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_----_7_Some_Experiences_of_Launching_Action_Learning.pdf

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Some Experiences of Launching Action Learning

It is now more than sixty years since the first printed report recommended action learning to the Mining Association of great Britain, the previous owners of the coal industry, in october 1945, suggesting a staff college for those with problems to come together and learn with and from each other, a venture that did not envisage the permanent employment of a highly qualified staff of specialist tutors, to deliver the lectures or conduct the seminars.

the Staff College would bring together groups of persons interested in common problems, who, under a leader taken from within the industry and previously invited to introduce a subject, or under a succession of such leaders, would be prepared to spend a weekend, a week, a fortnight, or even in special cases perhaps longer, on the fullest interchange of their ideas and experiences of those problems.

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 12:27:46.

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it is probably because this early statement of the nature of action learning – from the diagnosis and treatment of real problems in the company of comrades in adversity rather than from the reminiscences of no longer involved experts – was seen from the outset as uncompromisingly opposed to the interests of academics that it has taken so long for the idea to catch on. the extent and nature of this catching on, what is more, are by no means as clear as these 1945 recommendations were intended to imply. Much now on the market as action learning would not be easy to identify as such by those who have spent the last sixty years in following its fight for recognition.

for this reason it may be helpful to describe the steps by which some of the pioneers have managed to get programmes established so far – never forgetting ‘that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.’ (Ecclesiastes Chapter 9 v11.) Little can be guaranteed by following the advice of others, set out on the distant pages of a book. Nevertheless, the identifiable stages seem to be these:

earLy rumours

one may come across some public reference to action learning, probably by some other name, such as management action, experiential development, group activity training and over fifty others. All depend upon the simple idea of some real and assigned task as the syllabus, and the regular confrontation with a few equals as the medium; even if it is partly concealed between the constant supervision of some facilitator who attends the confrontations, and the packaged course of

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lectures given by experts, without particular relevance to the varied assignments that are the foundation of the programme.

Whatever the reference, something attracts the attention of a manager who may seek further information from a local management school or institute of management. in geC the first contact was from the managing director (then Sir Arnold Weinstock) who saw the writer on a television programme, and made contact through the BBC. Since the educational press has given little attention to the subject – and pursues an expert policy of not reviewing the writer’s own books – it is rare for first contacts to come from the established literature.

informed aCquaintanCe

it is generally essential to follow up the early rumours, and the first contacts to which they may be expected to lead. It is very easy for those who seek a new light to be led firmly towards the old, and they will be well advised to ask pretty quickly those offering to sell them action learning a few simple questions.

The first of these should discover how the salesman earned a living yesterday, and whether they have made any contribution to the development of action learning, corroborated, if possible, by the managers in the real world identified as having gained from these earlier exercises. there are now several channels through which potential participants can secure reliable endorsements of any agencies offering to run action learning programmes for them, including many of those currently referred to in the Bibliography. it is, unfortunately, necessary to make these uncharitable comments about the transition from early rumours to informed acquaintance, since action learning could scarcely have taken more than a generation to

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become established in the country of its origin had not it been seen as a threat to those doing well out of established courses.

the danger is now different; an early interest in action learning, instead of being suppressed by the opinions of experts as being ‘unscientific’, will now be welcomed – to be deflected into something claimed by other experts to be more up-to-date and ‘more fully staffed’.

aCtive motivation

No organization is likely to embrace action learning unless there is some person within it ready to fight on its behalf.

Careful observation suggests that it is rarely a conviction about the merits of action learning as such that first inclines people to take it up. Only when they become convinced that their existing approaches to managerial and supervisory training are not likely to get anywhere will they turn to the untried and the challenging. Since the last persons to admit that existing development schemes fall below desirable standards are those who run them, it is rare for the active motivation to start with the personnel department, or with the chief training officer, who probably owe their present seniority to having built up a system now under attack. Their instincts are to jump to its defence – one way to protect their established edifice is to disparage whatever may challenge it, and, when action learning is imperfectly understood, it can very quickly be disparaged.

