Renewing Managerial Practice: : A Review of ABC of Action Learning

Citation

Day, A. (1999), "Renewing Managerial Practice: : A Review of ABC of Action Learning", The Learning Organization, Vol. 6 No. 3, pp. 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1108/tlo.1999.6.3.1.1

For one who designs and facilitates action learning experiences, reviewing a book by Reg Revans on action learning is a little like taking the red pen to the Gospels. But, it′s probably not even close to how Mike Pedler felt when he pondered editorial changes prior to including ABC of Action Learning in his series, the Mike Pedler Library. No wonder the most he did was add on a few sections from earlier works and cut a few “whomsoevers” (which, by the way, was the wrong choice. Few people write as fluently as Revans, or understand as clearly where to put the whoms and the whats).

The bibliography refers over‐largely to works of Pedler and his cohorts. This is a great pity, as there is a larger and growing literature on action learning in practice, written both by practitioners and observers ‐ see, especially, Alan Mumford′s collection (Mumford, 1997).

Nonetheless, good for Pedler for ensuring that the ABC of Action Learning, first published in 1978, is back on the shelves. And, good for him for not cutting out the biting criticisms Revans makes about academics, the “obscurantist supernumeraties” who through books, case studies and simulations encourage managers to visit business schools where they are “paying through the nose for a regime of self‐deception”.

Ouch. Nothing personal, guys, it′s just that Revans thinks that people who preach action learning and make money from it are the scum‐covered bottom‐feeders of the business pond. At the top, as the most enlightened in the species, is the practising manager who does nothing more than search for resolutions to ill‐defined, ill‐structured problems and then reflects upon the experience with like‐minded and similarily‐engaged managers in a “set”. This all occurs, ideally, without external interference from the likes of designers and facilitators ‐‐ like me ‐‐ who are, to be sure, scuttling down at the bottom fighting Pedler et al. for scraps.

It′s all bracing stuff and is highly recommended for anyone interested in action learning. Not only is it a good primer on action learning, it′s a salutory lesson in plus µa change. Have we really been talking about values, culture and the learning organization for this long?

It reminded me both how disciplined and structured action learning is, and also why its uncompromising nature has made it so distasteful to so many for so long. It is, after all, something of a cult, with its own language, myths and heroes.

Don′t be misled by the foreward and preface, which somewhat incongruously ramble on about learning and society. There is no such implication in the ABC of Action Learning. Indeed, one suspects that Revans would cringe at such notions ‐‐ but, as he declined to collaborate with Pedler, we′ll never know.

What we do know is that Revans clearly states repeatedly that action learning is not about thinking, or philosophising, or pondering, but about “doing”. Anything else is but a distraction from the task at hand.

What is action learning?

In Section 1, “The characteristic assumptions of Action Learning”, Revans reiterates a fundamental principle ‐‐ most certainly the most basic of all ‐‐ that action learning “is cradled in the very task itself . . . the very doing of it supplies the learning generally offered far from the scenes of managerial activity”.

This often requires asking “insightful questions” about problems with no answers. These questions are posed by managers and leaders who overlay their understanding with their own values, experiences and associated subjective encumberances. Their delusions will only be revealed through “exploratory insight” ‐‐ which is where their colleasgues in the action learning “set” really help.

While Revans acknowledges that historical, “programme” (P) knowledge may be of some use in resolving the current problem, he eschews the current business school model which presupposes the P that is necessary and provides it relentlessly. He suggests, rather, that members of the set are entirely capable of tapping into requisite knowledge ‐‐ through books, tapes, friends, associates ‐‐ as and when required.

Centrality of the set

Throughout the book, Revans returns consistently to the role of the set. This is the group of “comrades in adversity”, created to help its members explore their own biased, subjective conclusions and turn their idle, useless reflections into action.

Members of the set “learn both to give to and to accept from other managers the criticism, advice and support needful to develop their own managerial powers, all in the course of identifying and treating their own personal tasks”.

