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-Chapter6What_Action_Learning_is_Not.pdf

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What Action Learning is Not

We have so far tried to define what action learning is supposed to be, mainly by listing the elements of which one will become aware on getting involved in it – as well as by presenting the prime idea as the figure at the end of Chapter 1. But any reference to these elements:

1. the Characteristic Assumptions of Action Learning;

2. essential Logistics;

3. the Characteristics of the Manager;

4. the Influences of Top Management; and

5. the Philosophy of Action Learning;

has generally been met by those coming across action learning as a topic of conversation, who themselves have not yet seen it in reality, with a spontaneous rejection, generally expressed in a torrent of academic analogy…

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 12:22:21.

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Action learning? You mean learning by doing? What’s new about that? We’ve got it all; what’s more, we’ve had it all for donkey’s years! There’s nothing new for us in learning by doing! …

And there will follow much supporting argument from the headings below. these have been prepared to show what action learning may be confused with, no doubt, but what, nevertheless, is not action learning. All this, and a lot more, about an idea first put forward in 1945.

job rotation

in this, as it has been explained to me, the learning vehicles are a series of functional tasks, each tried under the tutelage of the person normally in charge of the unit in which those functions are regularly discharged. this overseer (manager, supervisor, specialist, head of department) agrees to induct the novice into the local mysteries, generally with the understanding that they are a temporary visitor, a bird of passage who has just finished a similar sojourn in some other specialist unit and who will move over to another after getting a brief acquaintance of what goes on at this particular spot.

‘Sitting next to Nelly’ (followed by Kate, Agatha and the rest), or ‘Getting the Cooks Tour’ are variants sometimes used in place of the more official title of job rotation. Where the tradition is tenaciously held that, should two things seem to look alike, they must be identical in all conceivable respects – the principle behind the case method – it follows that action learning is, and must necessarily be, equated with job rotation.

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in practice, the exchanges within an action learning programme are contrived so that the visitor may begin to change the local goings on, not to rehearse them for implanting elsewhere. if they sit next to nelly, it is to evaluate what nelly is up to and to help her do it differently by encouraging her to ask herself and her pals what they are achieving.

traditionally, one sits next to nelly for exactly the same purpose as that behind all programmed instruction: to become proficient in yesterday’s business, and to convince those who show one how to do so, namely, the nellys beside whom one sits – or the experts on programmed instruction – that they know better than any others in the world what life is all about. this is, most emphatically, not action learning.

ProjeCt Work

As I understand it, this is generally the mission of some working party set up by the top management of an organization to make recommendations (or even to take circumscribed action) about some embarrassment that can no longer be ignored.

Generally, the source of difficulty is already clearly identified by several powerful factions within the organization – although there is also the drawback that each faction sees that source within some department other than its own. Usually the leader of the working party can be anticipated, long before that working party is at last constituted; he is generally the functional expert whose unswerving dedication to the practices of his youth is the fundamental cause of the embarrassment that has now become unendurable.

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the status of the members of the project team will also be predictable, although its membership may change from time to time. this will represent the various factions (operating departments, functional advisors, headquarters and regional directors, and so forth), but will not be empowered to contribute anything of moment to the deliberations of the working party without first getting authority from its principals.

A typical working party is, in short, merely a concentrated expression of the very divisiveness that is leading to the collapse of industrial and commercial corporatism. While its counter marchings may do much to bring out the rivalries and the contradictions within the body it is supposed to represent, it is no more effective in doing this than has become the British House of Commons; a political coconut-shy for the amusement of a population with more and more time on its hands.

Action learning has nothing in common with such diversions, but is concerned with encouraging real persons to tackle real problems in real time.

Case studies, business games and other simuLations

these are normally based on narrow edited descriptions by anonymous writers of unknowable conditions. Evidently the students (participants, discussants, players) can be responsible neither for diagnosis nor for therapy.

The minor disagreements likely to break out among a dozen literate persons reading a document of 50 pages will soon encourage them to take up and defend a dozen different

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interpretations of what the total document was given to them for. This will soon enable the ‘case leader’ to join in their arguments with all manner of references that, left on their own, the dozen participants could scarcely dream of. Some case leaders are so good at such intervention that they are known in American business schools as ‘star faculty’.

However this may be, the students have no means of checking the stories they are given to read, neither at the level of the facts they are supposed to offer (such as whether the Detroit transport Corporation actually exists, if it really does have the assets it is said to have, and so forth), nor at the level of the presentation of those facts by the order and emphasis with which they appear (since most persons are willing to agree that a horse chestnut frequently conveys an impression unlike that of a chestnut horse).

in action learning, the narrative on which the set discussions are based is dragged slowly and painfully from the here-and- now of the reality that the participant has been invited to diagnose and to treat. they themselves becomes part of it, and it becomes influenced by their concern for it.

