Scenario: New Information
As an action learning coach, how would you handle the following situation:
The team decides to capture some of the information they are discussing on a flip chart. The person that moves to the flip chart flips the leadership skills out of view.
Tags: Action Leaning, Action Learning Coach, WIAL, WIAL Action Learning, WIAL Talk
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Karla VERSOLATO
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I would ask the group if they consider it important to maintain leadership skills on the flip
chart and how they would like to deal with this issue.
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Susan Schneider
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I would intervene and say “We are working on our leadership skills as we work on the problem. How can we keep the leadership skills visible while capturing this important information?”
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Rachel Wang
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I would ask the team the potential impacts on learning if they could not see the leadership list during the rest of discussion. Then ask the team on their ideas to deal with the issue.
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Dina Guo
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I will observe the reaction of the other members firstly. If they could deal with it by themselves, I would not intervene. If they could not have agreement with the person, even there happens some inflict, I would intervene and ask some questions – “Do you see what happened just now? What could we learn from it? How would you do next?”
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Adam Kwiecień
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In AL we have two elements, solving problems and practicing leadership skills. Most often I help the group do both things. Sometimes there are additional constraints like not enough budget or not enough time. Depending on the details I sometimes do only problems or only leadership skills. I always focus on what the group wants and doesn’t want and what I feel is a stronger learning situation.
Very often in other meetings I use just one bit of AL e.g. “what skill do you want to practice now?” To be clear I always say it’s not full WAIL AL attitude but just usefull elements.
Scenario 1 (immediately)
I saw coaches (not only AL coaches) who used each and every learning situation and intervened immediately. I value such a skill and it’s not easy for me so I practice it everytime I can. I think It’s good because all the details, the emotions, the whole situation is fresh, it’s here and now, so they don’t have to recall anything, you can work on the real thing not on what the group remembers. So I would wait a second or two to let the group react themselves, and if no one reacts I would intervene with questions like “let’s stop for a minute, Mark removed the list, how does that influence our practicing leadership skills? What could we do? How this will effect the group work?”
Scenario 2 (typical intervention)
Regardless of the group development level I don’t intervene immediately, I make a note about the situation not to forget it. If it’s at the beginning of the session I wait for the first standard intervention and ask “How are we doing as a group? What are we doing well? what can we do better? If no one mentions the leadership skill flip I ask “In AL we solve problems and practice leadership skills. How are we doing concerning the skills? What can we do better? If the situation happens later in the session I do the same intervention while closing the session.
Scenario 3 (let them fail)
Sometimes I feel that a stronger learning effect will take place if I don’t intervene and “let the group fail”. I just use the typical intervention about the group work “how are we doing as a group …” and follow what the group chooses. If no one says anything about the leadership skill flip – I don’t mention that. If there is next session I “start from the scratch” explaining how practicing leadership skills work in AL.
Scenario 4 (there’s something more important now!)
It’s possible that at that very moment many important things happen at the same time, there are more than one learning possibilities. How I intervene will depend on what I feel or think can have the strongest effect on the group and their development. For instance the group has always no energy and uses no tools or techniques at all and suddenly one guy stands up and starts writing on the flip, another quickly comments that flip is not a good idea and suggests a different technique to write things down etc. I would focus on this.
At the end of the session, asking about reflections on group learning I may ask “what else” a couple of times to give them a chance to talk about the leadership skill list if they want to.
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