U8D1-28 - Needs-Based Action Learning and Change Management Planning - Please follow all instructions as written to complete this homework. See Details Below.

ABC_of_Action_Learning-Chapter5The_Philosophy_of_Action_Learning.pdf

Home >Business & Finance homework help >Operations Management homework help >U8D1-28 - Needs-Based Action Learning and Change Management Planning - Please follow all instructions as written to complete this homework. See Details Below.

The Philosophy of Action Learning

refLeCtion and aCtion: Learning by doing

It is many years since Aristotelianism was first recognized as a way of looking at the world, by those who insisted that experimental verification was a more reliable guide to mastering what they felt called upon to do than was intuitionally plausible. Finding out if something works when we try it still promises us more percentage than does checking it from a book or arguing about it with somebody else.

Aristotle, too, has bequeathed to us a system of ethics balanced upon action and reflection; one gets to understand by doing, and to do by understanding. thus it is that Aristotle is another of the Patriarchs to whom the opponents of action learning may be referred – along with Buddha, Sophocles and Saint James. Only in recent times, with the rise of book learning, credentialism, tenured jobs at universities, professional

Revans, Reg, and Reg Revans. ABC of Action Learning, Routledge, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=730762. Created from capella on 2018-06-02 12:20:30.

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 1 1 . R

o u tle

d g e . A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

ABC of AC tion LeArning5

institutions granting permission to add letters after ones name, and so forth, has education started marketing the pretence that to know and to do are quite unrelated expressions of the human spirit, as opposed as Heaven and earth, as categorically distinct as soul and body, as different as day and night.

Action learning is the Aristotelian manifestation of all managers’ jobs: they learn as they manage, and they manage because they have learned – and go on learning. As an activity in its own right, namely, something about which books have been written, courses organized, packages of every kind sold on the commercial market, action learning has been obliged to evolve simply to protect real managers from the corruptions of a lucrative academicism, enticing honest and responsible subjects to kid themselves that they will more effectively fulfil their missions by listening to lectures, by reading books and by being led through the simulations of unreal or idealized experience.

in the light of unsophisticated nature there would be no need for action learning, since there would arise no artificial management education demanding to be opposed by it. those who plied responsible trades would artlessly exchange accounts of what they got done, and ask each other all about what they had failed to get done, unhindered by professional interceptors, commentators, analysts, consultants, interpreters, reviewers and other experts.

it is to counteract what these obscurantist supernumeraries are up to that action learning has been obliged to distil a literature from its own hard-won experience, but its pages are no more than a guide to encourage others to make a start upon learning from reality. the day that action learning is said to be enshrined within its own encyclopaedia will be the day to

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 1 1 . R

o u tle

d g e . A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

the phiLosophy of AC tion LeArning

read out its obituary. And, until then, we must also remember that Aristotle did not always follow his own precepts and check his theories; his teaching that bodies fall faster when heavier survived until galileo – nearly 2,000 years.

managers as aCtion-refLeCtors, or as Learner-doers

By doing what they set out to do, and by setting out to do what they believe to be worth doing, managers are disciples of the Aristotelian ethic.

After reports about all the facts have reached their desks, after all the advice has been offered, all the opinions listened to, after everything has been listed for the final plan and the most talkative of the experts is on their way back to the airport deciding in advance what they are going to tell the next client, the manager still remains alone with the responsibilities: they are the person who has to get something done. Specialists have uttered their warnings, research consultants have thrown doubt upon the accuracy of the data, local academics have drawn attention to the precedent of the taff Vale Judgment, the public relations officer sees certain weaknesses if the affair has to be reported on the international network, and the economic adviser, while voicing no views about the cash flow, still shakes his head, knits his brow and purses his lips about the cash flow situation. … But the manager alone has to do something about it all.

the importAnCe of ACtion AnD LiveD experienCe

one mission of action learning is to help the manager bear this special burden. educational programmes that fall short

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 1 1 . R

o u tle

d g e . A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

ABC of AC tion LeArning5

of this, that do not prepare for this critical role by extending into it, are actually designed to emphasize the fallacy that talking about taking action is no different from engaging in the action being talked about … and thus that those who talk about it deserve to be paid at the same rate as those who finally take it. Their argument gains plausibility because the antecedents of responsible action can be so richly set forth in words and figures that these symbols, marshalled in their imposing administrative ceremonials, may divert attention from what needs now to be done, reducing it to the squalid lumberings of a handful of men in bowler hats.

these sophistries would not impress the characters in The Cherry Orchard, holding forth at length upon how they have talked themselves out of all capacity to act. We know today, a full lifetime after Chekov, that the business school graduates regarded by their professors as the most brilliant of their case analysis, and still rising like meteors in their first jobs, are overhauled and passed by middle life; those who seemed less able, back in the seminar room, to keep afloat in the monsoons of dialectic, remained free until their maturity to discover for themselves the powerful truths of their own lived experience.

