What does action learning look like today?

At our recent symposium, ‘Making a Difference in a Practice Field: Action Learning in a Changing World’, I was asked, as part of a panel, to say something about action learning as it is now in 2021. I was given just five minutes in which to do this – a considerable challenge. I began by saying that I remain an unabashed enthusiast for action learning; I firmly believe it can be a powerful and effective approach to learning and that it can underpin the transformation of practice. I am conscious of a huge range of problems being addressed through the use of action learning right now and real diversity of form and application. Action learning is being used for professional and personal development, organisational problem-solving and change, service and business improvement, innovation, culture change, social action, inter-agency working, policy learning and many other purposes.

If we look around at the practice of action learning now, we see that it is notable for its variety. Conventional (or classical) action learning persists, but there is also virtual action learning (and in the current climate we are all virtual action learners). There is also critical action learning, self-managed, business driven, networked, action-inquiry focused, positive and action–reflection centred to name just a few.

Action learning has shown a remarkable protean and adaptive capability. We considered the adaptive nature of action learning in a special issue of the journal this year. I am of the view that what has been termed ‘Revans’ classical principles’ are just that, principles; not a ‘how to do it’ prescriptive set of instructions or recipe or blueprint. Action learning has been described as context-sensitive, and it is informed and influenced by personal and professional preferences. In order to practice it well, I think we need to understand its core values – some of this is to do with the philosophy of action, of a collaborative mutual striving for useful and informed action in the world. The motivation to act and learn is both personal and political, it is about a critical understanding of the current state of things and an urge to create or develop something better for the future. Part of what is changed in that process is the doer – the action learner him or herself.

Because of its core values, those who advocate action learning (and understand those core values) have not shied away from tackling some serious social problems. A 2020 special issue of this journal focused on social action, and covered a range of pressing social issues from the alleviation of poverty to carbon management, to tackling food insecurity through exploring leadership challenges in the voluntary and community sector.

So, to come back to the question, what does action learning look like in 2021? There are positives but there are many issues to address. Conventional action learning approaches have been described as being too corporate, too managerial and too individually focused when the need is for greater collective leadership capacity and capability. It would be good to see more work on issues and concerns that go beyond the level of the individual problem-holder.

In 2019 John Edmonstone, Mike Pedler and Aileen Lawless wrote an interesting paper in our journal which pointed out that most of what we call leadership development ends up being, in practice, individual leader development and that action learning is not really being sufficiently deployed to try and address the wicked or intractable problems of managing and organising. If this is the case, why is not it? Why is there still so much apparent emphasis on ‘own job’ problems? Has action learning simply been co-opted into leader development? Or is, in fact, an oppositional view of individual versus organisational orientation unhelpful? These are questions worth asking, and as we know, questions lie at the root of action learning practice.

As far as this journal is concerned I should say we continue to welcome a range of contributions – research articles, polemical contributions and accounts of practice – not just research by action learning but also into the nature of action learning itself. As an additional incentive, we took the opportunity of the symposium to inaugurate two awards – one for best-refereed paper and one for the best account of practice. These will be annual awards and all papers published in the journal will, in the future, be eligible for consideration.

In this edition of the journal, we have four interesting papers which touch on some of the themes raised at our symposium. First, the value of P – programmed instruction – lies at the core of David Coghlan and Paul Coughlan’s paper ‘What happens to P? Lessons from Network Action Learning Research’. Our second paper, by Jane Robertson, ‘An emerging action learning framework to foster individual transformative learning during management development programmes’, examines the learning experiences of action learners. Our third paper, by Aileen Lawless and Katie Willocks, is ‘The wicked problem of employee wellbeing: creating safe space within a change laboratory.’ This paper explores the challenges of promoting and sustaining an employee wellbeing agenda using data drawn from a change laboratory used as an ‘adaptive action learning’ intervention. The final paper is by Asher Rospigliosi and is titled ‘Action learning for neighbourhood improvement – from practice to theory’. The aim of this paper is to offer an account of the philosophy or theory underpinning an action learning programme for social change.

My final point at the symposium was that there remains plenty of opportunities for action learning to make its contribution to creating sustainable and real change in organisations of all kinds. Now, as Revans said, what are you going to do about it?