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chapter 1 Action Learning: Its Origins and Nature

REG REVANS

Written for the first edition of Action Learning in Practice in 1983, this has been the first chapter in all subsequent editions.

In 1971 action learning circumnavigated the globe; in the summer of that year I visited New York (to discuss the publication of Developing Effective Managers, where it had appeared), Dallas (where Southern Methodist University was initiating a programme), Sydney (to lay the foundations of future programmes), Singapore (where discussions about starting a programme continue), Delhi (now the headquarters of a programme run by the Government of India) and Cairo (to follow up the Nile Project).

In this chapter I try to explain what action learning may be, but this is not easy when those who read my lines have not tried action learning themselves. There is nothing in this chapter about what teachers of management ought to do about getting started, for that is dealt with by others. My only suggestion to those running the management schools is, over and above what they are already teaching, they should set out to contrive the conditions in which managers may learn, with and from each other, how to manage better in the course of their daily tasks.

Action learning takes so long to describe, so much longer to find interesting, and so much longer still to get started because it is so simple. As soon as it is presented as a form of learning by doing the dismissiveness pours forth. ‘Not unlike learning by doing? … But that’s precisely what everybody here has been up to for donkeys’ years! Anybody in management education can tell you that lectures and bookwork alone are not sufficient for developing people who have to take decisions in the real world. We all know that practise alone makes perfect, and ever since our first programmes were set up we’ve made all our students, however senior, do a lot of case studies. Some we fit into practical projects, and others do job rotation in their own firms. What’s more, all our staff have been managers themselves, averaging over ten years of business experience, so they can get in on local problems to write up as our own cases. Quite often the initiative for this comes from the firms down on the industrial estate; one man has a quality problem, another is trying to cut his stock levels, and they ask us if we’d like to help both them and our own students. So, what with one thing and another going on here, we don’t see what this excitement is about. Action learning? Learning by doing? What’s so new? And who wants another book about it?

We may all agree that learning by doing is, in many forms, nothing very new. It is one of the primary forces of evolution, and has accompanied mankind since long before our ancestors came down from the trees. Even the most primitive creatures must have

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learnt from their own experience, by carrying on with what they found good for them and by refraining from what they found to be harmful. The earliest living things, without any memory worth mentioning, also learnt by doing; if it was fatal to their life style they died, and if it was agreeable they flourished. Their behaviour was self-regulatory and its outcomes either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. But, as evolution went forward and the brain developed, the results of more and more experiences were remembered and the organisms grew more and more discriminating: outcomes were no longer just black or white, life or death, go or no-go. They took on more subtle differences of interpretation, like ‘good’ or ‘bad’; ‘try again’ or ‘that’s enough for now’; ‘carry on by yourself’ or ‘ask someone to help you’. These experiences are enshrined in our proverbs: ‘The burned child dreads the fire’; ‘Once bitten, twice shy’; and (Proverbs ch. xiv, v. 6) expresses clearly the regenerative nature of learning, knowledge building upon knowledge in a true desire to learn: ‘A scorner seeketh wisdom and findeth it not: but knowledge is easy unto him that understandeth.’ Once the first point has been grasped the others readily follow: ‘Nothing succeeds like success’ is, perhaps, a more modern way of saying the same thing. Even the failure to learn has its aphorism: ‘There’s no fool like an old fool’ tells of those to whom experience means little, and who go on making the same mistakes at 70 that might have been excused at 17. With so much common testimony to learning by doing, therefore, what can be said for action learning that we find it necessary to keep on about it?

