 Gathering dust on a bookshelf at home is a thick hard-back book with a faded brown binding: 'The Origins and Growth of Action Learning', by Reg Revans. But take note, action learning is making a comeback and could become a key learning tool in developing management.
Martin Brooks of Atos Consulting explains:
Part one: History of Action Learning
Written in the early '80s, 'The Origins and Growth of Action Learning' is a collection of many of Revans' essays and research papers that tell the story of his experience as a management educationalist and of his invention - 'action learning'. Written in 'the grand style', Revans' book might have become one of the classic management textbooks but instead, it is now out of print, forgotten and rarely referenced by modern writers.
Revans, an Olympic long-jumper in the 1920s, was intensely competitive. He fought a lifelong battle against the educational establishment in the UK to win respect for his practitioner-led approach to learning. While he chose to engage in a literary war through the pages of his books, his opponents in academia adopted a more powerful strategy - they simply ignored him. Their theories of reflection and experiential learning made no reference to his published work.
The irony of Revans life is that his immense energy, intellectual talents, industrial experience at the highest level and prodigious literary output - all aimed at nourishing the growth of his big idea, in fact deprived action learning of the 'oxygen of publicity'. And so it is that today, 60 years after action learning was conceived, and after numerous successful implementations in public and private sector organisations around the world, the approach is still sometimes seen as 'new' and 'experimental'.
Today's management development professional will have heard of action learning and may well have participated in an action learning 'set' as part of a Masters Degree course. They will know about the theory of experiential learning and reflective practice and how these ideas are central to developing relevant and lasting learning in the workplace. But the practice of action learning and the theory of reflective practice remain separated by the Chinese-wall that was built in Revans lifetime. This wall is at last starting to be dismantled and the materials on either side are being reused by theorists and practitioners as a foundation that will carry action learning into the mainstream of management development.
Part two will follow shortly...
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