Inspiring and motivating can thus be a tricky business. The key seems to be in making an ally of some powerful member of the coalition of power responsible for the organization

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and, from the earliest possible moment, contriving that this person and the head of training work closely together. This dialogue is sometimes started directly by the training staff, after it has become known to them that the coalition of power is beginning to have reservations about training budgets and the like. It is sometimes started by a managing director, or senior engineer, or even an industrial relations officer, who has learned from a professional colleague in another enterprise that action learning may have something going for it.

this useful intermediary we may call the accoucheur – the managerial midwife who sees that their organization gives birth to a new idea, without themself needing to attest either its past origins or its future nourishment in any professional sense. It would be instructive to make a content analysis of the missions of the last hundred accoucheurs, to discover how they first got worked up, what they said to the training staff, how they put the idea to colleagues on the board – or elsewhere at the top – and how their own views of what they were up to changed as they advanced.

one managing director, forced to concentrate on action learning as the last hope for saving his twelve hundred strong business, has not only recorded how he did this, but has set up an action learning centre on his retirement. if he, personally, is not able to convince a few other line or operational managers in other enterprises that they might join their training managers as the factory or enterprise accoucheurs, so as to concentrate a few top level minds on making a fresh start on their chronic troubles, we shall need to abandon hope altogether and to write-off whatsoever is left.

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ConstruCtive Lobbying

experience suggests that many months may elapse between recruiting the accoucheur to team up with the personnel and training staff, and securing a final decision from the coalition of power to start any programme of substance. the accoucheur must, of course, be a politically mature person, well able to pilot any ideas they believe in through the troubled waters that surge around the board room and other refuges.

it will be long before those now trying to promote action learning will be able specifically to develop these key supporters. in due course, no doubt, as those now participating in action learning programmes secure the promotions they deserve, they will carry to the higher levels of their employment the beliefs they are now acquiring – especially if, as in other countries, the quality of the action learning projects reach such standards that their analysis and documentation may well form the dissertations for higher degrees.

But, for the present, such preparatory overtures are unknown in Britain1. either the enterprise has one or two potential accoucheurs among its top people or it has not, and, if they are lacking, it seems that the only means of inspiring others to assume the role is through the professional institutions, by addressing their conferences in the hope that some line manager will ask a few questions and find themself referred to a colleague in another enterprise known to be convinced that action learning has helped in some other context.

1 this is no longer the case. Many higher education institutions in the UK and elsewhere now offer post-graduate degree and diploma programmes, or elements of these programmes, by action learning (ed.).

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it is certainly through some operational need, felt and identified (if not accurately diagnosed) by some line department, that the accoucheur will most effectively diffuse their new enthusiasm among the small band of allies always needed to start anything afresh. it should be the professional responsibility of the training staff to see that they are properly supplied with all they need to interest their other colleagues, including introductions to those from other enterprises – or even local authorities and public corporations – who can describe convincingly what action learning has done to help them with their own practical problems elsewhere.

How this game of micro-politics is played is, of course, up to the accoucheur, who will be wise to listen carefully to such outsiders. Above all, the opportunity for them to interest the coalition of power in actually getting a programme started with the maximum of support must be left to their political judgement. Such an occasion might have nothing whatsoever to do with discussions about training policy or development budgets; it is most likely to arise during the discussion of some obstinate affliction, when the coalition is as aware as it possibly can be of the seriousness of the trouble and of the inadequacy of their attacks upon it.

The occasion can always be taken for the board to invite, through the accoucheur, the member or members (potential clients) most tormented by the problem to talk it over with the counterpart from the other firm known to the accoucheur to have met with success – or with such as the former managing director who actually saved his enterprise from closure. But, as in all action learning, our problem is not only to find accoucheurs: it is to keep them in touch with those genuinely able to help them from personal conviction and successful experience.

