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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ABC_of_Action_LearningChaptert_2_Essential_Logistics.pdf
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Essential Logistics
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the study of real life problems or opportunities by real managers in real time admits to a wide range of programme designs. For example, those actively searching the fields in which fresh questions need to be posed (and, if possible, resolved) may do so either full- or part-time; they may pursue their enquires alone or in small teams; they may remain in their own employing organization or they can be seconded elsewhere; they may even desert their own field of professional competence to find themselves working from first principles in some functional labyrinth they have entered for the first time in their lives – and, by doing so, they may also oblige the experts by whom they are now surrounded to think afresh about their unconscious assumption.
it is thus for the senior managements willing to try action learning as a medium of improvement to make up their minds about the logistical forms their programmes are to take, and this chapter suggests some of the details to which their attention must be given.
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1. exChange oPtions
there are four principal exchange options for designing action learning programmes:
(i) A familiar problem in a familiar setting. A participant may examine afresh some aspect of their existing job, an option very popular with the chief executives of small enterprises forming sets to exchange ideas about their own strategic problems and, thereby, to bring the effects of each other’s judgement and experience directly into the course of their own decisions.
there may be little in the way of physical transfer to some other work place, although, as their set exchanges (often starting as conversations over a series of dinner parties to which all play host in turn) and opens up new thoughts, they will consult their diaries to make visits to each other’s territories, even if each must remain, as before the programme was set up, almost wholly preoccupied with running their own business.
When a group in the same company gets engaged on its own problems at the points where these arise, we see what has become known as the Quality circle – advocated in this country during the 1950s but unacceptable to the then- prevailing economic opinion that the future lay with the bigger enterprises run by those qualified in management science. (It is most important that new academic inbreedings, howsoever smooth and sophisticated, do not just replace the old, and that new manipulations of the familiar task in its familiar setting are not begun independently of action learning at the top. Q-circles must always express the unique policies of the firm; bought in bulk as packages they may do harm.)
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(ii) A familiar problem in a unfamiliar setting. A personnel officer from one enterprise may be invited to join those in some other concern trying to simplify (or otherwise improve) their wages structure. the visitor is not engaged as an expert to tell the host management how to set about the innovation they have in mind; but is there both to watch how colleagues interpret their own professional roles, especially as these bear upon other departments of the receiving organization, and, as time goes on, to test the validity of their own creative ideas, the ability to make them clear to colleague professionals and their powers of adaptation while temporarily freed from the habitual constraints of their own job back home.
The transferred personnel officer will become as much a true learner of their own potential as they may see themself at the outset as a qualified adviser. Only those experts who recognize a need to learn – and recognize it so clearly that they are anxious to accept the change of the exchange – should be encouraged to move. those professionals who imagine they are being commissioned to go somewhere else in order to instruct those less able than themselves should not be allowed to menace what action learning has trouble enough already to get started.
(iii) An unfamiliar problem in a familiar setting. A production engineer, much concerned with the flow of work through his own factories, may join others in trying to rationalize the traditional wages structure now believed to be hindering the productive potential of the system by which he is also employed.
Perhaps the most recent and striking illustration of this option is to be found in the action learning set established among the five directors of a large woodworking concern,
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over a hundred years old, but lately threatened with closure by its uncompetitive factory costs. Each director worked part-time on a major problem of some other department, thereby starting the examination and treatment of unfamiliar problems in familiar settings – since all stayed within their own firm – from the boardroom to the shop floor, finishing with 72 foremen/supervisors working in 12 sets each of six. Every member of every set looked into the operational troubles of some section of the works about which, to begin with, they knew nothing whatsoever. This collective effort, by reducing factory costs by 30 per cent and by enabling the main flow line to be reduced by two-thirds its previous length, preserved a thousand jobs under notice only twelve months before.
(iv) An unfamiliar problem in an unfamiliar setting. the regional manager of a large bank spends nine months full time in an oil company to ask what the assumptions are that underly its distribution policies, and the nature of the information on which those policies are implemented. the aim is to discover what manner of marketing system should be developed to make the best use of the cargoes arriving regularly at the company’s refiner, so that the sales department can control what products the crude will supply to a greater extent than in the past, when, by long tradition, the distributors had to get rid of what the refinery engineers believed they could most economically turn out from the resources at their disposal.