Whereas in the case discussion one particular student may triumph over all their rivals by the sheer loquacity and dialectic with which they marshal the ambiguities and exclusions of the script – and thereby be persuaded that they have in some way triumphed over Managerial nature Herself – the participant in any action learning exercise would know perfectly well that, unless they had themself marshalled the evidence (by a long and tortuous inquisition as distinct from a glance down some printed page); argued it with a score of others all themselves seeking factual relevance in their own shifting confusions (as distinct from telling a dozen others to read again what it says

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on Page Number X of the case documents); and then tried to get something done about it back in the inferno of reality (as distinct from handing over the papers for the next lot to argue about tomorrow), true learning, that which improves one’s command of the adjacent world, is not so easy.

nor is the simulation made any more real by appealing to the superior organizing power of the computer: unreality is not made more substantial by multiplying it a thousand times a second. none of this is action learning.

grouP dynamiCs and other task-free exerCises

During the 1960s these exercises proliferated to such an extent that it is risky to assert that none of them contain the essential element of action learning – verification in the face of reality rather than by reference to (supposed) principle or to the opinion of other persons.

indeed, in very recent years, there is now the chance that what had been developed as action learning, a consortium of top managers regularly meeting to discuss among themselves the effect of trying out their interpretations of reality back upon the reality itself, may now revert to mere group discussion unverified by subsequent real world comparison. To be sure, it is their own personal perceptions of their own responsible tasks that the handful of participants are on about, and there can be little denying that, in being forced to describe to others what it is they imagine they are up to, their views of what this may be frequently be modified.

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But, if their new perceptions are not soon checked against the real world they purport to reflect – and, preferably, by some test that challenges the responsibility of the manager undertaking to conduct it – none can be sure that the discussions have not so much modified perception in the direction of truthfulness as merely swapped one misunderstanding for another.

there is all the difference in the world between modifying reality, on the one hand, and talking about modifying reality, on the other, even if, in an academic culture based upon talking about what might be done rather than upon the real time doing of it, this difference may frequently escape our attention. thus it is that, while group dynamics, aimed at trying to demonstrate to others who they imagine themselves to be, why they say the things they say and act the things they act, can certainly bring home to its followers a clearer vision of why in a group dynamics session they carry on as they do, it is quite fanciful to imagine that this new understanding also equips them to master the imperious demands of external and objective responsibility.

Task-oriented accountability penetrates the human secrets more deeply than wiping off the grease paint of higher education, although it would be uncharitable to insist that this, too, might lack all virtues. But action learning is more than detergent; it insists upon keeping to a sequenced timetable, observing the iron disciplines of an industrial or commercial setting, with penalties for not achieving such- and-such by times agreed beforehand.

Such exercises as sensitivity training, non-directive counselling and other excursions into group psychotherapy are but rarely anchored to the here-and-now demands of business. this, of course, is not to say that they are inferior to the reinterpretations

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of past experience and of present qualities – or even of future hopes – necessarily urged upon the subject by action learning. it may well be that, in preparation for responsibility involving the external world as well as committing oneself, one ought to begin by trying to identify the misunderstandings generated by the self and only later take on the ambiguities of that same external world.

My own opinion is that the two sources of error are far from separable; i should hesitate to join any discussion that tried to mark where my world left off and I began. That I here find myself in a minority is readily demonstrated by the manifold titles that group psychotherapy has now assumed, especially since the Asiatic tourist trade has enticed the Swamis out of place so far away from Manchester. there must be by now at least one hundred movements claiming to explain to individuals the purposes for which they have been brought into this life, and how those purposes may be more effectively fulfilled.

insofar as all of this is to be secured without serious responsibility for improving, on a basis laid down by others, some external and independent reality, it cannot be assimilated to action learning. nevertheless, in following some of these movements, the participants may become so much more aware of the effects they are having upon other persons that they ask themselves how they might also have more influence upon the objective world in which they and those others need to exist. if this were so, then the movements referred to will serve as overtures to action learning.

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business ConsuLtanCy and other exPert missions

it is frequently said by top managers that were they ever inclined to ask themselves if there might be problems or opportunities deserving their attention other than those continuously arising from the daily round, they would at once send for some reputable firm of business consultants – company doctors, management professors, experts from Boston, confidential advisors, and so forth.

The idea that what might be lacking is something personal to the top managers themselves, something, moreover, that they alone might one day be able to put right, would strike them as very strange. it would be even stranger to them to suggest that, not only were they themselves alone in being able to put things right, but that only they, too, could discover the avenues to successful amendment.

