Action Learning Reflections
Reflections on Action Learning following the international collaboration with Prof Reg Revans in 1995 and updated in 2018
by D.R. Phelan
In 1995 Dean was privileged to be invited to a gathering in London of 40 practitioners who had published organisational interventions using Action Learning. In the previous year Dean and his great friend and mentor Dr John Enderby had published the results of using action learning groups to improve customer service in Westpac, one of Australia’s oldest and largest Banks.
The international gathering of action learning practitioners was convened by the “Father” of Action Learning Prof Reg Revans who was nominated for a Nobel prize.
A brief background about Prof Reginald Revans:
Revans recalled one of his earliest influences was listening to a conversation his father had with a seaman who survived the sinking of the Titanic. As a young boy he heard that the “workers below” knew all about the problems of the ship including the risky speed it was maintaining to achieve a transatlantic record when it struck the iceberg. However the Captain never conversed directly with the seamen, so there was no opportunity to discuss their concerns. This insight of listening to the people doing the front line jobs remained with Revans throughout his life.
After obtaining a PhD in physics in the 1930s Revans worked in the Cavendish Laboratory under Lord Rutherford and Sir J J Thomson - two of five Nobel prize winners working in the laboratory at that time. Revans described how he learned about learning there. The rise of Hitler in Germany was increasing the pressure on this group to accelerate the development of atomic physics. They realised that to do this they needed to accelerate their own collective learning. One of the ways they tackled this was to have weekly gatherings where you could only speak about what you didn’t know or, in other words, where you were stuck.
Revans: “What I learnt was not so much about atomic physics as the need to ask silly questions when you have lost your way. When you are like the majority of us all and do not know what next to do, it is useless to pretend that you have the answers somewhere at hand – as do most people with letters after their names”.
At the core of Action learning is the willingness to recognise what we don’t know rather than rest on what we do. Searching questions and deep reflection then provide the source for the learning in a group of peers, whom Revans described as “comrades in adversity”.
Towards the end of WW2 Revans was engaged by the British National Coal Board (NCB) to develop an education plan to better train managers and so improve the production of coal for Britain. Revans went down into the mines and met with the pit managers. But rather than trying to become an expert teacher, he instead encouraged groups of pit managers to meet together in small groups and ask one another questions about what they saw, what was blocking their progress, what didn’t they know -which if an answer could be found, would significantly improve their production. Using this action learning technique he helped the managers to collectively find solutions which resulted in a major sustained increase in productivity within the NCB.
In this video Professor Reg Revans explains the philosophy, origins and applications of Action Learning - from archive footage in 1984 by Joanna Kozubska, International Foundation for Action Learning www.ifal.org.uk
Revans went on to improve Britain’s post war health system using action learning groups. He was appointed the first professor of industrial management at the University of Manchester. He then took the action learning principles and developed the inter-university action learning programme in Belgium. This was set up to improve the country’s poor economic performance – Belgium was at the bottom of the OECD rankings. Working with five universities and the country’s largest businesses, Revans’ collaborative approaches succeeded in raising Belgium’s industrial productivity growth rate above that of the USA, Germany and Japan. Action learning made remarkable impacts where traditional organisational and leadership measures had not succeeded. Revans’ was awarded with the nation’s top honour by the King of Belgium.
My summary of Key Points about Action Learning (A/L) that came out of the 1995 week long collaboration:
It is a universal approach for solving problems
It is a way of unlocking energy, creativity, and commitment.
A/L is more than learning by doing; it is learning to learn by doing.
A way of focussing on this is to ask yourself how you have changed or gained insight as a result of action taken.
An understanding of L = P + Q is helpful i.e. Learning is a function of Programmed knowledge plus flesh Questions.
Education should be about enriching the "P" by vigorously emphasising the "Q”.
Each of us needs to distinguish between Cleverness and Wisdom.
Are we genuinely asking ourselves fresh questions or expressing our beliefs with a question mark?
When there is a sense of not moving forward then it is a good time to stop and reflect.
Confusion and ambiguity is OK. The starting point of A/L is ignorance; it is getting in touch with the limits of one's experience and knowledge and framing questions about what you don't know.
Using Revans’ system alpha questions as a method of making sense of a problem area is helpful i.e. What should we be doing? What's preventing us from doing it? What can we do about it? Who knows? Who cares? Who can?
The starting point for learning is to hook onto experience.
Community is important - we benefit from others sharing their experience, and commenting from this experience on our thinking about our experience.
Action Learning Groups are likely to be more effective when the following Structural aspects are in place:
There is a clear purpose, understood by all, for coming together.
The task is challenging - a problem for which there is no known one “right” solution.
There is a brief to capture the learning i.e. "tell us what has to be done, what has been learned and how we can teach others".
There is a system for capturing the learning e.g. individual journals (what happened, what did you learn, what surprised you), or a team journal, looked after by the "Journal Bearer" who records what happened and why it happened.
Some action is taken after each meeting to test out thoughts. A/L involves movement forward not just thinking.
It is often better to do something, even though you are aware of flaws, than to do nothing because you don't have all the answers. Action brings the opportunity to catalyze something new. Value the person who has a go.
Discussions focus on real issues and group members’ actual experience - not case studies or role-plays.
Discussions result in fresh questions - "We are not here to discuss what we know, but to discuss what we don't know". “What question, (that no-one currently knows the answer to), if answered, would move us significantly forward?”
Meeting together is more about exploring doubt and ignorance than telling each other what we already know. It is about finding the edges of our knowledge.
Members have comparable competency levels - "learning from and with each other"
Groups of around 6 people are about right.
The organisational hierarchy really wants the problem solved, understands and sanctions the A/L process (i.e. allocates time and space to meet), and gives the group legitimacy i.e. 'Ye shall all know that this group is favoured by the King".
Some appropriate recognition and reward is seen to flow to success.
There is some process that enables people to articulate and pursue what they think is important and worthwhile doing, to the point of tension between that and what they think the organisation wants them to do.
At this point they will either wholeheartedly embrace the organisation's values and vision, strive to change it, or depart the organisation pushing to the point of action.
The following Psychological aspects seem to be helpful:
Individuals involved have some emotional investment in wanting the problem solved i.e. the issue is important to them.
A feeling of being "comrades in adversity" produces the right climate. We have a mutual interest in wanting this problem solved and learning from the experience
Members feel that the purpose for coming together will contribute in some way to "making the world a better place"
People share feelings as well as content around the issue e.g. "I feel ...............because I ................"
Members relate to each other in a facilitative ('you tell me') way rather than an authoritative (I tell you") way. The facilitative way is a lot harder than the authoritative way. It involves a lot more listening to each other.
There is trust and openness, a willingness to tell it how it really is. This is helped by members taking time to get to know each other personally as well as professionally. Members must be comfortable giving and receiving honest feedback.
The guts of A/L is bringing people together to talk with each other in an authentic way, leading to fresh questions being asked about their experience and knowledge to date.
The role of a facilitator is to ensure the group remains relevant, and to ensure there is just enough 'P" in the group to enable progress. Giving too much 'P" will create dependency and militate against fresh questions and hence learning and growth and perhaps a creative solution to the problem. The skill of a facilitator is to know if, what, when, and how to intervene.
Individual competencies are very important but organisational change requires systems change i.e. knowledge leading to action.
An understanding of the Action Learning cycle and learning styles is helpful.
Active listening and the ability to ask fresh questions are the two key skills that need to be present in the group. There needs to be some time early on spent on "getting to know you", groundrules formulation, and, if necessary, training in active listening and asking questions. Listening Leveling Validating.
Revans enjoyed quoting from the Bible: St Paul's advice to the people of Corinth (1Corinthians 3:18): 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.
Reg Revans passed away in 2003 at the age of 85.
Copyright Dean R Phelan 1995 and updated 2018
More can be read here Action Learning Principles
A case study illustrating the large scale application of action learning groups to uplift churches and a denomination can be read about in the book Kingdom Communities