As complementary to this exchange, the chief logistics and purchasing officer of the oil refinery also spends as much time within the bank to ask a similar question: does the bank need a marketing strategy? If so, how will those now running the bank determine what that strategy ought to be, and how will they restructure an organization, now more than one hundred
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years old, that has managed to get along without arousing the need for any clear definition of its place in the market?
2. individuaLs and teams
Action learning programmes may equally well be formed for small teams to study real problems as for individual managers to be the fellows (participants). In the Hospitals Internal Communications Project, small teams of a doctor, a nurse and an administrator formed both the clients, for the ten participating institutions, and (with different persons) also the teams charged with the field studies (fellows, participants). in practice, they also involved many hundreds of the other staff in the hospitals as helpers, both in diagnosing the afflictions of the hospitals and in doing something to put things right. thus, with the variations of full-time and part- time engagement, and of individual and team field work, all with four main options in the allocation of projects, there is scope enough for fitting action learning to the resources of any organization with a mind to try it.
3. sPonsors, CLients, CLient grouPs and PartiCiPants (feLLoWs)
(i) Sponsors. every project offered by a participating enterprise, believing itself to be faced with sufficient trouble (or opportunity) to wish to join an action learning programme, must nominate a sponsor to the programme organizers who is ready to act on behalf of the participating enterprise should need arise.
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The difficulties of persuading a score of firms to act together as a consortium will be unnecessarily multiplied if their representatives cannot be summoned quickly to deal with the unexpected. For example, when a number of firms in the first Belgian programme were so impressed with the effects it was having upon their own management, they suggested their participants ought to have the chance of visiting America in order to present their findings to the experts from its leading business schools and to the strategic planners of such companies as iBM, exxon, At & t, ge of America, and a dozen others in correspondence with the Belgian economy.
there is an immense advantage in forming close contacts between those in command of the separate participating concerns, not only for the speedy resolution of the unexpected, but also as a learning exercise for these very powerful businessmen themselves. the same may also be said for the teams in charge at the ten London Hospitals. these generally consisted of the chairman of the hospital medical committee, the matron (chief nursing officer) and the hospital secretary or house governor. Such senior persons found many novel things to say to each other as the results of the studies set into motion across the floors of their hospitals were reported back to them – and, what is more, acted upon.
(ii) Clients. every participating organization must also nominate a client for every project; that person is usually that senior member of its staff more concerned than any other with ensuring that something is done about the project, both in clearing the way for its effective diagnosis and in preparing the management to give its recommendations a fair trial.
Clients from different enterprises also have the unrivalled opportunity to learn with and from each other by occasionally
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meeting, either by themselves or with their fellows, to exchange interpretations of what seems to be going on. Since it is very common for the original project sent in by a prospective participant firm to be misconceived, and so to call for fundamental restructuring once the participant has started on their field diagnosis, it is essential to regard the first nomination of the client as provisional.
(iii) Client groups. As a course of action starts to build up following the field studies and their incorporation into a strategic plan, the client and the participant – as well as the sponsor – will soon recognize the need for allies to implement that plan. this calls for the recruitment of a client group, about which there is a further reference below.
(iv) Participants. the choice of suitable participants must, of course, lie with the sponsors, and much that is impossible here to specify will guide their choices, such as the personal qualities of prospective participants and the nature of the projects offered within the programme. it is useful to stress at this point that action learning programmes are not intended to communicate technical expertise in accounting, computer programming, quantitative methods, and the like. Applicants who build their cases upon their need or desire to seek technical qualifications should therefore have the true purpose of the programme explained to them, and ought not to be preferred to those who are more anxious to understand their own responses to conditions of risk, ignorance and confusion.
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4. ProbLems, not PuzzLes
We repeat that action learning is not a satisfactory approach to resolving puzzles, or difficulties to which a solution clearly exists even if it is hard to find, such as the best way of reducing the time or cost of some specific operation (already examined to ensure quite unequivocally that this can be done without starting all manner of other unexpected objections, and is something that can be tackled by some work study engineer or cost accountant or similar specialist).