One reason is that it is a social process, whereby those who try it learn with and from each other. The burned child does not need to be told by its mother that it has been hurt, nor that the fire was the agent of pain. Action learning has a multiplying effect throughout the group or community of learners. But this effect has also long been known: ‘Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend’ (Proverbs ch. xxvii, v. 17) expresses well one aspect of action learning today. The best way to start on one’s really difficult problems is to go off and help somebody else with theirs. To be sure, the social strength of action learning (as I believe it to be) has a subtlety of its own: it is more than mutual growth or instruction, whereby each partner supplies the manifest deficiencies of the others with the knowledge or skill necessary to complete some collective mission. Lending a hand to the common cause may well be part of any action learning project – but it remains incidental, rather than central, to it. Nor is action learning the essence of the mutual improvement societies so morally essential to the Victorians and still, to some degree, the contract tacitly uniting all communities of scholars. We must applaud the free exchange of what is known between the experts who know it; the sophisticated approach of operational research, in which teams of scientists, engineers and mathematicians work together on the complexities of vast undertakings, such as international airports, new towns, atomic energy plants and so forth, demands that one professional shall learn with and from the other. Nevertheless, what they are doing, for all its intricate teamwork, may be far from action learning – and may even be flatly opposed to it. For in true action learning, it is not what a man already knows and tells that sharpens the countenance of his friend, but what he does not know and what his friend does not know either. It is recognized ignorance, not programmed knowledge, that is the key to action learning: men start to learn with and from each other only when they discover that no one knows the answer but all are obliged to find it.

In practice, we find small groups are more effective at learning than simple pairs, provided that every member can describe his need to learn to the others in his set. The explanation of our paradox – that the learning dynamic is the recognition of a common

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ignorance rather than of some collective superfluity of tradeable knowledge – is both simple and elusive. Action learning, as such, requires questions to be posed in conditions of ignorance, risk and confusion, when nobody knows what to do next; it is only marginally interested in finding the answers once those questions have been posed. For identifying the questions to ask is the task of the leader, or of the wise man; finding the answers to them is the business of the expert. It is a grave mistake to confuse these two roles, even if the same individual may, from time to time, occupy them both. But the true leader must always be more interested in what he cannot see in front of him, and this is the mark of the wise man; the expert’s job is to make the most of all that is to hand. To search out the meaning of the unseen is the role of action learning; to manipulate to advantage all that is discovered is the expression of programmed teaching. Action learning ensures that, before skills and other resources are brought to bear in conditions of ignorance, risk and confusion, some of the more fertile questions necessary to exploring those conditions have been identified: there is nothing so terrible in all human experience as a bad plan efficiently carried out, when immense technical resources are concentrated in solving the wrong problems. Hell has no senate more formidable than a conspiracy of shortsighted leaders and quickwitted experts. Action learning suggests that, only if a man, particularly the expert, can be persuaded to draw a map of his own ignorance, is he likely to develop his full potential. In an epoch of change, such as that in which the world now flounders, there is no handicap to exceed the misconception of past experience – particularly that on which present reputations are founded. The idolization of successes established in circumstances unlikely to recur may well guarantee one’s place in The Dictionary of National Biography, but it is of little help in the fugitive present; there are times when we do well to put our fame aside:

At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them and said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

(Matthew ch. xviii, v. 1)

In times such as now, it is as imperative to question the inheritance of the past as it is to speculate upon the uncertainties of the future. As indicated in the quotation above Jesus warns of the need to be converted, to become once more as little children, since there is little hope for those who cannot unclutter their memories of flattery and deceit. It is advice most worthy of attention among all peoples with such tremendous histories as the British, although its classical illustration is in the parable of David and Goliath (I Samuel ch. xvii); here the experts, the warriors of Israel, faced with an adversary unknown in their experience (an armoured giant), could do nothing. They could only imagine what they had been taught: a bigger and stronger Israelite was needed to crush Goliath. Since no such man existed they were facing disaster. But the little child, David, proved himself the greatest among them; he was a child who had no experience of armour and could see that the search for the bigger and stronger Israelite was misconceived, so that Goliath had to be dealt with in some other fashion. The way was therefore open for him to pose the key question: ‘Given that there is no man to throw at Goliath, how else do we kill him?’ It is a fair statement of action learning to paraphrase this question as: ‘Now all of us can

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see – even the experts, too – that our ideas simply do not work, what we need is to look for something that is quite new.’ No question was ever more important to the denizens of this Sceptred Isle; somebody should launch a campaign to change its patron saint to David from Saint George.

