Coming About

For those of you in the Adult Learning program who were not able to join us on February 18, you missed a  great learning day — a fun travel adventure on Amtrak from Richmond to Crystal City, VA for the Academy of HRD pre-conference workshop on action learning with Dr. Michael Marquardt.  My guess is that each of the seven of us who were a part of the adventure will be blogging about it, so you should have a pretty complete picture of what went on before long. 

For me, it was a treat to bring a group of our students to meet with one of my former professors from George Washington University, and an eye-opener to see just how much Mike Marquardt has done in recent years to expand the concept of action learning in the U.S. and around the world. More than anyone since Reg Revans first introduced the action learning concept almost 60 years ago, Dr. Marquardt has spread the theory and practice of action learning to organizations and scholars far and wide so that it is now considered one of the primary methods for leadership development in organizations. Companies such as Novartis, Siemens, Boeing, Caterpillar, IBN, Nokia, Hong Kong Transit, General Electric, DuPont, Samsung, and many universities like ours, including American University and George Washington University, are using action learning to develop critical thinking, solve complex organizational problems, build powerful teams, and develop leadership competencies among learners.

Our capstone action learning course has been in place since Dr. Lex Dilworth created it in 1995 as an in-depth synthesis learning experience for our master’s degree students in lieu of a thesis requirement.  We have continued to evolve our course, and will be doing so even moreso now that I have had a chance to see how the emphasis on reflection has continued to grow and evolve, along with enchanced strategies for the role of the action learning coach.  We’ll be incorporating practice in the role of the coach in our classes this semester so that each of you in ADLT 636 has a better understanding of how to function in the role of the coach.

Dr. Marquardt delivered a powerful message in a well-designed, tightly packed four-hour learning experience.  We began with an overview of action learning, followed by a half-hour demonstration of the set experience in working with questions to explore the problem issues of a volunteer participant. Four more session volunteers joined the problem-owner and sat in a circle in the middle of the room (a fishbowl experience for the rest of us) as we observed action learning in action.  With Dr. Marquardt serving as the coach, we learned through his role modeling about the power of questions as the group engaged in action learning based on a real organizational problem.  Prior to beginning the questioning process, set members determined the leadership issues that each wanted to develop personally.  We listened and observed the process as a forceful coach required each participant to think deeply about what the group was accomplishing and the implications for each participant in the group demonstration.

After a break and a deep but quick dive into the theoretical heritage of action learning, all forty participants divided into groups of six to seven.  When we had organized ourselves in circles of chairs in different parts of the spacious room, we followed a structured script to guide us in questioning one of our members who shared a real organizational problem personal to the individual, one that he or she had not been able to solve.  Each circle of partipants then outlined our leadership goals and began the questioning process; after few minutes, the group’s coach purposefully stopped the questioning process so we could reflect on what we were doing and how it was going. 

How are we doing as a group thus far?  Give us one word to describe how you are feeling about the process? (okay, not okay, great?)

What are we (as a group) doing well?

What could we do better?

Do we have agreement on the problem — yes or no?  (To check this, each person in the set wrote down a description of the problem and shared them with the group.) Is there agreement?

Once we had agreement, we continued our questionning of the problem owner for another 20 to 25 minutes in our trial action learning experience. In my group, the problem was further clarified and refined at this point in time.  At the conclusion of our session,  our coach asked the problem owner,

What action are you going to take as a result of this session?

Were you helped by the group?  How?

Then, to the group as whole,

What did we do best as a group? 

How have you developed the leadership skill that you specifically set out to work on in the beginning of our session?

What have we learned that each of us can apply to our own organizations?

The experience was well crafted for individual as well as group learning, and I could easily see that we had been missing an emphasis on the strong coach as a leader of our action learning sets in our class experience so far this semester.  However, we can remedy right away! 

As those of us who participated in this experience continue to reflect on what we learned, there are several insights that I gained for making our class action learning experiences more in tune with the true power of this methodology to enhance individual as well as collective learning.  What changed for me in how I view action learning is the emphasis that Dr. Marquardt now places on developing each  member of the set as a leader: the focus on declaring our leadership development intentions, and the practice of carrying them out through questioning.

In our action learning capstone course, our client organizations are the true “owners” of our problems, and they are not members of our set or part of our reflections. They do not have to be for us to embrace the concepts of a strong coach with a determined agenda of keeping the group focused on what it is learning. The power of questions has newly revised meaning for me, as does the role of the coach. We will be building both of these ideas into our practice as we develop the leadership skills of Adult Learning students for solving complex organizational problems that have no one right answer.