knowledge through actual actions and repetitions, rather than through traditional instruction.

Action learning is done in conjunction with others, in small groups called action learning sets. It is proposed as particularly suitable for adults, as it enables each person to reflect on and review the action they have taken and the learning points arising. This should then guide future action and improve performance.

Revans's Formula

Professor Reginald Revans is the originator of action learning. He had invented and developed this method in the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

in the 1940s, working in the Coal Board

National Coal Board

The National Coal Board was the statutory corporation created to run the nationalised coal mining industry in the United Kingdom. Set up under the Coal Industry Nationalisation Act 1946, it took over the mines on "vesting day", 1 January 1947...

. he encouraged managers to meet together in small groups, to share their experiences and ask each other questions about what they saw and heard. The approach increased productivity

Productivity

Productivity is a measure of the efficiency of production. Productivity is a ratio of what is produced to what is required to produce it. Usually this ratio is in the form of an average, expressing the total output divided by the total input...

by over 30%. Later in hospitals, he concluded that the conventional instructional methods were largely ineffective.

People had to be aware of their lack of relevant knowledge and be prepared to explore the area of their ignorance with suitable questions and help from other people in similar positions.

This conclusion brought him into head-on conflict with educational institutions using lectures.

Later, Revans made this more precise in the opening chapter of his book (Revans, 1980) which describes the formula:

where L is learning

Learning

Learning is acquiring new or modifying existing knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals and some machines. Progress over time tends to follow learning curves.Human learning...

, P is programming (or programmed knowledge with simulation

Simulation

Simulation is the imitation of some real thing available, state of affairs, or process. The act of simulating something generally entails representing certain key characteristics or behaviours of a selected physical or abstract system....

s) and Q is questioning

Questioning

Questioning is a major form of human thought and interpersonal communication. The thinker employs a series of questions to explore an issue, an idea or something intriguing...

to create insight into what people see, hear or feel.

Q uses :

"closed" questions:
- who?
- what?
"objective" questions:
- how much or how many?
"relative" questions:
- where
- when
"open questions
- why?
- how?

Although Q is the cornerstone of the method, the more relaxed formulation has enabled action learning to become widely accepted in many countries all over the world. In Revans' book there are examples from the USA

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

, Latin America

Latin America

Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...

, the Middle East

Middle East

The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...

, Africa

Africa

Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...

and Asia-Pacific

Asia-Pacific

Asia-Pacific or Asia Pacific is the part of the world in or near the Western Pacific Ocean...

.

Michael Marquardt (2004; Marquardt, Leonard, Freedman, & Hill, 2009) expanded Revans's formula as follows:

L = P + Q + R, where R refers to Reflection.

This additional element emphasizes the point that "great questions" should evoke thoughtful Reflections while considering the current problem, the desired goal, designing strategies, developing action or implementation plans, or executing action steps that are components of the implementation plan.

Nobel Prize winners

Ravens noted from his experience working with Nobel prize

Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...

winning scientists at University of Cambridge

University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

, that there was a distinction between cleverness (i.e. knowledge) and wisdom, which showed in the form of insightful questioning. He showed that much powerful learning comes from people learning 'with and from others', hence many action learning programmes put the 'action learning set' at the heart of the process.

Use in schools

The contribution of Revans is being seen today through initiatives in leadership development such as those made by Richard Hale

Richard Hale

Richard Hale was an American character actor of film, stage and television. Hale was known for his unusual appearance which usually landed him in the roles of either Middle Eastern or Native American characters....

working with major organisations. They have developed a new approach to education of leaders which is recognised by leading universities interested in work based learning in the UK. This puts the business or personal questions issues before the syllabus, so following Revans' principles 'theory follows the action'. Richard Hale spent his early career in the GEC

GEC

The three-letter acronym GEC may mean* Government Engineering College, Delhi, India* Government Engineering College, Gandhinagar, Gandhinagar, India* Goa Engineering College, Goa, India* Government Engineering College, Barton Hill, Trivandrum...

organisation where Revans' ideas were pursued by Arnold Weinstock

Arnold Weinstock

Arnold Weinstock, Baron Weinstock was an English businessman whom The Guardian newspaper called "Britain's premier post-second-world-war industrialist."...