We must not give the impression that it is only traditionalists such as the soldiers who have trouble in changing their conceptions; on the contrary, many of the greatest inventions are the products of conflict, for then we are obliged to think to save our skins. Nor must we imagine that our (supposed) intellectual leaders will necessarily come up with the new ideas; for example, an extrapolation of the current unemployment figures recently made by some professor suggests that 90 per cent of the population will be out of work by the year 2000 – although he does not say how many of these will be professors. What can be done to deflect the course of history, so as to avert this terrible calamity with but one person out of ten in work? The academic seer, exactly like the Israelites, finds the answer in his own past experience: more education. At the very moment in which the country needs as many Davids as possible, to help the rest of us become again as little children and to enter the kingdoms of heaven of our choice, we are to be exposed still more mercilessly to the dialectic of scholars and the sophistry of books.

So far action learning has been presented merely as another interpretation of well- known historical events and biblical quotations. It is as old as humanity, illustrated in the Old Testament, justified in the New and implicit in classical philosophy. What, then, is original about it? Only, perhaps, its method. But, before we dismiss this as incidental, let us recall that every branch of achievement advances only as fast as its methods: without telescopes there could be no astronomy, without computers no space missions, without quarries and mines no walls, no houses, no tools and therefore not much else.

This relation of what can be done to the richness of the means of doing it is, of course, another statement of action learning itself, its specifically useful method is not only in making clear the need for more Davids, but in setting out to develop them. It may, in essence, be no more than learning by doing, but it is learning by posing fresh questions rather than copying what others have already shown to be useful – perhaps in conditions that are unlikely to recur. Most education, and practically all training, is concerned in passing on the secrets and the theories of yesterday; before anything can be taught, or before anybody can be instructed, a syllabus must be prepared out of what is already known and codifed. But if today is significantly different from yesterday, and tomorrow is likely to be very different from today, how shall we know what to teach? Does not the parable of David and Goliath justify this question? Action learning is not opposed to teaching the syllabus of yesterday, nor of last year, nor even of antiquity; action learning merely asks that, in addition to programmed instruction, the development of our new Davids will include the exploration of their own ignorance and the search for fresh questions leading out of it. Action learning is a method of building on the academic tradition, not (as some seem to fear) a simplistic challenge to that tradition. As another authority has it:

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.

(Matthew Ch v, v. 17)

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The search for innovation began at the nationalization of the British coal industry, when it emerged that much less was known about how to run a pit than the experts would admit to – particularly when they were overwhelmed by the political hurricane that had struck their ancient culture. The colliery managers themselves were soon able to recognize that their new problems were beyond their individual capabilities, and in those early days they had little confidence in the administrative hierarchies established as their new masters. Thus, the suggestion made to the colliery managers’ professional organization by its former president, Sir Andrew Bryan, that the managers themselves should work together, despite their self-confessed shortcomings, upon the here-and-now troubles of their own mines, was discussed with a cautious curiosity and accepted with a confident determination.

For three years a representative sample of 22 managers, drawn from pits all over England and Wales, worked together to identify and to treat their own problems; they were helped by a small team under the technical leadership of a seconded manager (who returned to run his own pit again) and by a dozen graduate mining trainees. Together with the staffs of the 22 pits themselves, the team worked through the symptoms of trouble indicated by the managers themselves, who met regularly at each other’s mines to review not only the evidence that had been collected, but also the use made of it to improve the underground performances of the systems to which that evidence referred. Learning by doing took on both a structure and a discipline: identifying the problem by following up the symptoms, obliging those who owned the emergent problem to explain to their colleagues how they imagined it to have arisen, inviting proposals about early action to deal with it, reporting back to those same colleagues the outcome of such proposals for evaluation, and reviewing progress and prospects. The managers met regularly in stable sets of four or five; they were constrained by the nature of their operations and by the discipline of observation not only to examine with their own underground officials what might be going on around them, but also to disclose to their learner–colleagues why they might have held the many misconceptions uncovered by these practical exercises.

