U6D2-28 - Explore, Examine and Identify Hybrid Action Learning Data Tools (Model). ***PLEASE FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS AS OUTLINED BELOW*** See Attached Documents for Reference and Readings.

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The Characteristics of the Manager

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At seventy years of age, every man is a walking expression of the habits of a lifetime and, before that, an emblem of his trade. Few would mistake a ballet dancer for a pugilist, or a miner for a trawler hand, as at first glance one reads the accumulated history of their lives. Why, then, are the evidences of being a manager so striking that they must be the foundations on which all management education should rest?

We are considering managers and management in general, seeking out their highest common factors, and cannot discuss here in detail the peculiarities of every class. no doubt, the qualities needed to manage, say, the eddystone lighthouse have little in common with those looked for when appointing the Governor of the Bank of England – whatsoever metaphors may be thought up of rays of hope and darkening nights.

A content analysis of several hundreds of hours of tape- recorded argument between managers in the major action learning programmes of Belgium reveals four characteristics, alike in their own spontaneous assertions and in response to others. All may, from time to time, be handicaps no less than

Revans, R., & Revans, R. (2011). Abc of action learning. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from capella on 2018-04-20 13:25:11.

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assets, and it is their dual character which justifies their choice as the elements of action learning. they are:

1. the idolization of past experience, as this is interpreted and recalled;

2. the charismatic influences of other managers seen as being successful;

3. the drive towards immediate activity, getting something done now;

4. the need to keep others in their places.

It is easy to see that all of these are necessarily the marks of the professional manager, the man (or woman) called upon to produce or maintain desired order in any complex system that, sooner or later, will otherwise show signs of falling apart. We may expand a little more upon the four.

the idoLization of Past exPerienCe

Just as all persons embrace within themselves the record of their lives, so are all managers branded by their past experiences; in a profession so dependent upon success, and so punished by failure, every manager is a vivid recollection of triumph and disaster. in consequence, they are often unable to see any more in the present than still further confirmation of a past now unforgettable: the misty ghosts of yesterday enshroud what goes on now.

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the CharismatiC infLuenCes of others

Most managers, when in a fix, wonder what So-and-so, the hero whom they have long worshipped, would do; some will reject solutions to current troubles by remarking that, had the proposal any merit, the Duke of Wellington would already have thought of it; some would sooner refer to the biography of the hero than give the same time to looking more closely into the current facts. this may be an ancient and atavistic trait, of which we read even in the Book of Genesis: ‘There were giants in the earth in those days... mighty men which were of old, men of renown’ (Gen Chapter 6 v 4).

to bring things up to date, the recent acceptance of action learning in Britain is due to the example of Lord Weinstock trying it out, at first with mixed results, in the most successful company in the country. in its more available forms, charisma will flow from personal contacts with other managers who set their examples of shrewdness and integrity to those around them looking for help.

the drive to aCt

Most managers, tormented by the ticking of the office clock and the fall of the days from the factory calendar, will respond sooner to the urgencies of the moment, howsoever inconsequential, than to the suggestion that they ought to clear the decks and heed the long-term warnings. This is the Gresham’s law of management: Short-term issues soon drive out the long. thus one observes the managerial chefs singing as they peel the managerial spuds, or rolling up their sleeves to scour out the administrative pans.

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the need for aLL to knoW their PLaCes

in all there is to do, the manager must lead the team, and to conquer its untidy and uncertain world the team must first itself be tidy. From long experience of taking charge and of issuing the instructions for others – this job here, that job there and the other job somewhere else – many managers tend to underrate their staff. in some enterprises the play of politics may reward this natural touch, so that senior ranks hold totally unrealistic assessments of their relations down below.

buiLding the four-square Programme

Action learning programmes should be designed to exploit to the maximum extent these four characteristics of the managerial demand. There will be those who ask why what is already so obvious needs to be set out in such elaboration – or even to be set out at all. of course, responsibility is searing, and our memories do not forget. of course, the genius impresses, and we seek him as our model. Of course, we are engaged to get results, and time must not be wasted. of course, we are in charge, and the rest must look to us. These may be ancient truths, but we can make of them new use, and this is what action learning tries to do.