Unlike their sparkling classmates, trained to turn on at will their fountains of purest rhetoric uncontaminated by passing doubt, they could not set aside what they had learned of the world at first hand, and so were delayed along the way by the shifting cargo of the experiences they had taken aboard. it demanded of them another decade to learn how these accumulations should be most economically stowed and most profitably traded; it was no longer sufficient, as in the days of the seminar, that the containers should be empty and the voyage chalked across a blackboard. Life, as Aristotle

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 1 1 . R

o u tle

d g e . A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

the phiLosophy of AC tion LeArning

still reminds some of us, is made up of action as well as of reflection.

knowing meAns Doing

Thus we demand that each participant attacks a real-life task for which no course of treatment has yet been suggested, even although efforts have already been made to do so. the problem may or may not be in the organization by which the participant is, at the time, employed, nor need it be in any professional field of their acquaintance. The programme is to help the manager develop as a manager, not as a business consultant, a staff adviser, a specialist in such-and-such a field or an expert in some other.

thay are there to observe themself in managerial action, trying to produce desired order in some totality judged to be in need of it, to effect some specified change in a complexity alike ill-structured and inconstant, to make helpful allies of some whose interests are at risk, of others who would undermine their authority, and of many who hold certificates proving that they understand the theory of the firm.

it is thus essential that the client management who own and offer the problem or opportunity which the participant is to tackle are genuinely motivated to tackle it, and have made this clear to the staff with whom the visitor is to work. Many action learning exercises are less effective than they might be on account of shyness among those who carry such final responsibilities; there is even a little evidence that the popular image of those at the top struggling, like Prometheus and Laocoon, against overwhelming odds, is not invariably appropriate.

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 1 1 . R

o u tle

d g e . A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

ABC of AC tion LeArning5

And moreover, if the clients are merely seeking some analysis of their difficulty, howsoever elaborate and sophisticated, charged with whatsoever recommendations, they must not be encouraged to think that they are into action learning. Managers are not employed to describe, to analyse nor to recommend: they are engaged to act. this they start to achieve more effectively only after they are able to see the outcomes of their own deliberated plans, implemented by themselves rather than by others who had no hand in their preparation or no faith in their validity.

the primACy of the set

In the risk-laden predicament of innovation each manager needs the support, not of those expert in yesterday’s successes, but of their fellow managers going through the same tricky apprenticeship of facing tomorrow’s confusion. To provide this support, and to encourage their sagacity still more by offering the same support back to their fellows, is another aim of action learning. The primary market for these exchanges is the small and stable set of comrades in adversity, regularly disciplining themselves in their observations and their analyses, more realistically appraising and more sensitively applying the limitless stores of their own lived experience.

All the paraphernalia described in this monograph, of clients and client groups, models of diagnosis and therapy, the sequential order of successful achievement, the climatology of top management, the occupational traits of managers themselves as human beings, the guiles of micro-politics and so forth – all as moulded in the action learning experiments of the past thirty years – have been isolated and defined merely to reinforce the character of the set as the mirror in which the real-life action is reflected, not only from one participant

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 1 1 . R

o u tle

d g e . A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

the phiLosophy of AC tion LeArning

to the next, just as are the empty containers pushed around the case discussion, but also between the mind of the participant and the real world to which they will shortly return with their container freshly charged.

We must be wary, now that action learning seems to gain acceptance, that the set is not cut off from reality, sold as a part-time discussion group of four or five top managers meeting to exchange their unverified misconceptions as to what may be going on under their command.

ProjeCts for aCtion; sets for refLeCtion

it may well be the set that most forcibly expresses the Aristotelian idea of which action learning is a modern example.

the set has been deliberately contrived so that managerial reflection can play upon the action of yesterday and anticipate the action of tomorrow. it reminds its members that when tomorrow arrives, with its call for them to do something, that very doing must itself remember not only yesterday’s reflection, but that reflection as it must be modified by the here-and-now dispositions of the moment making up the present – dispositions that could have been but imperfectly imagined during yesterday’s set exchanges.