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toP management deCision

the intrigues of the accoucheur and their professional accomplice from the training staff must be looked upon as merely a cultural preparation: they will not, of themselves, ensure that the coalition of power will actually decide to do anything. the notion that something new and different needs to be done is no easy one to implant where it needs to be implanted, at the very top of the organization.

early experience, among the colliery managers and the hospital administrations where the first consortia were set up so long ago, suggested that those in charge of a unit are much more likely to face the risks of innovation if several of them can be got together to stimulate each other to think afresh. Just as the action learning set of five or so participants striving to make sense each of their own projects endow one another with unsuspected skill and courage, so the representatives of different top managements coming together at the invitation of one of them are much more likely to play the daredevil than if they are, in some fashion, enticed singly into the minefields of discovery.

if all of those who turn up are thoroughly aware that their organizations can no longer vacillate but must do something quite novel, each will understand enough of the conundrums faced by the others to contribute to the total discussion the encouragement to take studied risks, even sufficient to tip the scales held teetering by one party present. What is, in fact, happening at such a confabulation – for the risks known to be involved soon give the exchanges a most personal and even single-minded quality – is that, exactly as in the formal set discussion, all are helping the others to perceive their necessities afresh.

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A much wider range of lived experience is being invoked, simply because it is there to be invoked, and it happens to be the very kind of lived experience so badly needed: that of other real top managers accumulated from their past attempts to do something about other troubles, some of which may have presented elements like those now tormenting others around the table. However this may be, it was the constant discussion about their real troubles among the presidents of the large Belgian enterprises, more than any intellectual explanation from the academics and training experts, that led to most final decisions to go ahead; there is similar evidence, in 1982 and later, that such mutual support in risk taking will also help British industry and commerce to make a long- delayed beginning.

What will probably be decisive in the long run is the extent to which top managements themselves will take these launching initiatives. Unless the appeal for support comes from some other coalition of power as a personal touch, it is unlikely to get very far. We are deceiving ourselves if we imagine that the most precious asset top management commands – its lived experience, deep and often hard to discover – is going to become available for wider use unless that top management is itself to become personally involved in offering it to others.

thus it is that those anxious to persuade coalitions of power to tackle their troubles by action learning should recognize the need first to get the coalitions of power exchanging confidences among themselves.

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oPerationaL design

the top management, once it has chosen from a list of three or four vexatious troubles that on which it is ready to make a start, must decide in what way it can make known throughout its dominions that it is seriously committed to the new approach.

the move to develop a spirit of question posing in a hierarchical system traditionally run by experts is sometimes met with alarm by its middle managers, since, if they are allowed to ask questions of their superiors, there will be a danger of foremen and supervisors being permitted to ask questions of their own departmental heads.

the most simple and effective way to prepare the operational managers is to meet them altogether, or, where the institution works around the clock, like a hospital or colliery, in large numbers shift by shift. it is important that all subordinate managers should be able to hear the kinds of responses made by their colleagues to the suggestion that all in the hierarchy are being invited to work together on whatsoever problems are thrown up. Unless the majority of the staff are convinced that their coalition of power are in real earnest, the cooperation given to the action learning participants will be less than may be necessary.

Nor is this all. The finest way to get the circulation going among the middle management is for them to be convinced that those at the top, too, are trying to make better use of the resources available to them. Precisely what manner of departmental meetings, too, may be called for to ensure more open exchanges between those likely to become involved in the diagnosis and therapy will need to be worked out as the

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client and the helpers get started. the important need is to ensure, by public presentation, that the top wants something done and is ready to play a new part in helping to do it.

those at the higher levels may sometimes be surprised by the responses they get: foremen and middle managers willing to work long hours in their own time without payment; offers to run a newsletter keeping everybody in the picture; suggestions about local projects, designed to add detail to the wider investigations inspired from above; and requests for further general meetings after some of the middle managers have got together to work out a timetable for their own supplementary service groups.

PreParatory WorkshoPs

Once all the above steps have been taken, perhaps with the help of some local or regional management centre, the staff of some already experienced firm or internationally recognized authority, it will be time to run some kind of introductory seminar or workshop for those within the organization likely to become engaged.

As far as possible, the ideas of this booklet should be available to the key persons among these, since there is no harm in the fundamental nature of action learning becoming a topic of discussion in the light of what the organization is trying to do. And, moreover, the specific roles that need to be filled, client and client group, sponsor, participant and, where one is needed, set launcher or set adviser, should be described by a real manager who has actually gone through the real and responsible experience of tackling urgent and threatening problems.