Revans retains a characteristically uncompromising stance on the centrality of the set and their task:

It is particularly important that the set is kept mainly to the reporting, analysing and planning of real‐time action continually being taken by the participants in their operational backgrounds.

ÉSo‐called sets that meet to exchange feeling and opinions not immediately derived from a current undertaking to change some reality observable to others may be justified as “sensitivity training”, as an “encounter group” and as a dozen other modish rituals. Unless, however, its discussions are based on the verifiable evidence of deliberated achievement it may be little more than an efficient (and expensive) means of replacing one set of misconceptions for another. Since it is easy to run, it will be widely on offer.

Sound familiar? And this was written years before Senge and his ilk invited managers to share their “mental models” and then exchange them for something Revans would no doubt describe as another set of misconceptions. Or, as Baba Ram Dass once said: “Get out of my head with your dirty feet”.

Revans′ convictions of the primacy of the set should leave little doubt about the place of external experts and management teachers. “A long way away” just about sums it up ‐‐ unless they are members of the set with their own questions, to, in Revans′ words: “allow her or him to become a Q‐seeking participant to tackle a project quite independent of all pre‐disposing P knowledge”. If they are experts, then they should continue their work elsewhere until a member of the set calls upon them with a specific question.

Even the more benign role of “facilitator” won′t last long on one of Revans′ sets. This person serves only to “speed the integration of the set” and therefore must work to help the set achieve independence as soon as possible, for “it is vital that Action Learning takes advantage of our present disillusion with the academy to escape yet another round of dependence upon ambiguous facilitators”.

Learning involves doing

One of the greatest myths of management education, says Revans, is the distinction drawn between research, action, learning and communication.

“There can be no action without learning and no learning without action”, he states simply. He condenses the scientific method′s five stages ‐‐ observation, provisional hypothesis, trial, audit and review ‐‐ into three action learning steps of diagnosis, prescription and therapy. Managerial effectiveness, he argues, can only be assessed by how the manager applies himself or herself to each or all of those phases.

The application, not the rumination, is what it′s all about. “Because so much managerial action is necessarily an exchange of words . . . the distinctions between getting something done and talking about getting it done may be simply overlooked”. It′s not enough, Revans continues, “to specifiy such‐and‐such a way of resolving their difficulty; he or she must be able to effectuate it as part of their contractual mission”. Or, as my zen teacher would say: “just do it!”.

Knowing means doing

If Revans seems a little too glib and stern in the first chapter, readers can flip to Chapter 5, “The philosophy of Action Learning” for a more lengthy discourse on some of the above points. In the sub‐section titled “knowing means doing”, for example, he philosophises eloquently about the importance of letting managers get on with work themselves, instead of hiring an external, non‐involved consultant.

What does it matter if the answer to a problem isn′t textbook? It′s the manager′s job, Revans argues, to experiment, check the results, and do it again. This is the action of action learning. After all, he tells us “Managers are not employed to describe, to analyse or to recommend. They are engaged to act”.

If they want to engage in some “thinking” then the place for that is, actively, within the set “which has been deliberately contrived so that managerial reflection can play upon the action of yesterday and anticipate the action of tomorrow. It reminds its members that when tomorrow arrives, with its call for them to do something, that the very doing must itself remember not only yesterday′s reflection, but that reflection as it must be modified by the here‐and‐now dispositions of the moment making up the present ‐ dispositions that could have been but imperfectly imagined during yesterday′s set exchanges.

Hard as he may sometimes be on idle reflectors, Revans does display a deep empathy for the managerial task. In Chapter 3, he describes the characteristics of a manager ‐‐ idolisation of past experience, charismatic influence of others, the drive to act, and “the need for all to know their places” ‐‐ in rich detail, and then describes how a “four‐square‐programme” addresses these characteristics.

Top management support ‐‐ nice, but not necessary

It has long been received wisdom in action learning circles that top management must embrace the philosophy of action learning, or at the very least must actively support the projects being undertaken. Indeed, at Britain′s only business school devoted exclusively to action learning, the International Management Centres, participating managers must obtain a written undertaking from senior management that such support will be forthcoming.