Action learning not only exalts Aristotelianism by forcing participants to interpret all they are doing through the looking glasses of reflective argument; it obliges them constantly to polish the glasses so as to ensure its images are clearly seen. Whether each participant wipes clean their own mirror, or whether this is done for them by another member of the set,

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 1 1 . R

o u tle

d g e . A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

ABC of AC tion LeArning5

cannot be foretold. All the same, it would be wrong to assume that the spirit of Aristotle informs only the set itself; there are other components of action learning programmes to prove that doing is knowing and that knowing is doing. Together they compose our educational task force, although the set may be the flag-ship most boldly to carry the Aristotelian banner.

the LeArning Community

this force, which we may call the learning community, must include the senior management deciding from the outset to be in the programme, and, as is clear from other references in this monograph, critically influential in determining how much is learned and how much progress is made. And each participant will shape the views and draw out the experiences of all with whom they work, infusing at the levels of operation, away from the set, the Aristotelian interplays of action and reflection.

In some of the missions run by the Hospital’s Internal Communication Project (HIC) up to five hundred members of the staff were inspired by their own diagnostic and therapeutic endeavours. it would have been impossible for some antique and stiff-jointed institution like a large London hospital to lift its annual efficiency by the order of a million pounds unless the learning virus injected into a few of the senior staff had diffused down to the bedside and into the laundry. And, no less, it was at these humbler levels that the suggestions about what to do were drawn from what those who worked at them had already done, after these lived experiences, also interpreted in the local mirrors of custom and practice, had been accepted as learning experiences the next time round.

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 1 1 . R

o u tle

d g e . A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

the phiLosophy of AC tion LeArning

In the first strategic Belgian exchanges (The Inter-University Programme of 1968) it was estimated that the 21 bartered fellows, the substantive set members, strongly influenced over two hundred senior managers in the enterprises that participated. More recent examples show that when action learning is accepted as the best means of averting total calamity – as in saving the whole enterprise from collapse – or of securing the highest of rewards – as in winning some contract open to the world – every single member of the management, not merely the nominated members of the set central to the exercise, has been brought to understand the message of Aristotle: that it is from action alone that one learns to act more effectively – using the job as the syllabus and the colleague as the teacher.

outWards from set to Learning Community

nor are these numerical multipliers the only virtues of the learning community. Each fellow influences every other to some observable extent, so that the ideas and experiences of many very different individuals are reflected into other enterprises and into other industries.

one set may learn from another set, as, for example, when the score of participants in a five set programme decide, every five weeks, to regroup themselves for half a session. This is not so as to go into detail through the reflective exercises to which they have accustomed themselves with their regular colleagues, but to analyse with comparative strangers the nature of these exercises rather than their project content. they are getting together to discuss, not so much what can be

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 1 1 . R

o u tle

d g e . A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

ABC of AC tion LeArning5

seen reflected in their individual looking glasses, but how the glasses are most effectively used.

in these exchanges, there is nothing more important than that each should recognize the conditions of their own learning, or what it is that leads them to change their mind, whether from the action they are constrained to take, the new interpretation forced upon them by the comments of a colleague, or by a new skill in holding their own looking glass in a new fashion. it is the social character of all learning (demonstrating A gets nothing from the arguments of B unless B also gets something from the responses of A) that makes it worthwhile for those embarked on action learning to concentrate from time to time upon the precise origins of their new insights, and by what means these can then be passed to others.

Aristotle’s thesis, that if we are all involved in the action – five hundred of us on the floor of the hospital – then we are also all involved in the learning, offers us, to be sure, our philosophical rewards. nevertheless, as practical managers, it is good to know in some operational detail how to speed the transmission of the thesis through to those corners of the enterprise as unknown to the members of the set as are those members unknown to those who work in the corners.

Just as sets may resonate with other sets, so also may one organization learn with and from another. Despite their extreme sensitivity to the state of world commerce (for they must export half their gross domestic product to pay for their necessities – compared with Britain at less than one-quarter, Japan less than one-sixth and America less than one-twelfth) Belgium alone in the West kept GDP per worker as high in the 1970s as in the 1950s, when even germany and Japan lost about 3 per cent annually across the tinselled 1960s.

