Action Learning: a Transformative Experience for Managers?

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Action learning: a transformative experience for managers?

Victoria J. Marsick, Teachers College, Columbia University

Abstract

This study describes Action Learning in the Management Institute, Lund, Sweden, and explores whether or not it is transformative for managers. Action Learning has a dramatic impact on some managers, particularly when personal and professional change are linked. Factors that seem key to change, and possibly to transformation, include broadening of perspectives and frames of reference, framing and reformulating problems through active experiments, reflection and critical reflection, and the powerful effect of teamwork.

Acton learning

Action Learning is best articulated by Revans[1] who found that he could train people more effectively by helping them learn from and with one another while tackling real-life problems, often by working in teams. He noted that people develop ‘questioning (Q) insight’ when facing complex problems in the future, while ‘programmed (P) knowledge’ was helpful only when tasks were repetitive and dependent on the past.

Action Learning is designed to foster ‘Q insight’. It is based on the old adage that people learn best from their experience. At its core is work in small project teams on actual problems in companies or business divisions other than those familiar to the participants. Each programme typically has from 15 - 20 participants and runs from 35-45 days spread out over 8 to 12 months. Experience alone is not sufficient for learning. Facilitators help the groups learn from both the task at hand and their own learning process. Managers also frequently bring into the group problems they are having back home. Project work is supplemented by seminars on management topics.

In MiL, project teams are not encouraged to simply reflect on the problem and ‘do reports’. For example, one project team found that headquarters (HQ) of a consumer co-operative was not giving full authority to their storekeepers to decentralise. HQ blamed the storekeepers who they said ‘have no courage’ and said ‘there is no limitation - only the law’ - to actions storekeepers could take. The group helped storekeepers do some experiments. They ordered a competitor’s beer and ‘asked this company to come with their horses and wagons, put them outside the store, got the storekeeper on the horse’, and took photographs for the company’s newsletter. The project team helped the company sort out and learn from the consequences.

The research

Action Learning purports to enable managers to develop their own theories of leadership and management. The researcher’s hypothesis is that Action Learning does not just ‘add’ knowledge and skills, but that it is, in some way, transformative. The researcher draws on Mezirow[2], who suggests that people organise learning around meaning perspectives, integrated psychological structures with dimensions of thought, will and feeling. People can learn within the same meaning scheme, learn new meaning schemes, or transform their meaning schemes. The researcher defines transformative as enabling managers to see themselves in a fundamentally different way than usual. For this to happen, managers must get outside their customary frames of reference and examine values and norms underlying their actions, a process often called critical reflection. For managers, transformation is both personal and social. While changes may be unique to the individual, they are social in that perceptions are shaped by organisational norms which these managers can maintain or change.

The question addressed is thus whether or not Action Learning achieves any transformation, and if so, in what ways and how. The study is qualitative, uses open-ended interviews and draws on grounded theory by keeping open to unanticipated themes. In this first phase of this exploratory study, the researcher interviewed twelve staff members and eight managers. In addition, sessions were observed in three different MiL programmes: the opening day of a Swedish MiL programme, the middle ‘project revision’ sessions of an internal programme, and the closing day of a shorter programme for senior executives.

Preliminary findings

It is too early to determine if these changes are transformative. Nonetheless, the programme had changed some managers both personally and professionally in a very deep way, as discussed here.

Personal and professional development

MiL had a key impact on personal development, which was linked with professional development. For example, one manager said ‘that this was probably the biggest milestone in my life. The, change during this process was quite intensive’. One facilitator explained, ‘MiL’s concept compared to other schools in Sweden is more on the personal development side …. ‘. A mid-programme personal development seminar is probably MiL’s most highly-rated feature. A shorter weekend is frequently held with spouses, demonstrating a belief that the manager’s professional life cannot be fully separated from personal life. Interviewees indicated the placement of this activity was critical to its success. If it had stood alone, it would have been seen primarily a sensitivity training experience. But in the middle of the programme, managers indicated they had built trust with one another that enabled them to gain deeper insights, take more risks, and subsequently build on these insights.

One’s own theory of management

Managers are expected to build their own theories. One of the most widely reported changes was a shift toward building and working through teams, as for example:

I had a tendency to be very direct. ... and I still am ... And, two years back, I implemented (decisions) without putting too much interest in whoever might be around and whoever might feel stepped aside … now I try to get it done by other people, and having them convinced that it is the right thing to do.

This manager created a non-hierarchical product planning team even though staff felt uncomfortable in working that way. Another manager ran the team-building exercises he learned with his own top team, and then subsequently with other levels of teams in a ‘kind of snowball effect that is affecting a big organisation’. A third manager joined company-wide project teams which he did not do before the programme.

Problem reformulation

Many management programmes focus primarily on problem analysis. MiL helps people to frame problems, and to examine issues that arise as implementation takes place. The project team typically reinterprets the problem. One problem, for example, was defined as a desire to ‘go from selling electricity to an energy service company’. The company believed their local level workers had to learn to interact differently with customers, but as the team interviewed staff at many levels, they redefined it as a higher level difficulty between the marketing and distribution divisions.

Frequently, the problem also has more to do with misperceptions and inappropriate actions of people, such as the person requesting the project, even though the problem was first defined as a technical problem. For example, in one project, the problem was defined as developing strategic plans in ‘a rather small company that was selling courses, technical (courses) in the engineering area’. The new CEO was changing the organisation from a small, centralised family-run business to a decentralised one. But the team realised they had to tell him ‘that you’re working too much with words, in writing papers to your group, organising everything. You have to be more a leader, taking positions, making your will more flesh and blood’.

