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Scenario: Door

As an action learning coach, how would you handle the following situation: At the start of the session a participant gets up and closes a door.
As an action learning coach, how would you handle the following situation: The teams members are locked to the table. They are adhering to the two grounds rules but not making use of any other resources.
As an action learning coach, how would you handle the following situation: At the start of a check in you promise the team member that had just started to ask a question that you will return to them for the first question when you are done.

Scenario: Explaining

As an action learning coach, how would you handle the following situation: A participant explains what they believe the problem is rather than just reading what they have written.
As an action learning coach, how would you handle the following situation: The team has come to the realization that the problem presented has many aspects to it and they only have a limited amount of time to work on it.
As an action learning coach, how would you handle the following situation: A participant asks everyone a question. Gets an answer from everyone and one of the participants ask the person who initially asked the question – “what are your thoughts?”
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”. Read More
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. Read More
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. Read More
Over the summer I took a month off for vacation. I managed to distance myself from my work quite well. But ignoring sports successes is impossible for me. In 2021, it was TeamNL at the Olympic Games, but in 2022 it was the performance of the Jumbo Visma team during the Tour de France that caught my eye. Jumbo Visma is a Dutch cycling team with cyclists from several countries. After several years of being close to success, where things often went wrong at the last minute, they were very successful that summer of 2022. I went to watch, listen and read. What an Action Learning Team that is! A nice touch is that the environment has already determined that the team consists of eight riders, the ideal number for a team, at least that is step 1. Read More
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 Read More
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. Read More

“As part of our executive development program, we utilized “Action Learning” to help our leaders work through specific problems and learn from each other during the problem solving process. We found Action Learning effective, as it helped the leaders discover solutions through a group coaching format, simultaneously leveraging off each of their experiences as they come from different functions and regions.”

David Giang
Head of Group Talent
Thai Union Group PCL.
Bangkok, Thailand