Leadership development, wicked problems and action learning: provocations to a debate

ABSTRACT

The paper examines whether, if leadership is defined by the willingness to tackle wicked issues, and if action learning is employed for leadership development purposes, do the action learning participants on leadership development programmes address such wicked issues? It adopts a version of dialogical sense-making to consider this and describes an attempted literature review which led to a series of questions on academic motivations, puzzles and problems, when exactly a problem is wicked, the possible difference between private and public problems, leader development and leaderful practice. It failed to identify such evidence and it is postulated that this is due to the individual-focused nature of leader development.

KEYWORDS:

• Wicked problems
• leadership development
• action learning

View correction statement:

Correction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

John Edmonstone is Director of MTDS Consultancy, Ripon, UK. He is Honorary Senior Research Fellow, School of Social Science and Public Policy, Keele University, Keele, UK and Visiting Research Fellow, Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK. Among his recent books are Systems Leadership in Health and Social Care (Routledge, 2019) and Action Learning in Health, Social and Community Care: Principles, Practices and Resources (CRC Press, 2018).

Dr Aileen Lawless is Reader in Human Resource Development and Head of the Leadership, Education and Development Research Group, Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK.

Mike Pedler is Emeritus Professor, Henley Business School, University of Reading, Henley-on-Thames, UK, Visiting Research Fellow, Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK and Founding Editor of Action Learning: Research and Practice.

Notes

1. This terminology is chosen for two reasons. First, whilst the term ‘wicked’ arises in a different context to Revans’ distinction of problems from puzzles, it shares many common characteristics with his descriptions including degrees of uncertainty, multidimensionality and as requiring collaboration and learning in any action strategy. Secondly, Revans used several and various terms and phrases to describe his problems at different points in his work of which ‘intractable’, ‘unanswerable’ and ‘unformulatable’ are but three, whereas ‘wicked’ is both easier to use and more in current usage. However, it is important to acknowledge there are also differences between these usages, and between these and other related terms, which are explored in Pedler (2016).

2. Scopus claims to be ‘the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature: scientific journals, books and conference proceedings.’ https://www.elsevier.com/en-gb/solutions/scopus. Scopus offers ‘smart tools’ to track, analyse and visualise research and enable overviews of the selected published literature.

3. A reviewer's comment on the second draft of this paper provided a useful case study of action learning being used on a leadership development programme in a housing association to develop organisational leadership as well as individual leaders (Denyer and Turnbull James 2016). Though beyond our current reach, these possibilities suggest directions for further inquiry.