But since there can be no learning without action and no action without learning (if change is to be brought about by the purchased services of outsiders, independently of any involvement at a personal level of the top managers who commission those outsiders) then there can be no learning – that is, no preparation among those at present in charge to meet the recurrent challenges of the future.

the enterprise will therefore become dependent upon its external advisors until it can no longer afford to meet their fees and expenses – a condition now frequently encountered. nor is this all. the external consultant generally claims expertise in such-and-such a field, and, on this account, will diagnose the affliction (or interpret the hope) of their client management in terms of it. for a month or more

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everything will go as predicted, the pattern uncovered will fit the forecast already made, and the plan of action will build upon the personal enthusiasms of members of the host management. the outside consultants who have prepared the plan – not seldom by piecing together fragments of their past prescriptions to other clients – will gradually ‘phase themselves out’, leaving those on the spot to implement what still needs to be done.

With their wide connections across a fast professional culture, the itinerant experts are able quickly to find the super- specialist needed (it might seem) to advise upon some highly technical obstruction to success. the very speed and certainty with which these talents are specified, recruited and deployed will ensure that no single member of the host management will learn much from their involvement.

the assignment of a visiting fellow from another enterprise also anxious to do something about its more obstinate and ill-structured embarrassments has little in common with the engagement of profession experts. Were the fellows of the inter-University Programme to carry visiting cards to widen their possibilities of future employment, they would endorse them in red capitals:

Our strength, just like your own, lies in our ignorance of your troubles.

For, while the expert may pretend that their first desire is to see the problem as it is seen by the management that needs to do something about it, they are in this particular business for a quite different reason. the visiting fellow, on the other hand, is clearly another manager in fact, anxious to interpret the trouble as a manager among managers, and to learn from

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their hosts as much as they are to learn from him. they do not seek to prolong their engagement with their hosts, nor to withhold unpleasant advice that may prejudice the willingness of his clients to meet their financial obligations – since there are none. they are not hoping, as are many consultants, that they may be offered an appointment in the firm they are setting out to help, so that their advice will not be coloured by quite adventitious possibilities having nothing to do at all with the original reasons for their being in the action learning programme.

Faced with a temporary check, the visiting fellow has no headquarters office they may ring for instant support from another itinerant expert. instead they will need to open up some fresh line of questioning with their hosts. Unlike the professional consultant, they will not be spending a lot of their time trying to find out what the most powerful person in the receiving organization believes the problem to be in order to present to them a solution based upon that interpretation. The visiting fellow will, laboriously and with little thanks, be trying to reconcile the myriad views and experiences of large numbers of their new colleagues in such a manner that these now start to suggest what might be going on and how it may be improved upon.

While in practice the expert consultant is desperately striving to use every interview they conduct as a means of assembling every shred of an idea from others into what they will claim as their own solution, they must be very cautious about creating the impression that they are circulating as the thirstiest of learners. Their official status is a teller of others, an instructor of babes, a guide to the foolish, an enlightener dispelling the darkness, a leader of the blind, and so forth. They must be

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extremely cautious about giving an impression that there is anything they have to learn.

the visiting fellow, on the other hand, gets the authority to help their new colleagues from their own eagerness to learn by recording the explanations of what these colleagues themselves imagine to be wrong. As the supreme non-expert, they are, at least at the outset, in no position to question what others say, nor to stem their desire to say it – and hence to learn from what others are trying to tell them about that which, they feel, seems to pass their own understanding.

As Saint Paul reminded us all:

Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool that he may be wise. (Corinthians Chapter 3 v18)

it is one of the texts upon which action learning is founded, but rarely seen on the Christmas cards from experts.

oPerationaL researCh, industriaL engineering, Work study and reLated subjeCts

Action learning will make extensive use of all or any of the technical methods that have been so ingeniously developed by these subjects over the past forty years. And as time goes on, and they absorb the study of subjective judgement, so the approaches taken by the true thinkers in these fields will become closer to those of action learning.

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it must always be a question as to how far the exploration of the purely random, that is now the epistemological core of action learning (how best to explore ones residual ignorance in the light of what others may have to suggest), will be admitted as a legitimate annexe to the supposedly exact sciences, and their associated technologies.

All seems to turn upon one’s starting point; the manager, tormented by the need to get something done, is just as likely to admit inspired guesswork to their counsels as they are all manner of quantitative analysis, since the second may be useless without the first – like throwing a lifebelt on the strongest of nylon lines one hundred feet long to the drowning man one hundred and five feet away. The professional analyst, on the other hand, may feel that the exploration by subjective means – trial and error, conjecture and refutation, action learning – is unscientific, so that all seaside resorts should make their lifelines at least one hundred and five feet long. It remains to be seen.

