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No Action without Learning and No Learning Without Action.
This short video clip will give you an inside into Action Learning.
We hope you enjoy it.
Thanks very much David for joining me this afternoon to have a brief conversation
around Action Learning.
We now know that 75% of US companies use Action Learning for
their leadership development programme.
So, this is a huge statistic and we've both used Action Learning
over the last number years.
So I would like to maybe just for you to start of the discussion just talking about your
experience of Action Learning and what it means for you.
Thank you very much Pauline and I'm delighted to be here. I love talking
Action Learning because I think it is worth talking about and people worth knowing about.
The basic premise of it that should be
It can be no learning without action and no action without learning.
What Action Learning does, it reverses
what we used to do in the education system, you get a lecture
then you go and apply it. Or you read it a book and you go and apply it.
In action learning you start with what's really going on, a problem you are trying to solve
and you work then and try to solve that.
And you meet with people who are your peers you
Not people who are your bosses or anything.
An you explore your efforts to try and resolve it.
And they act as kind of friendly companions where they challenge you.
Ask you tough questions, ask you supporting questions, help you to think it out.
They don't give advice. And you meet with your group every
2 or 3 weeks or whatever it is. You go back and try to work away on your problem.
Come back and meet them again. The group then creates a safe environment to
explore what is a difficult maybe an
intermountable, apparently intermountable kind of problem.
Now it's not just kind of a support group as it may sound abit like that.
There is actually a rich theory behind it.
Where you have to investigate the problem thoroughly and know why is it there?
Why it did not work before?
What efforts to solve it before did not work? and Why?
And then there has to be that openness and trust in the group for the group
to help you explore it and you help other members at group.
And then basically there is personal learning.
That goes beyond a particular project so you learn, the individual learn
how to solve problems and so on.
Therefore, it is a terrific pedagogy for management education.
Managers don't want lectures, they want to be able to help.
How do I deal with the kind of problems I am dealing with in supportive environment.
That is in the core what I think Action Learning is all about.
It's really a wonderful, it is a radical pedagogy. And really rich and
used all over the world for management education.
But you're using here now! Yes we're using it, particularly we are using it
with our year two students, when they start off with their projects.
So action learning works well from that perspective.
But I suppose I find that we need to get the students
very used to the whole process before they start on that journey for their projects.
I think there are two little barriers to overcome.
One is when they come to school they expect to be taught
and they then kind of astonished and is put back to them to learn themselves.
And secondly, people often don't trust there own experience and say what do I know.
You have to build and get them that confidence and build up
that trust in the group.It's that early stuff you can think about. - Exactly, that takes a while
because when we mix them in their action learning group,
they with other people that they don't know.
Because that whole idea of questioning
that you mentioned
is really important. And when there is people in the group whom they don't really
know their background and projects
they can question them better
and challenge them without being judgmental. And you mentioned about being
judgmental. So, that's important as well.
But I suppose for me, I'd like to move action learning on
and move it in under a framework around research.
You see the traditional view around researcher is that we think of somebody in a white coat, in a lab.
And we have to be
outside the situation, be neutral, detached, be objective.
But now over the last 40-50 years we grown to understand that you can research
your own experience. You can be in the thick of something
and be asking rich questions and develop a scholarship of practice.
So Action Research or Action Learning and Action Research and all
those other approaches
are in fact developments of this notion of
scholarship of practice and the scholar practitioner.
Therefore, it's valid then to be able to write about yourself.
What you experienced and what you tried to do,
what worked and what didn't work. How you learned and so on.
So an action learning dissertation would have all those kinda things in it.
It would be like a personal narrative and sharing personal learning.
As well as an analysis of the team or the structure of the HR process or
whatever they are working on.
That is very helpful and I think it gets us thinking more about Action Learning and Action Learning as a research.
Because there is a whole development of action learning
masters and doctorates in universities all over the world.
That was really interesting David, thank you very much for that discussion around action learning
and around action learning as a research.
It is a pleasure, thank you.
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