. Revans distinguished between puzzles and problems, noting that action learning lent itself to working on real problems (e.g. improving productivity or morale rather than puzzles e.g. constructing a balance sheet). Key writers on the subject have been Mike Pedler and Alan Mumford in the United Kingdom, Canada and internationally, and Robert Kramer, Michael Marquardt, and Joe Raelin in the United States.

ARL and MiL Models

As with other educational processes, practitioners have built on Revan’s pioneering work and have adapted some tenets to accommodate their needs. One such branch of action learning is Action Reflection Learning

Action Reflection Learning

Action Reflection Learning is a learning methodology originated in Sweden in the late 1970s, and refined by the MiL Institute in that country and by LIM, Leadership in International Management, in the USA...

(ARL), which originated in Sweden among educators and consultants under the guidance of Lennart Rohlin of the MiL Institute in the 1970s. With the so-called “MiL model”, ARL gained momentum with the work of LIM, Leadership in International Management, under the leadership of Ernie Turner in the USA.

The main differences between Revans’ approach to action learning and the ‘MiL Model’ in the ‘80s are :

the role of a project team advisor (later called Learning Coach), which Revans advised against;
the use of team projects rather than individual challenges;
the duration of the sessions, which is more flexible in ARL designs.

The MiL Model evolved organically as practitioners responded to diverse needs and restrictions. In an experiential learning[mode, MiL practitioners varied the number and duration of the sessions, the type of project selected, the role of the Learning Coach and the style of his/her interventions.

ARL evolved organically through the choices and savvy intuitions of practitioners, who informally exchanged their experiences with each other. It became a somewhat shared practice, which incorporated elements of design and intervention that the practitioners adopted because of their efficacy. In 2004, Isabel Rimanoczy researched and coded the ARL methodology, identifying 16 elements and 10 underlying principles.

"Unlearning" as a Prerequisite for the "Learning" in Action Learning

Robert Kramer (2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2010) pioneered the use of action learning for officials in the U.S. government, and at the European Commission in Brussels and Luxembourg. He also introduced action learning to scientists at the European Environment Agency in Copenhagen and to officials of the Estonian government at the State Chancellery (Prime Minister's Office) in Tallinn, Estonia.

Unlike other writers in the field of action learning, Kramer applies the theory of art, creativity and "unlearning" of the psychologist Otto Rank

Otto Rank

Otto Rank was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, teacher and therapist. Born in Vienna as Otto Rosenfeld, he was one of Sigmund Freud's closest colleagues for 20 years, a prolific writer on psychoanalytic themes, an editor of the two most important analytic journals, managing director of Freud's...

to his practice of action learning. Rank was the first to see therapy as a learning and unlearning experience. The therapeutic relationship allows the patient to: (1) learn more creative ways of thinking, feeling and being in the here-and-now; and (2) unlearn self-destructive ways of thinking, feeling and being in the here-and-now. Patterns of self-destruction ("neurosis") represent a failure of creativity not, as Freud assumed, a retreat from sexuality.

In action learning. questions allow group members to “step out of the frame of the prevailing ideology,” as Otto Rank wrote in Art and Artist (1932/1989, p. 70), reflect on their assumptions and beliefs, and reframe their choices. The process of “stepping out” of a frame, out of a form of knowing – a prevailing ideology – is analogous to the work of artists as they struggle to give birth to fresh ways of seeing the world, perspectives that allow them to see aspects of the world that no artists, including themselves, have ever seen before.

The most creative artists, such as Rembrandt, Michelangelo and Leonardo, know how to separate even from their own greatest public successes, from earlier artistic incarnations of themselves. Their “greatness consists precisely in this reaching out beyond themselves, beyond the ideology which they have themselves fostered,” according to Art and Artist (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 368). Through the lens of Otto Rank’s work on understanding art and artists, action learning can be seen as the never-completed process of learning how to “step out of the frame” of the ruling mindset, whether one’s own or the culture’s – in other words, of learning how to unlearn.

Comparing the process of unlearning to the “breaking out” process of birth, Otto Rank was the first psychologist to suggest that a continual capacity to separate from “internal mental objects” – from internalized institutions, beliefs and assumptions; from the restrictions of culture, social conformity and received wisdom – is the sine qua non for life-long creativity.