One manager agreed to study in depth the system by which he maintained his underground machinery; he encouraged interested parties from other pits to share his results, not merely to instruct him on how to do a better job but because they had to understand more clearly some troubles of their own. In this way he is launching a community of self-development whose credentials are the ultimate values of the managers themselves. There are many forms, no doubt, of education and training that enable the well-informed to make a point or two for the benefit of others, but invariably it is not clear that the points so made are also for the benefit of the here-and-now conditions in which those others may work. Facts that are incontrovertible in discussion may be ambiguous in application, and those unskilled in application may, simply by instructing others, nevertheless deceive themselves. There can be no place for this in action learning: all statements, whether of fact or of belief, whether of observation or of policy, whether about one’s problems or about oneself, are all subject to the impartial responses of nature and to the sceptical judgements of relentless colleagues. Only those who have suffered the comradeship in adversity of an action learning set, each manager anxious to do something effective about something imperative, can appreciate the clarifying influences of compulsory self-revelation. This alone can help the individual to employ better his existing talents and internal resources, revealing why he says the things he says, does the things he does, and values the things he values. As one of the fellows in an early Belgian

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programme remarked at its final review: ‘An honest man, did you suggest? What is an honest man? And what ought I to do to become one?’ It is the participants themselves, each wrestling with his own conditions of ignorance, risk and confusion, who drag such questions from the newly-explored doubts of their macerated souls: they have no need for case leaders nor for programmed instruction (save on such technical details as they themselves can spot), since their growth is symbiotic, with and from each other, out of their own adversities, by their own resources and for their own rewards.

The reference to how action learning (as a specific social process) began in the collieries offers the chance of its further description. First, we notice that it was intended, not as an educational instrument, but as an approach to the resolution of management difficulties; the principal motivation to action learning was not a desire to teach anybody, nor even the hope that somebody else might learn: it was to do something about the tasks that the colliery managers were under contract to master. The argument was simple: the primary duty of the National Coal Board is to ensure that coal is drawn up the shafts of its pits at a reasonable price and in adequate amount; the training of colliery managers to help the Board fulfil this duty is quite incidental. Action learning maintains the proper priorities by suggesting that the managers continue with their contractual obligations of drawing coal, which they now do in such fashion that they succeed in doing it better tomorrow by reporting to their colleagues how well they are doing it today. The managerial task itself is both the syllabus and the lesson.

Secondly, the learning of the managers, manifested by the improvement in productivity, consists mainly in their new perceptions of what they are doing and in their changed interpretations of their past experiences; it is not any fresh programme of factual data, of which they were previously ignorant but which they now have at their command, that enables them to surge with supplementary vigour through the managerial jungles. Perhaps for the first time in their professional lives they are able to relate their managerial styles (how to select objectives, evaluate resources and appraise difficulties) to their own values, their own talents and their own infirmities. If, as will at times occur, any particular member of an action learning set recognizes that he has need of technical instruction or programmed knowledge, he may make such arrangements as he can to acquire it. But his quest need no longer be seen as cardinal to action learning, even if his further success in treating his problems must depend upon the accuracy of his newly-to-be-acquired techniques; action learning will soon make clear the value of his latest lessons, and may even encourage him to be more discriminating in any future choice of technical adviser.