Action learning is to make useful progress on the treatment of problems/opportunities, where no solution can possibly exist already because different managers, all honest, experienced and wise, will advocate different courses of action in accordance with their different value systems, their different past experiences and their different hopes for the future.
5. the Learning equation
the contrast between puzzles and problems, on the one hand, and between participants who are seeking techniques and those seeking to understand their own responses to uncertainty, on the other, emphasizes the dual nature of true learning.
There is first the need to amass programmed knowledge (technical expertise, functional specialism) or the fruits of authoritarian instruction, here designated as P, and duly described at length in the syllabuses of teaching institutions of all kinds, from universities to training centres for the mentally handicapped.
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But then, especially today, there is the need to master the taking of decisions in circumstances of change so violent as to be confusing. this calls for an ability to pose useful questions when there can be no certainty as to what next might happen. this questioning insight we designate as Q; it is something quite different from P, and is exercised by leaders, while P is deployed by experts.
in the design of action learning programmes it is absolutely essential to make clear the distinction between P and Q, even if, in most of life’s troubles, the manager is called on to exercise some of each. (if we denote learning by L, then L = P + Q : our equation)
6. the essentiaL CharaCter of the set
Apart from working regularly upon their projects, under whatever variations of the exchange options set out above, each participant is to become a member regularly devoted to enkindle the meetings of the same set (group) of fellows, between four and six in number, at which each gives to the others an account of their progress and their setbacks.
the set is the cutting edge of the action learning programme, and nothing must be allowed to stand in the way of the participants regular appearances at it. in practice, the participants themselves see that nothing ever does; (in an early programme run by geC in this country, out of a total of 732 participant attendances, 729 were kept).
the detailed planning of the set meetings should be left to the participants, who will soon learn when what they have to say is likely to arouse the creative interest of their colleagues.
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these will ensure that no member of their set is allowed to coast along on the presentations of the others. All, with inexorable certitude, will be called upon to disclose much that they had for many years successfully hidden from themselves, such as what (if anything) they really believe in – for, should they not know this, they cannot decide what risks to take.
And this is the first need of the managerial policy maker – or why they say the things they say and do the things they do. At the end of the first major programme in Belgium, the question voted by all participants as the most important they had learned to ask themselves after nine months of self-disclosure to their colleagues was simply:
What is an honest man, and what need I do to become one?
(This can also be most profitably posed by several organizers of action learning programmes who acquaintance i have recently made.)
7. induCtion exerCises
there is generally a need, before launching participants upon their projects, to help them with a brief induction course. the objectives include:
(i) An explanation of what action learning is supposed to be. this is most readily framed around the learning equation set forth above, and stressing that it is to develop the capacity to ask fresh questions rather than to communicate technical knowledge.
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Once it is clear that whatever technical knowledge any particular participant may need to get ahead with their project will be supplied on a personal level, the members of the set will devote themselves to their projects as a first resolve, and, as a second, offer to coach any other participant in the programme (and, by the end of the first month, any member of the directing staff) in the field of their own professional expertise.
Participants engaged on the analysis of real and difficult projects do not take long to discover the immense benefit to themselves of helping another with the technical codes that they believe themselves to have need of. it is helpful to bring this later development of the programme to the attention of the participants at the outset, since the prospect of such mutual support will help to consolidate the learning community.
(ii) To make the participants in some degree curious about the impact they make on other persons. Since they are about to start in a most unfamiliar fashion each upon their own substantial enquiry, they will soon discover that the facts and opinions they collect in the field, and that therefore determine their progress, depend, more than upon anything else, upon their personal abilities to stimulate those among whom they conduct their enquiries.
(iii) To equip them with a rudimentary set of ideas useful in their coming set discussions. they will badly need a verbal currency for evaluating their inspirations and for bartering among themselves the advice and criticism constantly surging within their imaginations. Whereas we are not short of a terminology when we are exchanging programmed knowledge, P, we cannot yet be sure of the more economical concepts useful
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for the mutual definition of Q. However this may be, the following six have been used since the early days of action learning, and seem to stand up well:
decision learning system information risk value
this brief induction course ought to last but a few hectic days. Then, after a short period of field investigation the participants should be reassembled for a half day, so that they can let each other, and the course organizers, know of any gaps in their programmed knowledge they already sense may hamper the smooth running of their new enquiries.
