“In two hours, I accomplished more through the action learning process than I would have achieved in six months.”
Doug Park // Director, Microsoft Xbox Support
Author Archive
Peter Thailand
CALC since 2013 and started up WIAL Thailand !
“Building teams has become a key goal and achievement of Action Learning at Siemens. Action Learning has helped the company maximize the entrepreneurial spirit and enhance team player qualities such as cooperation and free exchange of ideas. The quality of teams has resulted in more innovative ways of finding new solutions for customer requirements.
Peter Pribilla // Corporate Human Resources, Siemens
“Real progress in business is achieved only by corporations and individuals trying out creative ideas and making them work, by pooling talent, and most of all, by learning while doing. Action Learning is the vehicle for achieving this.
Gerald van Schaik // Former Chairman of Executive Board, Heineken
Presentation by: Gail Finger and Patricia Larsen
Review of the two-year Action Learning project
Leading with Questions: How Leaders Find the Right Solutions by Knowing What to Ask (New Edition)
By Dr. Michael Marquardt
In this thoroughly updated new edition of his business classic Leading with Questions, internationally acclaimed management consultant Michael Marquardt shows how you can learn to ask the powerful questions that will generate short-term results and long-term learning and success. Throughout the book, he demonstrates how effective leaders use questions to encourage participation and teamwork, foster outside-the-box thinking, empower others, build relationships with customers, solve problems, and much more. Based on interviews with successful leaders who “lead with questions,” from such organizations as DuPont, Alcoa, Novartis, and Cargill. Marquardt reveals how to determine which questions will lead to solutions in today’s complicated business world. Step-by-step, he walks you through the process of learning the art of questioning and shows how to use the techniques of active listening and follow-up, presenting guidelines for using questions in myriad situations with individuals, teams, and organizations.
Presentation by: Arthur M. Freedman, MBA, Ph.D., MALC
In your experience, what conditions, situations, or relationships result in a failure of Action Learning?
Leading Organizational Change Using Action Learning
By Arthur M. Freedman PhD and H. Skipton Leonard PhD
Organizations in all sectors and in all industries are and will continue to be confronted by the challenge of multiple changes in their external environments. For example, creation of disruptive technologies, fluctuating economies, increasing or decreasing governmental regulations, demographic shifts, human and natural disasters, expanding globalism, and aggressive competition. As the environmental landscape changes unpredictably along many different dimensions, organizations must recognize and adapt to the discontinuous threats and opportunities that these changes create. This calls for organizations themselves to change in ways that their unique histories have not prepared them. Thus, organizations today need effective tools to enable them to quickly create solutions for complex, systemic, important, unprecedented problems.
Great Solutions Through Action Learning: Success Every Time
By H. Skipton Leonard PhD and Arthur M. Freedman PhD
This book fills a conspicuous gap in the Action Learning literature – providing specific principles, strategies, and recommendations to coaches for developing the questions that are the foundation of effective Action Learning. Many other books provide the theory of Action Learning as well as recommendations for setting up Action Learning projects. In addition to this information, this volume provides the specific information that the coach needs to ensure the success of the Action Learning project. While the principles, strategies, and recommendations discussed in this book are based upon the methods developed with others at the World Institute for Action Learning, the authors provide many new practice principles and models which will be appreciated by experienced Action Learning coaches who want to be considered expert Action Learning coaches and who want to ensure the success of their Action Learning practice.
When working with a client on a business problem through action learning, I ask the sponsor or problem owner to answer a number of questions, in writing, before the first session starts. I have created a one page form with the following questions:
Describe the problem … describing context, history and some basic data, key people and departments involved.
Why is solving this important ? What has been tried in the past, and was this partly successful or not successful at all ?
What do you expect of the team, in terms of recommendations only, or recommendations and actual implementation ?
What would be your definition of ‘success’ of the team addressing this challenge ?
What is your experience with asking the sponsor to describe his/her problem ahead of the first meeting ? Do you use any other questions ?
During the Single Problem Action Learning session, the coach reminds all team members a few times that they have to think about the actions they will commit to at the end of the session, in preparation for the follow up session. When the coach asks for the actions at the end of the session, several people have listed the same or nearly identical action. How would you react as coach ?
The team in a single problem action learning set asks questions to the sponsor (the boss), and in addition to just answering the question, the sponsor talks about the context, history, options, ideas for solutions … and this even when the question asked was a closed one … Even if the team members become aware of this, they struggle – in particular in a high power distance (respect for authority) – to do anything about it. How would you as a coach intervene ?