Thirdly, we see from this distinction between the reinterpretation of what is already known on the one hand, and on the other, the acquisition of knowledge formerly unfamiliar, another characteristic of action learning: it is to attack problems (or opportunities) and not puzzles, between which there is a deep distinction, yet one frequently overlooked. The puzzle is an embarrassment to which a solution already exists, although it may be hard to find even for the most accomplished of experts. Common examples are the crossword puzzle, the end game at chess and the A-level examination question demanding a geometrical proof. Many technical troubles of industrial management are largely puzzles, such as how to speed work flow, measure costs, reduce stock levels, simplify delivery systems, optimize maintenance procedures and so forth; industrial engineering and operational research are systematic attacks upon manufacturing puzzles more often than not. The problem, on the other hand, has no existing solution, and even after it has been long and deliberately treated by different persons, all skilled and reasonable, it may still

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suggest to each of them some different course of subsequent action. This will vary from one to another, in accordance with the differences between their past experiences, their current values and their future hopes.

In the treatment of problems, therefore, as distinct from puzzles, the subjectivities of those who carry out that treatment are cardinal. All who treat the same puzzle should arrive at much the same conclusion, consonant with some observable outcome. But, in the treatment of a problem, none can be declared right or wrong; whether any particular upshot is acceptable or not, and to whom, depends (and must depend) upon the characteristics of the individual to whom that upshot is made known. While it may be a substantial puzzle to measure how many unemployed persons there will be in Britain next New Year’s Eve, those who set out to do the measurement should be in significant agreement. But the managerial (political, governmental) problem as to what, if anything, to do about it will scarcely be an object of agreement. Such proposals for action will be strongly coloured by all manner of personal beliefs and interests, ranging from bank balances to international sentiments, and from the estimate of oneself being out of work to the (possibly subconscious) appreciation of what a power of good this experience would do to those who write so eloquently about its reinvigorating effects.

However, action learning makes no claim to develop the skills for solving puzzles: this is the role of programmed instruction in the appropriate profession, trade or technology; the mission of our method is to clarify the problems that face managers, by helping them to identify, through the enticing distortions and deceitful recollections of their own past triumphs and rebuffs, what possible courses of action are open to them. It is when these are then surveyed in detail that the puzzle-solving expertise is called for. Our experience of many action learning programmes then suggests that this expertise is generally at hand in the very organization tormented by the problem to be resolved; if it is not, then there is almost invariably another organization represented in the action learning programme that will be most happy to supply it.

All may learn with and from each other, not just the participants alone but on a larger scale; the concept of a learning community, that emerged from the Inter-University Programme of Belgium, is perhaps the highest expression of the social implications of action learning that we can find. The ease with which such a community may be formed out of the organizations that choose to work together in an action learning programme is evidently a measure of the readiness with which they communicate both within and between themselves. It has long been known that high morale and good performance are marked by speedy and effective systems of communication, and it is these which enable their managements to learn. When tasks are carried out in settings that soon make clear the consequences of those tasks, then life becomes not only intelligible, but is in itself a learning process and an avenue to self-respect and confidence.

So far this chapter has concentrated on the advantages of working in the set of manager–colleagues, each of whom is endeavouring to understand and treat some problem allocated to him. It may be (as it was with the participants in the pioneering programme among the mining engineers) a series of troubles arising in his own command, so that, if the manager is to carry on with his own job, he is able to work only part time on his assignment; on the other hand, the manager (as in the first top-level exchange programme in Belgium) may be working full time in some other enterprise and upon a problem in some functional field remote from his own. There are many different options available to the designer of action learning programmes, but all must be characterized by two

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criteria: the set, in which real managers tackling real problems in real time are able freely to criticize, advise and support their fellows, helped as the participants feel appropriate by external specialists; and the field of action, wherein the real problem exists to be treated by other real persons in the same real time. In other words, action learning demands not only self-disclosure of personal perception and objective, but the translation of belief and opinion into practice; all that goes on in the set must have its counterpart in the field of action, and the progress of this counterpart activity is constantly reviewed within the set.