8. Programme Phases
the phases of the typical action learning programme are described under four headings:-
i) Diagnosis.
ii) Six sequential phases.
iii) intermediate invigoration.
iv) therapeutic.
(i) DiAgnosis
In 7 (i), above it is suggested that action learning should be explained as something different from traditional instruction. in reality, this difference can be made clear only by the practice
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of action learning, and it is helpful throughout any action learning programme to refer back to what has so far been done, and to anticipate what is still to come. nevertheless, it is useful from the outset to encourage the participants to think of what they are doing as a sequence of several phases.
The first (after the preparatory initiatives of sponsors, the nomination of clients, the specification of projects and the choice of participants) is that of diagnosis. Participants must bring themselves, as they identify their first major job (of tracing the course of action they hope will lead to mastering the problem/opportunity put to them), constantly to see their mission in terms of three diagnostic questions:
1. ‘What are we (the firm I am now helping) really trying to do?’
2. ‘What is stopping us from doing it?’
3. ‘What can we do about it?’
it is from these three primary interrogations that the diagnosis of the project will be accomplished, taking the form of a strategic plan. The elaboration of the three questions will take on every conceivable form, from the opening conversations between the participant and their client, through the formation of a provisional strategy based on further conversations and references to more formal records, to the detailed field testing of the provisional strategy among those far from the places of the original conversations.
The avenues likely to be explored by an intelligent outsider cannot possibly be foreseen at the outset, nor can a participant anticipate the unexpected turns the sequence of investigation
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may take as they report on progress to the other participants in the set.
(ii) six sequentiAL phAses
We may summarize the elaboration of an action plan based on these diagnostic questions as the preparation for taking such action. this, it is hoped, will be achieved during the remaining period of the programme, which we call the therapeutic (or action) phase.
in practice, to split the period over which the participant occupies themself with treating the troubles of some other enterprise into two phases in this way is somewhat simplistic. Diagnosis (finding what to do) and therapy (getting it done) rarely fit end to end; they are intermixed to such an extent that a further therapeutic step often demands unravelling much of the previous diagnosis, and making a fresh start. All the same, the sequential notion is important; one ought never to try doing anything important without first finding out what it is being done for.
And if this cautionary approach is looked at in more detail, we discover that the two phases are each themselves composed of three sub-phases. it is helpful that the participants should discuss these from time to time. in addition to the six ideas forming the vocabulary of debate, these six sequential phases will help them to keep their bearings during the exploration of the previously unknown.
the six sequential phases are:
a) analysis. from the diagnostic questionings of the previous section, conducted among a wide range of persons
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influential in the affairs of the receiving enterprise, and helped by conversation with the client and discussions within the set, each participant provisionally identifies the key avenues of enquiry to follow.
b) development. The participant sets out to find the paper answers to as many of these key questions as they can; this quite specific search will take them to sources of information and opinion whose reliability and political alignment they are soon able to judge, and whose responses may cause them to modify their earlier goals.
c) procurement As the participant begins to see opening up before them a line of enquiry not only suggested in the analysis phase but confirmed in the development, they will start to make provision for exploring it still further, generally by asking whether they can marshal the resources needed to move along it. these may include not only finance or other tangible assets, but also the support of persons throughout the enterprise not involved in the project from the outset.
in some projects it may also be necessary for the participant to win over some who see this mission as a threat to their own interests.
d) construction or assembly. the proposed resources must now be marshalled, so that the individual collaborators and their assets are usefully brought into contact with each other.
At this phase it is likely that there will be a mass return to the first phase, followed by a hurried retracing of steps, since the commitment of resources cuts more deeply that
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the communication of opinion, and a few fresh questions are likely to be uncovered. At this phase the role of the client becomes of greatest importance, and every effort that the participant has made in the earlier phases to gain their confidence will be abundantly rewarded.
e) application. the newly assembled resources in their great variety are set moving in accordance with the original strategy, as this is seen to lie at the end of the provisional avenue of enquiry (suitably modified by the experiences of later phases).