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The ready mark that they have done so is their ability to take the obscure and ill-framed questions of those about to tackle action learning for the first time, and to distil from them at least half a dozen major issues, all dimly forming in the mind of the questioners. But, although all may be managers of the same rank and professional qualification, the one will have spent several months in the company of three or four others learning how to explore his own ignorance through the enlightenment of needing to do something about it, and in such a way as to avoid deceiving themself about the consequences.

Moreover, the real manager who has actually been through such a programme will, not unlike a Catherine Wheel, throw off all manner of comment about their own adventures, and return to their inquisitors all levels of questions – some extremely personal – so that their own delight in the exchanges is more than apparent. it becomes, in practice, a learning experience for the older hand; they are, to some extent, reliving what they have been through, and is all the better for it.

These preparatory workshops should, as far as possible, involve the future participants from more than one enterprise, even although this may be a very large one, with problems enough to run self-contained action learning programmes on its own. Those who attend it should be expected to have read the first two sections of this booklet, or to have acquainted themselves with the aims and the methods of action learning from other sources. it is important that this should be required of the participants, in order that time is not wasted over the need to convince them – as all on first hearing need to be convinced – that action learning is fundamentally different from most other educational experience.

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grown men and women usually encounter with utter incredulity the suggestion, first put to them, that it is from their own experience of the past and their own uncertainties about the future they are now to learn. they cannot believe that they are not to copy down in their best handwriting what some professor is throwing from an overhead projector upon the classroom wall in front of them, nor to act through some charade with all taking parts as managers, shop-stewards, foremen welders and so forth, in order to put across the principles of cognitive dissonance or sapiential authority. The notion that constructive activity will be expected from those on the floor of the workshop can be highly disturbing, not only to the teaching profession but also to the participants. they should be prepared before they come to meet each other for the first time … sixty years of educational inertia are looking down on us.

The workshop should last at least a couple of days, so that the participants can sleep on the ideas first put to them, and thereby become initiated into the habit of posing questions they have had the chance to think out for themselves. its agenda need not be rigidly framed in advance, since the participants – should things go properly – will have all kinds of suggestions to make about diagnosing and treating the troubles billed to be attacked.

Perhaps the most difficult idea to get across at this first gathering is the dependence of the whole project for its success upon all trying to discover what needs to be done – including how most effectively to use the time of the workshop to decide the future course of action. it is most faithfully to engender this critically positive approach that the presence of real managers from elsewhere who have themselves gone through their own action learning experiences can be so stimulating. A second get-together should be suggested, to be staged for a half-day

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six weeks later, in order that all may be able to report back how they are getting on and what else might need to be done to make sure that all the key participants fully understand what is to be expected of them.

exChanging exPerienCes of LaunChing aCtion Learning

for the next few years, while action learning is still emerging from the authoritarianism of traditional education – being told by experts how to become proficient in yesterday’s receding pastimes – it will help the whole movement if fairly accurate records are made of what goes on at these preparatory workshops.

We know much less than we think we do about how to stimulate responsible people to put their energies into making a better job of what they are supposed to be doing, and there is nothing like encouraging them to find out for themselves how a better job might be done. We could all get quite a lot out of exchanging among ourselves the impressions we have of how things are successfully (or unsuccessfully) launched, and there is an important task to be tackled here by the training staffs of the organizations that try launching them.

The political acuity of the accoucheur will be sufficient to make them realise at a fairly early stage their own need for information and advice as to what action learning may be, at a level more profound than can ever be expressed in the literature, or even in conversation with a former participant. for this reason – and because, in accordance with the tenets of action learning, accoucheurs are likely to learn anything worth knowing only from other accoucheurs – workshops can

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be held at which the tasks of the accoucheurs can be offered for analysis and development by the accoucheurs themselves. At such convocations the following matters would all find a place on the agenda:

z the choice of problems around which to form projects

z the roles and responsibilities of clients

z the qualities and selection of participants

z the representation of the organization in any consortium

z the monitoring of projects

z the development of set advisers

z the role of training staffs

z the induction of participants into their projects

z the continued support of participants

z the continuing role of line management in the projects

z the supply of appropriate technical knowledge

z the autonomous extension of projects into other projects

z issues of cost and benefit

z the concept of the whole organization as a learning system.

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