Thus, action learning not only makes explicit to the participant managers their own inner processes of decision, but makes them equally attentive to the means by which those processes effect changes in the world around them. After 20 years observing what the set members have to say to each other about success and failure in the field of action, it is possible to suggest that what might reasonably be called the ‘micropolitical’ skills needed by managers to judge what is relevant to building into a decision, on the one hand, and to secure what is essential to implementing that decision, on the other, can be significantly developed by action learning. In other words, those who participate in successful sets can also learn to penetrate the mists of field diagnosis more clearly and to bring a surer touch to their field achievements.

This is not the place to enter into a detailed discussion of what these micropolitical skills may be, but an understanding of them seems cardinal to any general theory of human action. For the present, it is sufficient to summarize the successful diagnosis in the three questions: What are we trying to do? What is stopping us from doing it? What might we be able to do about it? (and it is interesting to write down what David might have answered to them all); and to perceive effective therapy as a campaign of allies who answer to the specification: Who knows about this problem? Who cares about it? Who can do anything about it?’ It is the quality of the successful fellow to identify these allies and to recruit them throughout his project into an action team (known in Belgium as the structure d’accueil) to serve whoever may own the problem on which the fellow is to exercise and develop his managerial skills.

The literature of project design and negotiation must be consulted by those who wish to take action learning beyond the report writing stages that many see as its conclusion, for the complexities of taking action (which demand commitment and anxiety) go far beyond those of suggesting what action might be taken by others (which call only for intelligence and loquacity); all that must be observed now is that exercises that call only for (supposed) analysis of field problems, and are completed without the (supposed) analysis being put into action, are simply not action learning as it is defined in this chapter. This, of course, is no reason whatsoever for regarding them unfavourably; as with the case study, in which the participants neither collect the evidence from the field before discussing it nor, after their discussion, do anything to implement their conclusions, much may still be gained – in particular, dialectical skill in knocking the arguments of others to bits. For many of life’s occasions such skill may be a most useful asset. It is, all the same, a mistake to imagine that the facts of nature in all her raw relentlessness are quite as readily disposed of as are the arguments of one’s more vulnerable opponents in the classroom. It is not enough for managers to know what is good, nor even to convince other managers that they know what is good: they must also be able to do it in the real world. In this life it is generally a mistake to confuse talking about action with action itself.

The other contributions to this book will give some indication of the present condition of our subject; the central thesis – that responsible action is our greatest disciplinarian

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as well as our most sympathetic helper – will appear in every light, in every setting and in every culture. It will do so, not because action learning has any claim to greatness nor to originality, but because it is in the very nature of organic evolution. Nevertheless, so numerous are the possible variations upon the themes that run through this book that action learning may seem to be all things to all men. Certainly, I for one am often confused by reading of some development that is what I would have called pure action learning, but that is described by some other name, such as ‘activity learning’, or ‘action teaching’, or ‘participative management’, or ‘management action teamwork’, or any of a score of other titles; it is only when I refer to the date of publication of such accounts (usually in the past couple of years) that I can be assured that my writings of the 1940s are not unconscious plagiarism. I am also mystified, from time to time, to read confident reports of successful achievements in the field of management education that are listed as action learning, but later perusals still confirm my inability to detect in them what I have set forth in this chapter as characteristic (for me) of action learning. But of what importance is my failure? If we give our attention to the main process by which mankind has dragged itself up from the abyss to which some of its representatives seem so anxious to return, we must not be surprised if there is disagreement as to the nature of that process. For all that, however, I cannot put out of my mind two references, whenever the nature of action learning is compared with what, during my spell as President of the European Association of Management Training Centres, was for a generation regarded as management education. The first is from Plutarch’s Lives (Agesilaus p. 726):

Agesilaus being invited once to hear a man who admirably imitated the nightingale, he declined, saying he had heard the nightingale itself.

The origin of the second I can no longer recall, except as a threat by my mother when I was inclined to stray beyond the garden wall; it was that I might be stolen by the gipsies and then so disfigured that even she would be unable to recognize me were I offered back to her on sale. It is astonishing to discover, so late in life, how vividly I remember her words on reading yet one more article on what is new in action learning.

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