At this phase the participant will be able to identify their true allies, and also the extent of the support from the client and sponsor. it is generally during this application phase (not seldom crowded into the final days of a project whose earlier phases have been allowed to overrun) that fresh key questions are uncovered – and therefore projects defined for future action learning programmes.
f) review. As the application phase begins to acquire its own momentum and the field work of the project is taken over by the local management, the participant will need to identify to what extent their efforts, and those of the local management, have achieved what, from the analysis phase above, they were intended to achieve, and what is to be learned by tracing the major surprises.
it may well be unsophisticated to suggest that, if any action learning programme is to run for six months and to pass through these six identifiable (even if overlapping) phases, every participant should spend about one month in each phase.
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the real world, full of uncertainty, misrepresentation and doubt, cannot so readily be partitioned. nevertheless, unsophisticated or not, the sequence is useful in guiding the approach of participants, forcing upon them the planning of their time, and thus giving their whole set a common calendar inside which they may be able to help each other (as the cycle of the seasons may help the farmer) to keep their bearings in what might otherwise degenerate into an unending political dogfight staged in some unmapped industrial wilderness.
The identification of the six sub-phases also helps to discriminate between diagnosis and therapy, since the first three are diagnostic and the latter three therapeutic. the diagnostic phases call only for intellectual skills, providing that the participant is polite, and sufficiently sensitive to the impression they are making upon others not to test too severely the patience of those from whom they are endeavouring to extract suggestions, or merely factual data. the second three phases present an ordeal of a more painful kind, since the participant now seeks from others, not simply an account of what may be going on or an interpretation of its causes and its consequences, but commitment and support. the extent to which they secure them will depend upon many things, but mostly, in the early days, upon their personal skills, by which to convince others to a level at which they agree to act in addition to accepting the intellectual argument that action might be quite a good thing to take – provided it is somebody else who takes it.
this is the crucial difference between action learning and case studies, authoritarian instruction and all traditional teaching – one has to know not only what is good, but how to do it. experience of several hundred action learning programmes shows that most busy managers follow particular new lines of
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action, not so much because they are convinced by the logic behind them, but because of their personal belief in the other person advocating to them the innovation. (it is, of course, true, as the history of action learning itself reveals, that all fundamental innovation, by whomsoever it is first advocated, is at once ridiculed and then opposed, and all participants must develop the ability to incorporate such rejection into their plans.)
thus, a well-designed action learning programme must engender within each participant the self-confidence that enables them to convince others that their advice is worth following simply because it is the person themself who offers it. So it is that each participant must find out, in the course of the programme, a lot of things about themself that they did not know when they joined it. (What is an honest man (or woman), and what need I do to become one?)
(iii) intermeDiAte invigorAtion
the diagnostic phase may prove exhausting, and for strange reasons. Busy managers, many of whom as a matter of settled policy rush off at once to implement the first idea to cross their minds, may find their new role as a participant, first committed to a long search for diagnostic material, more than frustrating.
The perpetual checks and revisions they encounter in discussion with their clients and in argument within their sets are, for some, almost debilitating. Many of them learn to be satisfied, as they tread this arduous course towards the elaboration of their strategy, with little demonstrations of their personal or professional skills made by helping out their field acquaintances, or the local management, with the
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solution of minor puzzles, or the offering of advice once they are sure that advice will be accepted.
But, over and above these minor restorations of confidence, it is a good thing to offer all the participants a chance, half- way down the programme, to exhibit their findings to an intelligent audience ready and able to respond. in the Belgian programme the fellows were taken to America to argue their findings and suggestions with interested businessmen and celebrated academics (not at that historic period yet suspected of actually harming the economy). This is an experience not easy to replicate in these more austere times, but sets can now present an account of what they have been up to in the first three sub-phases of their endeavours to other sets in the same, or other programmes.
in a large concern, committed to action learning for some time ahead, where one set may overlap another in time, that which is half-way through can present its provisional strategy at the end of its diagnostic phase both upstream and down. it can present to the next lot starting out as part of its induction course, trying to identify what, with the benefit of three sub- stages of hindsight, they might have done differently. And it can present to the lot just finishing, in the hope of constructive suggestions about the snags their proposals for action are likely to encounter. Just as participants learn with and from other participants, so may sets (each of which generates a distinctive character of its own) learn with and from other sets just as, in the early 1970s, the fellows from Belgium set off the nile Project of egypt and the egyptian managers came to Brussels to see what the Belgians were doing.