Giving feedback to high-level project hosts is not always successful. In one case, the project host ‘was kind of sitting, preventing real communication between … the different other actors on the scene in this company’s product area’. The group talked with his superiors, although he warned them not to do so, but the superiors were unwilling to force the project host to do things differently. The facilitator concluded, ‘That was about two and a half years ago, and today the company is in big trouble, just because they didn’t dare to challenge or upset him’. He also noted that while a failure on the surface, the project generated significant learning for the group.

Reflection and critical reflection

Acton Learning is designed to help managers become more reflective on their experience, not just in the task-oriented, problem-solving way they might do to solve crises, but in a manner conducive to challenging one's own taken-for-granted viewpoints. One manager noted: ‘you have to face the future, you have to take the blinders off. And this seminar is one way to take the blinders off’. One way in which this was done was to enhance perspective by getting outside of the situation. One manager noted, ‘the problem is that when you are sitting in a company, you are so involved in the process, so it is very hard to get a helicopter view of the process by itself’. He pointed out that ordinary work situations are often like ‘working in a labyrinth, you have to be able to lift yourself up from time to time to get perspective’.

The unfamiliar environment of projects minimises automatic responses and encourages managers to challenge assumptions. Staff often take journeys, literally and figuratively, to make the environment even more unfamiliar. One took managers to the theatre and had them interview the actors. He then had them dramatise for the actors their understanding of what they heard, thus surprising both actors and managers. Many staff plan trips within Sweden, and sometimes to other countries, which are left somewhat open-ended, often creating anxiety for trainees used to being guided toward clear-cut tasks. This simulates the uncertainty of general management tasks. Trainees must plan the trip as they encounter new experiences, and then process what they have learned and relate their insights to management.

Some managers reported they could deal more effectively with uncertainty and challenge their own and others’ viewpoints. One manager noted: ‘Very often, more than before MiL, very often to question … myself, to put questions to myself ‘why?’ ‘Why am I working like that today? Why is my organisation … like this today? That is new for me’. However, another facilitator noted he wasn’t sure his project team, employees in an in-company programme at a fairly low level in a traditional hierarchy, could fully understand what enabled them to challenge their CEO. He asked them, ‘How come you dared to do that? …. They couldn’t think of the reasons why they could do that. They could perfectly well see that this is (pause), this is unbelievable, and we have been doing the unbelievable, but how comes?’ He paused dramatically as he told the story and said he asked them ‘would he (the CEO) ‘bite’ them? And I don’t think it was actually only symbolic, but it was also meant, in a way, quite literally. Bite!’, he said dramatically. Elsewhere in the interview, this facilitator indicated these employees had literally grown up in the company, with generations of their forefathers employed by the same firm. An in-company programme does not help people get outside their perspective in the same way as do projects fully outside the employee’s environment.

Maximising differences

The programme maximises differences in both the project groups and activities to help managers see issues from multiple frames of reference. As one facilitator put it, many managers ‘have a way of thinking and way of talking and way of discovering which is narrow. And ... they are not giving themselves enough width experiences. And they are not taking the chance to communicate with youth, with their kids, with their wife, or with persons that have another point, another language, another way to see’. Programme design confronts this problem. And yet, all managers did not agree about the reality or value of differences in their project groups. Perhaps the Swedish value around consensus interferes with comfort with conflict.

Many facilitators designed activities to maximise differences in perspective. For example, one Programme Director arranged for managers to visit a community with a culture and tradition very much different from the mainstream. He had them interview five different groups and then role play what they found for the community. The project facilitator also plays a key role in helping people identify and understand different points of view. For example, one facilitator talked of interviews early in the programme ‘at an insurance company in Stockholm talking with the top executive … ; I had a group of three persons. And after an hour of asking questions, I saw the group was just bewildered’. Instead of letting the interviewees leave when the group finished with their questions, the facilitator asked the interviewees to ‘just sit for half hour and listen to the group. Then I asked the group to tell each other what they thought of the kind of information they had gotten so far’. The interviewees were not allowed to interrupt. ‘So they realised that they were role playing or acting’. By unmasking the roles, the facilitator was able to open the conversation to seeing things from different points of view.

Conclusion

From this first phase of research, the author cannot generalise about the large-scale success of Action Learning as a means for transformation, particularly with such a small sample. Findings provide clues as to ‘best case’ examples of what Action Learning can achieve, contribute to understanding of the way in which adults learn from experience, and shed light on effective means for facilitating critical reflection in the workplace.

Action Learning does seem to have a dramatic impact on some managers, particularly when personal change is not separated from professional change, and when both are linked with the feasibility of change within the organisational culture. Managers and facilitators alike discussed the importance of organisational factors in doing things differently, for example, time required for fundamental changes, impediments of size and of bureaucracy, degree of support from the highest levels of the organisation, and the organisation’s values and culture. Factors that seem key to transformation include broadening of perspectives and frames of reference, framing and reformulating problems through active experiments, reflection and critical reflection, and the powerful effect of learning within a team.

Further references

Marsick, V. J. (ed.) (1987) Learning in the workplace. Beckenham, Croom-Helm

Marsick, V. J. (1988) Learning in the workplace: the case for reflectivity and critical reflectivity. In Adult Education Quarterly, in press.

[1] Revans, R. (1971) Developing effective managers. New York: Praeger Pub.; (1982) The origins and growth of action learning. Lund, Swe