Shame on us. While top management support makes life easier, it′s not always available and therefore life must go on without it. Peters and Smith said as much in a recent paper (1996) questioning this assumption. Revans was clear about it 20 years ago.

“If . . . it is the attitude of the boss that counts most in the end, then, if we cannot change that attitude after the programme has begun, let us at least ask ourselves how much we can detect of it before we set out”. He then goes on to list 12 potential states of top management participation, from <it>carte blanche confidence through lack of interest to defensive rationalisation. In doing so, he attempts to reveal the nature of the situation, leaving it up to us to decide how to respond.

This fits well with his theme running through the book that managers are paid to act responsibly and therefore should get on with the job, rather than whine, opine or procrastinate.

What it is not

Here, in Chapter 6, “What Action Learning is not”, anyone not practising action learning will want to put down the book and weep. Action learning is not job rotation, which usually comes without responsibility, it is not project work, which often results in recommendations and no action, nor is it case study analysis led by “star faculty”, business games, simulations or the like.

Action learning is not about group dynamics and other “task‐free exercises”, nor is it consultancy or other “expert missions”. Those involved in operational research, industrial engineering, work study and other similar analytical distractions aren′t doing action learning. Nor is action learning “simple common sense”, unless we′re referring to the collective wisdom of active workers and managers.

By the way, it′s refreshing to see an actual physicist (Revans′ original discipline) referring to quantum physics, rather than the usual new‐age psychobabblists′ “gosh, aren′t we all just wonderfully connected!”). Revans actually understands this stuff, so we can take more seriously his assertion that Heinsenberg′s uncertainty principle should be understood by managers just as it was understood years ago by physicists.

How to start and continue action learning

Lots of detail abounds in two chapters ‐‐ “Essential logistics” (misprinted as “Essential Rights” in the table of contents ‐‐ a tempting idea) and “Experiences of launching Action Learning”. Revans may be fairly accused of being overly prescriptive in the “Essential logistics” section, but nevertheless we have to accept that all has been drawn from experience (just not ours).

I′ve often been troubled by the somewhat oxymoronic nature of a “body of knowledge” about action learning. Reassuringly, for me, Revans seems to feel the same. He says it′s because of the “professional interceptors” that “action learning has been obliged to distil a literature from its own hard‐won experience”. But, he cautions us that “the day action learning is said to be enshrined within its own encyclopaedia will be the day to read out its obituary”. Quite so.

In the meantime, readers will find the examples contained in these two chapters interesting, and it will give them starting points for getting their own action learning programmes up and running.

Less inspiring is the final chapter, “The enterprise as a learning system”, which Pedler explains he added in from an earlier, 1969, work. Other than forecast the emergence of the current preoccupation with the “learning organisation”, the chapter is of little interest. Revans, 30 years ago, seems to be falling folly to a spot of rumination himself; systems within systems and all the jazz.

Return as quickly as possible to the body of the work. It will tell you all you need to know about action learning, how to do it, and how not to. It will do so intelligently and in a writing style that often reaches the lyrical. As Revans says, in exucriatingly intimate detail:

After reports about all the facts have reached their desks, after all the advice has been offered, all the opinions listened to, after everything has been listed for the final plan and the most talkative of the experts is on their way back to the airport deciding in advance what they are going to tell the next client, the manager still remains alone with the responsibilities: he or she is the person who has to get something done. Specialists have uttered their warnings, research consultants have thrown doubt upon the accuracy of the data, local academics have drawn attention to the precedent of The Taff Vale judgment, the public relations officer sees certain weaknesses if the affair has to be reported on the international network, and the economic adviser, while voicing no views about the cash flow, still shakes his head, knits his brow and purses his lips about the cash flow situation. But the manager alone has to do something about it all.

And here′s how he or she should go about it: The ABC of Action Learning, Lemos and Crane, London, 1998. 152 pages ISBN 1‐898001‐42‐1.