1. the programme must, continuously, emphatically, by responsible conduct and evident trial, oblige each participant to look critically at their past experience, to read afresh the graffiti scrawled across their cortical slate. Whatever the deliberated activity, whether in a project carried out elsewhere, away from normal work, or whether a study of something supposed to be going

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on closer to home, the participant’s next important moves, in diagnosis, prescription or therapy, should be so clearly expounded, so logically justified and so honestly reported back in their outcome, that recollections of the past become the most vivid and steadfast luminant to guide their current strivings, rather than those flickering uncertainties of insight that heighten their perplexities at work.

Since the action learning set is inspired by the interest each participant arouses in drawing out the aid of their colleagues towards his own success, all will constantly be required to expose for the most exacting scrutiny just what they think they are up to – and why. Yet even at the end of the programme some keen-eyed observer may still be musing over what frightful thing could have happened long ago to a colleague, permanently to obscure from him some glaring weakness of perception. As it was put by one senior Belgian manager:

After three months, they all read my thoughts more clearly than I did myself.

And what one person may take as loyalty to their own past, another sees as treachery to all our futures.

2. Every participant will, from time to time, find themself down another blind alley, when they will discover for themself (and be obliged to confess to their colleagues) that there is little point in asking what their charismatic hero would have done; they will soon be told to get back to the hard realities before them and forget the sacred shrines. if this person is out of ideas, or needs to face mounting opposition on the job, their colleagues will help them

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more clearly to perceive where they must look, for in doing so and in discussing why they are doing so they will also be strengthening themselves.

The mind gone blank can do little with itself save panic, but a few supportive minds aware that they themselves might, too, go blank at any moment can provide the most refreshing tonic. it will be that person’s own inspiration they will restart, read from that person’s own cortex, expressed in that person’s own terms and applied in that person’s own way; the friends in need are, to be sure, the friends indeed. So, when all else fails, get into action learning; by helping others we learn to help ourselves.

3. the longer term study, for which as the coordinator of some complex project the participant will now have time enough, enriched by the duty to themself and to their colleagues to set forth what it all means, not in some instant gabble on the classroom floor led by an impatient teacher, but in the regular calendar of set discussion (when all must explain their confusions no less than their grasps), will also favour the wider vision.

By needing to crawl along its subterranean labyrinths, each participant will come to respect the subtleties and the contradictions that compose their project; all these they will seek to balance and to record, constantly stopping and turning to ask what is still unseen. In this exploration they will put aside instant response and turn to considerate reflection, distinguishing between what is immediately verifiable and what calls for logical analysis leading into testable relationship.

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The dialogue between action in the project field and confrontation with colleagues in the set will soon make the case for seeking the long-term view. The participants then learn the virtue of second thoughts about all that may suddenly cross their minds – with second thinking to match the inspiration and the overall design.

4. these analyses and their cross questionings will oblige each of the participants, and perhaps in unaccustomed ways, to verify their facts more rigorously than in the past. in a strange environment they may stop to examine, more critically than at home, all that comes to them as information, by what channels it does so, and what, if any, uses are now made of it by those at lower levels.

The participant’s status in the receiving enterprise, together with their own personal desire to get at the truth by methods to which they have long been a stranger, will suddenly make them understand how dependent they are – and must necessarily be – upon staff of whose very existence, even upon the organization chart (should one exist), they were formerly quite unaware. The quest for reliable information upon which to rest one’s case when at work away from home is invariably such as to force – although there is much willingness – every participant in an action learning programme to rethink what they owe their staff and to re-examine their own credentials to be their leader. it was the controller of energy at the largest steel plant in Belgium who, as a fellow working on the management information system of a savings bank, observed:

It is always the boss who decides whether his staff work well or badly, and power is not always where it seems to be.

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a modeL for Learning to aCt

We can easily represent these four elements as the inputs to a model of action learning. each must generate its corresponding output, and encourage the outputs of the other three.

