Insight, knowledge and confidence - three skills required to deliver results in business. In the second part of his series on Action Learning, Martin Brooks of Atos Consulting explains how the approach complements other forms of education and training.

The very shortest cycles are converted into 'motor skills' (walking, talking, writing, etc.) and slightly longer cycles become automatic behavioural responses (you smile, I smile back). For most people, living in an unchanging environment, these are 'simple' situations where the problem is obvious to them from the situation and the solution has become a well-rehearsed procedure. The key here is 'unchanging environment' - as will be obvious to anyone writing in a very different alphabet, walking on stilts or responding to facial expressions in another culture.

But in more complex situations the individual will have to explore a path through the three-step problem solving cycle to achieve a successful outcome. They will require insight to extract a meaningful problem statement from the situation, they will need knowledge of solutions to the problems so defined, and they will need confidence to execute the solution so that the situation changes in their favour. Insight, knowledge and confidence - three skills for a three-step process. 

Knowledge is the easy one. This is the point that Reg Revans - the founder of Action Learning - made so forcefully and that brought him into direct conflict with the educational establishment. Good students, with good memories can do very well at building encyclopedic knowledge and demonstrating this to great effect in examinations. But encyclopedias don't solve problems (though, as Revans might have said: "they make good money for encyclopedia salesmen".

Action Learning starts where formal education and training leaves off, by helping individuals to develop their insight into complex situations and giving them the confidence through practical work-situated experience to execute solutions. This is the key message of Action Learning. To borrow from the advertising strap-line of a well-known brewer: "it reaches parts of problem-solving that other learning methods cannot reach". 

In the next part of this series, I will look at the practicalities of Action Learning and consider the issues involved in establishing a successful programme. But before we get started on that, let's not forget its aims: to develop insight and confidence in tackling real-life situations. Combined with education and professional training, Action Learning equips people to attain that most elusive of life's secrets - delivering results.

Part three will follow shortly...