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(iv) therApeutiC
After their intermediate invigoration, the participants must brace themselves to set out on the most difficult part of the programme: getting firm action to be taken upon what has so far largely been an exercise in intellectual argument and dialectical compromise.
It will be no demanding task to make clear to them the change in the course of their fortunes and responsibilities. But there is one idea that should have been put into their minds long before, and should now be seen as coming into its own: the client group. this is the little band of allies each participant should have been recruiting, under the patronage of their client, as they struggled through the diagnostic phase. the participant should soon be aware that, in this life, very little can be done without allies. their role is to persuade up to a dozen of those with whom they have been working for the past few months to form, with the client as leader and themself as convenor and adviser, a team to get implemented the strategy that they have so far helped to draw up.
three classes of membership are called for:
1. Who knows about (understands) the problem being tackled?
2. Who cares (genuinely wants something done) about the problem?
3. Who can (has enough power to) get something useful done about it?
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it is now, more than ever, the duty of the participant to observe what goes on in the micro-political arena, where they are acting on behalf of their client. The participant’s personal task is to encourage the client group to follow the strategy through under the approval of the client themself, even if regular meetings of the client group cannot be held. in this uncertain temptation of Providence the participant will do well to bear in mind the findings of Thomas Joh, set forth in Chapter 4 The Influences of Top Management and they will also discover the rewards for their earlier patience in making a personal friend of their client. As one Belgian fellow put it:
Always nurse your client; you have no other source of power.
9. suPPorting assembLies
the need to hold occasional assemblies of sponsors or of clients as any action learning programme unfolds will soon make itself apparent. Save for those organized to get the programme itself started, the participants themselves are the best judges to propose when their seniors might get together and what they might wish to discuss or to suggest.
Sponsors and clients are often known to seek attendance at a set meeting, and for many different reasons, but it should be for the participants to settle on what terms these visitors are admitted. Set meetings are also effective in converting the most determined opponents of action learning, the personnel and training staffs to its harmless cause. But it must be remembered that interruptions by outsiders to the deep and very personal involvement of the participants in each others’ projects will be violently resented, and it is not unknown
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for behavioural scientists to be physically thrown out of the meeting room when incautious enough to offer professional advice to managers with real tasks to accomplish.
it is in getting participants to report to meetings of others – sponsors, clients, academics, training officers, and so forth – rather than in having them submit to being observed at work, that the set procedures will be better understood. So profound may be the impact of self-disclosure upon the individual that any intervention by strangers, even if claiming to be expert in psychology, may be harmful.
the suggestion that the participants themselves, going through these experiences, should keep careful records of what they see happening to them, chronicles of such standards as to conform with those of post-graduate dissertations, has much to commend it. one university is already awarding its masters’ degrees in this field, and the regular assemblies of the participants who have followed its programmes (run in the closest cooperation with industry and commerce) will eventually have a deep impact upon the development of action learning as such and upon the future of higher education as an investment of human resources.
10. ePiLogue
this chapter on logistics, although the longest in our compendium, is necessarily the most incomplete and sketchy. It makes no effort to discriminate between the logistics of the various exchange options, between full-time and part-time participation, between projects carried out by teams and those by individuals. it says nothing about the role of the supporting staffs, nor about the resolution of conflict, the supplementary
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studies of participants, the maintenance of a capacity to learn from daily action long after the fellow has left the official programme, and many other important considerations.
Most of these omissions are quite deliberate; they have been made to diminish the threat to action learning by the professional consultant and the management professor, motivated by personal gain and out to make all in action learning as dependent as possible upon the paid expert. This booklet has been deliberately kept brief, in order that intelligent sponsors, supported by committed clients and motivated fellows, will be able to keep themselves clear of the packaged material now flooding the action learning market. We need all to learn with and from our comrades in adversity – especially top managements. there is no salvation by crackerjacks.
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