THE PANDEMIC PURSUIT: A POST-GRADUATE CALC’S TIMELY TALE
As someone who loves to learn and to take action, you can imagine the immediate
curiosity I had when I first heard about Action Learning. My colleagues who have had
the chance to participate in Action Learning sessions spoke about it with much
enthusiasm, but when asked about the details, all of them said the same thing: “You
have to experience it to understand it.” Eventually, I did join one session. Little did I
know that a single session would cause a huge ripple effect in my life.
It was early 2021 and I was a struggling graduate student stuck without a thesis to
pursue to finally complete my master’s degree. I wanted to conduct exploratory
research that would not only contribute to the field of Organizational Psychology, but
also benefit organizational development practitioners in the Philippines. I took note
of possible topics to focus on and read through tons of literature to identify gaps that
my study could address. I kept hitting deadends. It seemed like all my topics of
interest were already charted territory.
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Learning from what goes well is the fourth element of seven, which I describe,
following the success of Jumbo Visma’s cycling team.
My previous blog was about the importance of learning from what went wrong. So
now the opposite. The question that immediately comes to mind is: How (or when)
does a team learn more from loss or more from gain and why?
It begins with a simple conversation between Action Learning coach Hou Shaohua and
his friend Zhao Shuping about Action Learning. After a serious discussion in April
2021 ,they realized that Action Learning may help Generation Z and young people born
after 1995 out of the confusion of life and work.
The book points out how human capacities for dialogue and connection are
powerful tools to generate more empathy and results in communities,
organizations and even in the country.
What is culture?
I recently reread Edgar Schein’s seminal book “Organizational Culture and
Leadership”1. Schein identifies culture as “a pattern of shared basic assumptions
learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal
integration, which has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to
be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relation
to those problems”.
Professional Action Learning Coach Christoph Maria Ravesloot from WIAL
Netherlands specializes in working for teams with trauma blocking the team
development. The first step is to make the safety in the team negotiable and get it to the
attention and care of the team. He wrote a blog on that theme from two action learning
perspectives: who reports unsafety in the team and who experiences it? Those two
perspectives define the intervening questions an action learning coach can ask the team.
When these invitations show up to write for the WIAL Newsletter my first sense is
that I really have nothing to tell anyone. So, why not use this opportunity for some
hard thinking to organize my ideas on how some of my practices may be showing
up to help me to see beneath the surface or as I will refer to it “see” the invisible in
different situations
Given the current and growing interest in team coaching among a wide
range of organizations, it will be increasingly important to highlight action
learning as a systemic team coaching approach, in addition to its value as
a group coaching and problem-solving methodology. While there are
many flavors of Action Learning, the single-problem approach developed
by Prof. Marquardt can be regarded as an effective approach to systemic
team coaching. It shares the enabling conditions that support effective
team coaching as well as Peter Hawkins’ five disciplines that are essential
to the success of a sustainable and value-creating team.
The human mind learns in different ways: reading, listening, seeing, debating the
subject… all this contributes to the acquisition of knowledge. And when we practice
something, then we perpetuate the learning cycle. In the corporate world, we call this
practice Action Learning, did you know?
![](https://wial.org/wp-content/uploads/new_york_public_library.jpg")
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and the ongoing crises and
challenges that New Yorkers were experiencing during and after the global pandemic,
our frontline library staff were feeling very unsafe, unsupported and confused about
policing in the United States in general, in our city, New York, and also in our 92
neighborhood libraries.
![](https://wial.org/wp-content/uploads/action_of_the_brave.jpg")
It begins with a simple conversation between action-learning coach Hou Shaohua and his friend Zhao Shuping that explains what action learning is all about.However, after a serious discussion in April 2021 ,they realise that action learning may help Generation Z,young people borning after 1995,out of the confusion of life and work as it does in other areas.