Foundations of Innovation-Intensive Action Learning

ACTION LEARNING: A THEORY OF CAPABILITY BUILDING

Action Learning began to used as a methodology for management development development after the Second World War. It was distinctive from other ‘soft technologies’ for developing the competence of managers because it came from a different source.

Much of the innovative thinking in management development from the 1960s onwards flowed from humanistic psychology. The originator of Action Learning, Reg Revans, had taken a different route> He had spent long hours investigating management decision-making in dank coal mines and many nights studying the challenges of running hospitals out-of-hours. His’ insights flowed from being close to real people making consequential decisions in situations that were, almost invariably, imperfect.

Revans realised that management was, quintessentially, a craft that could only be learnt by doing. The challenge was to find practical ways to help managers to move towards mastery. This meant enabling them to find and implement efficient and effective ways to achieve desired outputs in midst of the messiness, uncertainties, multiple priorities, resource shortages and complexity of organisational realities intermixed with the wider lives of those who were the key actors in problem-solving.

In Revans’ opinion the then current paradigm for developing managers to become masters of their craft was broken. He wrote in1984 that: “The (Second World) war had made me very mistrustful of experts, brimming over with ready-made ideas about what they had done superbly in the past… Industry… wanted managers who would think afresh about the troubles lying ahead… (that would require) an educational approach in which the syllabus is the here-and-now troubles that must be dealt with… (and) the learning was to come from the posing of questions made relevant through the advice and criticism of other managers able to understand one individual’s confusion as they, too, were going through many of the same uncertainties”.

Revans’ view was that creative destruction was needed that provided “freedom from teachers, from any form of printed syllabus or regulations, from any fixed institution, or even from any literature, save the most occasional".

Although Revans had held academic posts, he was cautious, often scathing, about the value that could be added to managers by institutions of higher education writing: “those who do not accept responsibility for their conduct, such as professors who live, not by taking action, but by talking about others taking action, are unlikely to learn a great deal from what they do. Hence it is that the universities have become the marmoreal institutions of our age: their staffs are not (yet) menaced by reality” (1984, p.13 author’s italics).

For Revans, learning was inextricably connected with performance. He believed that it was possible to train the mind so that it would become more able to be surefooted in the hinterland between problems, opportunities and effective action.

AND TODAY?

When Revans was developing his insights, the World was a very different place. Universities lacked the creative dynamism of assertive Business Schools. Professors prized scholarly work but did little or no consultancy. Managers were often intellectually isolated. Accessible knowledge assets were scarce, expensive and dated. Improvement methodologies, such as lean processes, were under-developed or absent. The pace of change was significant but nothing like that of modern industries which can undergo revolutions almost annually. Technical change, a core driver of innovation, was slower and permitted fewer disruptive changes. The need for efficiency and effectiveness dominated priorities rather than agility or effective change management.

We are no longer in the take-off phase of Action Learning. It is a mature product that has evolved many sub-types (Brook et al. 2012). Moreover, it has been successful so that, as Cho & Egan, observed: “Action learning is among the most widely used interventions for leadership and organization development… The popularity of action learning has been driven by related, tangible outcomes and relevance to real organizational issues”

It can be argued that exploiting modern knowledge assets is a required attribute of a competent manager, providing that mature and timely judgements are made as to what ideas, tools or techniques are to be adopted. In short, modern managers need both collective and personal ‘absorptive capacity’, that can be defined as: “the ability to locate new ideas and to incorporate them into an organization’s processes… widely seen as a major contributor to organizational performance” (Easterby-Smith et al. 2008, p.483).

OPPORTUNITIES NOT ONLY PROBLEMS

Today, managers who ‘just’ solve problems can be said to be “doing half the job”. Finding, defining and choosing to operate in opportunity spaces is as important. This is why a new strand of Action Learning is so important – we call it it novation-Intensive Action Learning.