1. idolization of the meaning of past experience must be transformed into the constant reappraisal of one’s true beliefs and inner resources.

There is a difference between believing in nothing, on the one hand, and not knowing in what to believe, on the other. I recognize now that I have not only been doing entirely the wrong things in my own job; our salary system was designed for me to concentrate on doing them.

2. The charismatic influences of others, diminishing the ability to seek self-reliance, must open the windows of self-disclosure to admit the friendliness of other learners.

At first I felt uneasy about my freedom to speak the truth. Why should anybody in my firm be interested in the truth? Now I see no harm in it. Indeed, I occasionally find it quite satisfying. Managers are not untruthful by nature; they are simply forced to pretend that they know even when they do not know.

3. The drive to act must be replaced by a desire to seek out some rational base for operational decisions.

This programme has taught me always to consider what I should do next. Previously it had never occurred to me to ask. Getting at the real problem is

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like skinning an onion: the longer it goes on the more people who shed tears.

4. And the need for all to know their places must become an interest in participative leadership, with learning to do the task by the unavoidable need to do it.

At the start I was convinced that change of any kind was impossible; now I see that, using patience, I have made it inevitable. It is no longer disturbing for me to accept support from another manager without having to negotiate some deal with them.

All of these transformations can be helped by the academic syllabus judiciously brought to bear, in forms to be agreed by the participants, preferably after the demand for its help has been made in terms of specific operational need. A dual support is still to be preferred:

− In the first element, to relieve a fixation upon the past, the psychology of perception and of defensiveness should be seen against the background of confrontation with other participants about understanding and influencing some accessible reality.

− in the second and the fourth element, each raising dependence on the self and the staff, the conflicts within the set should be discussed in terms of the psychology of the interpersonal, and of such concepts as authority, security and value.

− in the third element, with its tantalising and protracted searches of the complex and unfamiliar, we must, if help is sought, call in the business analysts and the modellers of operational research.

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summary

The essential working arrangements of action learning provide precisely the developmental needs called for by these four managerial characteristics.

instead of...

1. their long-acquired inclination to see their past successes and their past failures writ large in what they now encounter as the present.

this may be corrected by their constantly having to explain to other attentive managers what they are now engaged upon, what they intend to do about it, and, in particular, how their perception of what they see and their design of what they plan are coloured by their past experiences.

2. the identification of their own success with that of some hero figure (or of more than one), striving to imitate some model rather than to develop their own plans of action from scratch.

By questioning them on how their plans have been drawn up and implemented, their set colleagues force them to make use of their own latent powers.

The Prize Song of Wagner’s Meistersinger is an allegory, with Walther, the knight, being cross-questioned by Hans Sachs, the shoemaker, as to how he had first been inspired to compose his imperfect draft.

3. their preoccupation with short-term issues in the hope of quick rewards, rather than with the longer term issues more important to the future (a misdirection of attention now said to be a cause of America’s industrial troubles).

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An action learning project, by its very nature, forces every participant to examine the roots of strategy, and also denies access to short-run trials.

4. their unrealistic views of the supporting roles of their staff, leading to exaggerated estimates of their own powers of leadership.

Action learning exercises conducted away from home soon force participants to acknowledge their dependence upon those at lower levels – especially for the facts about what may be going on, as distinct from what is thought to be going on.

the participants will soon become aware of these four characteristics and of the ways in which they are illuminated by the programme. They may go so far as to ask that supplementary courses, over and above the field exercises, should be arranged for the deeper analysis of the psychological and technical issues raised in the identification of these four characteristics.

this implies, of course, that the programme will now start to provide P. Since what is now specifically asked for is highly relevant to the needs of the participants it will stimulate, rather than retard, their total learning. As far as possible, P should be supplied by other participants when it falls in the fields of professional managers – as in accountancy, quantitative methods, systems design, capital investment, warehousing and distribution, wages policy and so forth. not all participants, of course, will have the same needs, and all supplementary enlightenment of this nature should be individually specified.

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