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 1 1 . R

o u tle

d g e . A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

the phiLosophy of AC tion LeArning

But Belgium saw, and in the face of all adversity, how more effectively to use their economic resources, year after year since her strategic programme of top level exchanges was begun.

this quite singular performance supports the action learning thesis: that it is adversity which most readily improves our actions, by first concentrating our thoughts, and that the Belgian programme, by starting with the second, has now achieved the first. And if enterprise may learn from enterprise, why not one country from another? Perhaps the more fruitful applications of action learning lie, however, in quite other fields – in its promise for industrial democracy, to bring the trade unions and the shop floor into raising the quality of life all round, not in productivity alone. the ills of society, too, in violence, urban decay, unemployment, offer Aristotle their challenges. Action learning may yet suggest how they may be taken up, as the staff of Ulster Polytechnic, among whom I worked off and on for several years until the message was accepted, seem now to be demonstrating.

the Prime idea of aCtion Learning

the prime idea of action learning, set forth at the end of Chapter 1, is that all rational behaviour, intended by sober deliberation to increase one’s command over the environment (with the terms command and environment also soberly deliberated) is that learning, advising and deciding (followed by the action defined by that decision) are inextricably related. they are, all three, different aspects of the same entity, namely, the sober and deliberated examination of the world around us, made with a view to deepening our understanding of that world – something generally known as scientific research.

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 1 1 . R

o u tle

d g e . A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

ABC of AC tion LeArning5

Although this, like learning, advising and deciding, must also be conducted by human beings, it is a comparatively recent development, and was unknown to many of the civilizations that preceded what we are please to call our own.

it follows from this prime idea that there can be no learning without action, and no (sober and deliberate) action without learning.

there are, of course, many who go on doing the same ineffectual things all their life, and at the end of it they attract the comment: There’s no fool like an old fool. … But there are also those who soberly and deliberately refuse to learn, because the new knowledge, while consonant with the scientific method, is inconvenient for other reasons. it may not be complying to know such-and-such, just in case it might slip out, or even affect one’s actions. It might even be that some new way of looking at how one earns a living lights up a new question: is my time really well spent?

the truth, should it come, may be painful and disincline one from taking aboard new beliefs. New ideas suggesting new behaviours may be soberly and deliberately suppressed because they contradict established values and accepted traditions. thus it was that nietzsche evaluated any new proposal by the animosity with which it was first received; unless it is ridiculed by the clever and opposed by the stupid, it is not worth going ahead with, for it is only after such rough receptions that it will be absorbed. Certainly, this has been the experience of action learning, ridiculed through the 1960s and 1970s by the management schools, but now advertised by them under different names as their own developments.

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 1 1 . R

o u tle

d g e . A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

the phiLosophy of AC tion LeArning

the criterion by which such behaviour should be judged is not intellectual ability but personal values. the opposition to novelty is not due to pure obtuseness, or to an incapacity in following the cycle of the scientific method as it unrolls the truth. it is that the truth contradicts existing values; if these are known; or that it demands facing unpleasant risks if one is to work out the consequences of embracing some different notion.

thus it was that single idea discovered by the top managers in the first Inter-University Programme of Belgium to be of the greatest interest to them was that of a value system. What were the standards of integrity against which all final judgements were made by those with whom they worked – including themselves? It was a notion bound to arise out of the set discussions in which the fellows stripped each other naked, an experience that led them to define the most valuable question they had learned as: What is an honest man, and what need i do to become one?

the PrinCiPLe of insuffiCient mandate

Those to whom this question rarely occurs are unlikely to know who they may be, nor in what they may believe. This means that they have incomplete views of the significance of fresh experience and are, on that account, unlikely to gain much from it. the top Belgian programme was important simply because it greatly enhanced the self-awareness of the fellows, teaching them a great deal more about themselves than about management techniques. it was this that led one fellow to admit that the set made him feel like a Henry Moore statue, with a great hole in it, through which the other members launched their paper darts at each other. Certainly,

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 1 1 . R

o u tle

d g e . A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

ABC of AC tion LeArning5

it was those who became most aware of themselves who also became most aware of others, and so of their micro-political problems.

All this, inherent in the prime idea of action learning, is expressed in The Principle of Insufficient Mandate:

Those unable to change themselves cannot change what goes on around them.

Those who are to change significantly that which they freshly encounter must themselves be changed by the changing of it. Without power to discard beliefs shown to be wrong (insufficient mandate over oneself) one cannot introduce actions known to be right. It is an essential derivative of action learning.

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 1 1 . R

o u tle

d g e . A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .