Action Learning

Ross Woods, 05 (rev. Mar 08, Sep. 16)
With thanks to Amelia Mosquera-Pardo

 

Action learning is an approach for a team of people to learn together through planned experiences. It is a cyclical process, and each part of the cycle has two roles: task (what we have to do now) and learning (what we need to learn now).

 

What are the steps?

Each part of the cycle has two roles: both task (what we have to do now) and learning (what we need to learn now).

1. Start the group.
• Select a facilitator and team members,
• Agree on start and finish dates, and
• Agree on any performance indicators for outcomes (how will you know that you have been successful?)
• Plan how you will communicate.
2. Present your problem or challenge.
• Say why it is necessary.
• Identify your purpose if it's not already obvious. Answer the question, "Why are we doing this?"
• Identify the outcomes you expect if they're not already obvious. "What will we have at the end?"
  
3. Analyze what you can know now.
• Challenge the definition and assumptions. Redefine the problem and the key issues arising. Challenge current views and understandings.
• Get others to share their knowledge. Check the library and search the Internet.
• Identify the characteristics of your context and analyze them. Identify and analyze trends.
• You might compare different definitions or ask for different interpretations of the main factors.
4. Plan for action.
• Considering what you now know, what kind of action do you need to take? Make a plan of what you will do according to what you need to learn.
  
5. Implement the plan.
• Take action, have an experience. Test out the latest version in a real situation.
• If you have to change the plan to put it into practice, make notes of what adaptations you made and why. These changes are important for a several reasons:
• You might have improved the plan to make it work in the real world.
• You might be implementing something other than the plan.
• You might have identified factors that will require you to re-interpret your basic idea.
6. Evaluate.
• What worked? And what do you mean by "worked"?
• Look at the results and review how you went. Analyze critical incidents and mistakes.
• Reflect on what you can learn from the experience
7. Draw conclusions.
• Say what it is that you learnt.
• Define it and put it into a structured, conceptual form. You might want to compare it with what you already know.
  
8. Then go back to start.
• Plan the next time through, testing your new understanding with improved practice.

You can vary this basic process. One team can handle several projects at once, or two teams in two (or more) separate organizations can collaborate to work on one project. Alternatively, a team can split into different groups of people who each take the process in different directions. (They might not even agree, but the process can continue as long as the learning is valuable.)

 

Principles: What does it need to work?

1. A good problem. You need a significant problem that needs solving, with a defined scope. It can't be something that you can simply look up in a book. People need something that they can adopt as a challenge of their own, but that they share with others. The problem must suit the team's capabilities and interests, and be resolvable in the amount of time available.
2. A good team, (a "set"). The approach needs all team members to be committed to working together as a team, and each individual must take responsibility for his or her own role. The approach enables teams and organizations to learn, not just individuals. And it's not just that individuals learn together and from each others. The group has a dynamic and a culture, almost a consciousness of its own apart from the individuals in it.
3. Good recording. All team members must have some way of recording what they learn. It could be a blog, a journal, a diary of dot-points, emails, memo to self, or minutes of group discussions. If you don't, then the learning is of no value to the organization.
4. Good plans. You must set goals and plans.
5. A good facilitator. It must have an experienced, enthusiastic facilitator. A good facilitator:
• is outside the team (the "set")
• doesn't know the answers (or for teaching, lets students learn through their own discovery and doesn't just "tell them".)
• uses the learning styles of each individual team member, by assigning roles and tasks accordingly.
• lets people learn at their own pace where possible.
• manages group dynamics, both in meetings and outside.
• keeps the learning process on track and efficient.
6. Management support. The boss must be supportive, and so must the line managers. It needs resources, the main one of which is staff time. If you come up with a good result, you need some kind of management support so that it can be implemented. Otherwise, everybody's time and money is wasted, and staff may be seriously disillusioned with management.
   To be fair on management, other factors may enter into management decisions (industrial relations, new legislation, market trends, strategic directions, share values, etc.) but these should have been fed into the research itself for the finding to be workable. For this reason, many management teams do action learning.
7. A champion or sponsor. If you find something good, you want it to be implemented, and you want your people to be recognised for their achievements. You don't want to face a situation of Who cares?

 

What can you use it for?

Teaching

If you use action learning for Professional Development, you probably won't assess each team member but you will evaluate the effectiveness of the whole program. However, if you use it for teaching students, they can be assessed on what they learn. The answers may be known, so it's not original research, but it's new territory for the students; they need to go through the learning experience to understand it for themselves and the focus is more on the journey.

Management

It can be a way of managing people in the face of a major challenge, such as a large project or radical change. It creates a learning culture that brings people along through change, and views the challenge as a learning opportunity rather than a difficulty. In a project management case, the point might be to satisfactorily complete the project. (The trap in this is to ignore the development of a learning culture.)

It can be also be a way of managing people for continual improvement, which is especially important in highly competitive environments. Participants are usually managers or task teams, and learning is built into the organization's culture. This brings a risk of frustration; workers don't like continual change without good reason.

Research

In original research, nobody knows the answer and the researcher's focus might be to come up with an answer. In some kinds of research the answer is known, but it is not yet known how to implement it, or how it will look in this context.

Check your methology. Identify and apply any relevant standards of rigor and objectivity, that is, that it is real research. For example, you might need to test the findings in multiple contexts to establish any kind of generalizability. Make sure that you are generating real knowledge, not just sharing opinions and building consensus. There are limits to what you can achieve through collecting anecdotes, although a grounded theory approach (q.v.) is perhaps the best way to process them if anecdotes are your most abundant data source.

Some groups report negative learning. They start out thinking that they know a great deal about the topic, but at they end they realize it's more complex than they'd thought and report they now know rather little about it.

 

Hints

1. The first time through, you understand the problem in a particular way and have a particular set of questions. As you go through the cycle several times, your understanding of the problem improves, your questions evolve into better questions, and your solutions become more sophisticated. Consequently, you must do more than one cycle for it to be action learning.
2. The process is to some extent self-validating. Answers have already been tested in real experience by a group of people.
3. If it goes for a long time, the leader will need to have new ways of welcoming people and new ideas, and keeping the discussion fresh.

 

Links

www.scu.edu.au/schools/gcm/ar/arp/actlearn.html
www.educ.utas.edu.au/users/ilweb/action_learning.htm
See Reframing The Future for Facilitating Workbased Learning Groups