Many years ago, the physicists accepted uncertainty as a fact of existence, and Werner Heisenberg is seen as one of the greatest among their number. Action learning is still largely ignored by the operational research workers and their associates, probably in the belief that, as the computer becomes ever faster and more capacious, it will absorb the margins of managerial uncertainties within its spreading range.

there is little point in arguing the matter, but i am sure they will one day need to follow the example of the physicists – if for very different reasons. The Book of Proverbs told us all 2,500 years ago that the future is uncertain:

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Boast not thyself of tomorrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth. (Chapter 27 v1)

Although action learning cannot pretend to foresee the future, it may, by helping anybody likely to encounter it understand more clearly who they think they are, also enable them more realistically to cope with it when it arrives.

simPLe Commonsense

one is frequently told that action learning is no more – and cannot possibly be any more – than the simplest common sense.

When the innocent non-expert sees that the questions of the traditionalist obscure from them the simplest of truths, and when, after they have been able to overcome their objections to some fresh approach, they succeed, against all their professional ridicule and sophisticated detraction in achieving the goal they are able conclusively to prove impossible, they must then face their second trial: of being told that all they did was simple commonsense.

It is enough to use popular illustrations; first, in the story of David and goliath; second, in the chronicles of Christopher Columbus. As to the first: the Israelites are trapped against the rock by the Philistines and are in danger, after forty days, of dying from thirst; they are pinned there by the armoured giant, their expertise. No bigger Israelite, with thicker armour and heavier spear, exists, and so there is no other way out for the experts. But David, who has never worn armour and never fought in a battle, sees that the problem is to ask a different question. It is no longer: ‘Where do we find a bigger man to

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conquer Goliath?’, but: ‘Granted that there is and can be no bigger man, how otherwise do we get rid of Goliath?’

even after he had seen this to be the proper question, David had to reject the smallest suit of armour in the camp, ordered by King Saul to be put upon him … and then, when Goliath lay dead, there must have been those Israelites who remarked: Well, what’s all the fuss about? Simply because this boy gets a pebble from the brook and hits Goliath between the eyes … why, any fool can think of things like that! What is it, after all, but simple commonsense.

And as to the second; Columbus hears the courtiers on about where he had got to. All he had to do was get in a boat – not even his own, mark you! … then he hoists the sail and waits to see what happens. He finds land – so he says – rests for a few days and then comes back. Why, any fool can do that! What on earth’s all the fuss about?

So Columbus suggests they should attempt to stand an egg on end; then try all evening but none succeeds, even although Columbus assures them it is possible. After most have admitted they cannot do what he says he knows how to, they demand that he demonstrates his elusive skill. He gives the egg a sharp tap, lightly crushing the end and it remains erect. there is a howl of execration, such as only experts are capable of howling – although not necessarily under provocation. Well, of course, if you do it like that! It stands to reason. What’s all the fuss? Any fool can think of that! Why, it’s only commonsense, after all! And so on and so forth, without limit. We’re all experts.

True commonsense, also known as wisdom, is rarely displayed by experts of any kind, particularly when explaining why their expertise prevents them from seeing the simplest of truths.

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If by ‘commonsense’ wisdom is implied, and action learning dismissed as mere commonsense, then we have reason to feel flattered, for this is as action learning should be seen. It sets out to explore what one does not know, and why one does not know it, for the wise person is more interested in what they cannot see of their troubles than in what they can.

there may be a lot more in action learning than can be dismissed as mere commonsense. on the other hand, both may be no more than the ability to ask unusual questions.

Why aCtion Learning differs

We conclude this section with the remark that action learning is less structured than these other approaches, which have long been associated with particular schools and identifiable philosophers.

Since it is less structured, like space and time themselves, it is available to all persons and may be all things to all people. Since it must follow the very wide variety of managerial practice that it is intended to improve, and since it has no syllabus of its own, there is little wonder that everybody who does not understand it must at once assert that they have been doing it for donkey’s years.

It makes little use of teachers, specialist and other professional sclerotics, and tries to encourage the managers themselves, those who have to take the decisions about their own tasks, to discover who best to help each other.

Whereas we may liken the traditional management schools, and the great supermarket of academic packages they have

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on offer, to a coterie of fashionable clubs served by world- renowned bartenders, each secretly dispensing their scholarly ambrosias, we can liken action learning to no more than the managers gallantly drinking each other’s health in cold water at the factory tap. At least, they are not paying through the nose for a regime of self-deception.

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