Unlearning necessarily involves separation from one’s self concept, as it has been culturally conditioned to conform to familial, group, occupational or organizational allegiances. According to Rank (1932/1989), unlearning or breaking out of our shell from the inside is “a separation [that] is so hard, not only because it involves persons and ideas that one reveres, but because the victory is always, at bottom, and in some form, won over a part of one’s ego” (p. 375).

In the organizational context, learning how to unlearn is vital because what we assume to be true has merged into our identity. We refer to the identity of an individual as a “mindset.” We refer to the identity of an organizational group as a “culture.” Action learners learn how to question, probe and separate from, both kinds of identity—i.e., their “individual” selves and their “social” selves. By opening themselves to critical inquiry, they begin to learn how to emancipate themselves from what they "know" – they learn how to unlearn.

Role of AL Coach and Questions

An ongoing challenge of action learning has been producing desired organizational results and meeting organizational expectations by taking action and learning in an action learning project. Usually the urgency of the problem or task decreases or eliminates the reflective time necessary for learning. More and more organizations have recognized the critical importance of an action learning coach in the process, someone who has the authority and responsibility of creating time and space for the group to learn at the individual, group and organizational level. There is controversy relative to the need for an action learning coach. Reg Revans was against the use of learning coaches and, in general, of interventionist facilitators and "certified"coaches" . He believed the action learning set or group could practice action learning on its own. Neither did he want a group to become dependent on a coach. Moreover, reflection was always a fundamental component of action learning for him and did not, therefore, have to be emphasized as some consultancies have done.

Self-managed action learning (Bourner et al., 2002; O'Hara et al., 2004) is a variant of action learning that dispenses with the need for a facilitator of the action learning set. Shurville and Rospigliosi (2009) have explored taking self-managed action learning online to create virtual self managed action learning. Deborah Waddill has developed guidelines for virtual action learning teams, what she calls action e-learning.

To increase the reflective, learning aspect of action learning, many groups now adopt the practice or norm of focusing on questions rather than statements while working on the problem and developing strategies and actions. Questions also enable the group to listen, to more quickly become a cohesive team, and to generate creative, out-of-the-box thinking.

The difficulty with relating Self-managing teams (e.g., Wellins, Byham, & Wilson, 1991) to action learning is that the former focus almost exclusively on finding or creating solutions for the problems with which they are tasked. Without reflection, action learning team members are likely to import their organizational or sub-unit cultural norms and familiar problem solving practices into their teams without making them explicit or testing their validity and utility. Cultural norms and practices inform action learning team members’ implicit assumptions, mental models, and beliefs about what methods or processes should be applied to solve a problem. Thus, not always but with great regularity, they apply traditional problem solving methods to non-traditional, urgent, critical, and discontinuous problems while mindlessly expecting them to produce viable, effective solutions—generally without enduring positive effect.

Without action learning team coaches who focus exclusively on helping team members to inquire, reflect, and learn from their emerging experiences while explicitly refraining from any involvement in the contents of the problem, team members often "leap" from the initial problem statement to some form of brainstorming that they assume will reveal or produce a viable solution. These suggested solutions typically provoke objections, doubts, concerns, or reservations from other team members who advocate their own preferred solutions. The conflicts that ensue are generally both unproductive and time-consuming. Self-managed teams, tend to split or fragment rather than develop and evolve into a cohesive, high-performing team.

Perhaps most important, without coaches who have the authority to intervene whenever they perceive a learning opportunity, there is no assurance that the team will make the time needed for periodic, systemic, and strategic inquiry and reflection (Marquardt, 2004; Marquardt, Leonard, Freedman, & Hill, 2009). Thus, self-managed versions of action learning teams are unlikely to enable team members to make explicit efforts to learn – about themselves, leadership, teamwork, participative problem solving, the systemic nature of problems, the relationships between the problem and the organization’s strategic direction, interactions of organizational subsystems, and organizational dynamics, including organizational politics.

Events and Conferences

Several organizations focusing on the implementation and improvement of Action Learning sponsor conferences. Examples are the International Foundation for Action Learning, the Global Forum on Executive Development and Business Driven Action Learning, and the Action Learning/Action Research Association.