Here there be dragons

Michael Stanford, Executive Director

Here there be dragons

Twenty years of exploration and discovery in the world of action learning

A wonderful characteristic of executive education is that there is no shortage of new worlds to discover. One world - a world that the ancient explorers would've marked on their maps with the words "Here There Be Dragons" because of its unpredictable winds and shifting current - is the world of action learning.

Action learning takes place when real-world individual or business challenges serve as the laboratory for formal learning. Over the two decades we have been exploring action learning with our clients and we have learned a lot about what works and what doesn't work. Here are some highlights:

Know where you want to go

When we help top teams rethink their business vision, we often use a "Looking Back at Success" exercise through which the team identifies what success will look like and feel like once it has been achieved. The exercise forces the team to articulate in sharp and detailed terms what success really means for each team member, for the team itself, and for the business.

The same process can guide learning and development leaders who are exploring action learning as a developmental tool. The kinds of action learning approaches we use vary significantly according to how stakeholders define success. And so in our initial conversations with clients who express an interest in action learning we try to understand why the exploration is taking place. We ask: Why do you want to use action learning? What problems are you trying to solve? How will you know if we've been successful?

The answers to these questions help us align the expected outcomes of the action learning work for our learning and development key contacts, for the teams that will undertake the action learning projects, and for the organization. And they help us understand if action learning is being considered primarily for its impact on the learning process (i.e. success = capabilities developed) or for its impact on the business (i.e. success = business challenges solved).

Over 15 years ago, in our early days of exploring the world of action learning, we discovered the consequences of weak alignment around a common definition of success. Working with the European arm of a global consumer electronics business, we launched business-driven action learning projects to support the development of new leadership capabilities in the top leadership team. After about 9 months of work which we supported with a series of face-to-face capability-building interventions, the action learning teams presented their recommendations to the organization's senior leaders. The results were spectacular. In all cases, the presenting teams displayed a solid understanding of the leadership capabilities that the program had been designed to develop. And each of the teams had explicitly applied these new capabilities to their real-world business challenges. For the client's learning and development team and for us, mission accomplished. But for the participants, the mission had just started! Having dedicated so much of their energy to working on important business challenges and having experienced the joy of exercising some new leadership muscles, they were in no mood to declare victory until each and every one of their recommendations had been implemented by the organization. At the time, neither we nor the organization were prepared for this outcome.

So, before entering into an action-learning initiative it is important to know how you will define success. Is it when your leaders are more capable in certain ways? Or when your teams perform at a higher level? Or when you've overcome certain specific business challenges? How we design the action learning initiative will depend on your answer. And how we prepare your leaders and your organization will depend on all your stakeholders having a common understanding of your answer.

There will be storms to weather along the way

Life in the trenches of everyday business is difficult and messy. When we undertake serious action learning work, we are explicitly inviting this chaos into the learning experience. We've learned that we must be prepared to cope with all the disturbing ambiguities of day to day business - the competitive pressures, the market demands, the strategic uncertainties, the internal misalignments, the conflicting personal agendas - when we take on the task of addressing real-world business challenges through our action learning programs. Capability-building programs that do not involve business-driven action learning are at least partially shielded from CEO or top management team changes, from new strategies, and from decisions about which markets to enter or products to develop and deploy. But these are all exactly the kinds of concerns that shape and reshape the currents and weather patterns within which action learning takes place.

We've found three ways to cope with the inevitable storms.

First, we build radar systems that warn us when important changes are likely to happen. A strong understanding of the industry and of the client's position in the industry is part of this system. An internal network among the top management team and functional leaders, and formal processes for getting constant feedback from the network, are essential. Thankfully, in our experience most learning and development teams who bring us into their action learning work already have these systems in place.

Second, we recognize that the best way to deal with uncertainty is to acknowledge that it exists, to master what we can master, and to ensure we are mentally open, agile and flexible enough to react quickly and constructively when inevitable and unpredictable changes happen. While this is primarily a mindset discipline, it is important because it enables us to maintain our energy and focus when plans change.This doesnt mean that we ignore the importance of thorough and disciplined preparation - we recognize the wisdom in Roald Amundsen's belief that "adventure is just bad planning". But we also recognize that just as Amundsen and his team faced the unexpected every day on their path to the South Pole, we must also be prepared for the unexpected when we invite the chaos of daily business into the learning experience.

Third, we create support mechanisms that help us deal with the challenges specific to action learning work. One example is the pool of professionals - we call them learning managers or learning consultants - from which we draw to support our action learning work. These professionals usually have a consulting background and work closely with the program team and the project teams to make sure we all have the information and material we need to make quick progress within the action learning work and to respond quickly when the landscape changes.

Success can take you in the wrong direction

An interesting evolution happens when learning and development teams orchestrate successful business-driven action learning work. They blur the distinction between formal learning and achieving critical business results. And they start to build a brand for themselves that changes from "learning and development is where we go to learn new skills" to "learning and development is where we go to tackle business challenges."

This is a welcome evolution for most learning and development teams, but it comes at a price. It means that the team will be asked more and more to step out of the relatively familiar world of capability-building and into the chaotic trenches of the business. It also means that the business will start coming to the learning and development team to help solve all sorts of business issues, including many that may not be appropriate laboratories for learning. Without proper focus, the team can find itself carried away on all sorts of currents. Here we find that a sharply articulated definition of the team's mission is useful for keeping the team focused, on track, and un-distracted by opportunities that may be important but are not part of its mandate.

Be prepared to explore new territory

After almost two decades of exploration and discovery in the sometimes stormy world of action learning we've learned a lot. But the maps we're creating to guide us through the action learning experience are like the ancient maps of the world: precise when it comes to the territory we know but bordered by vast undiscovered oceans that carry the explorer's warning about the unknown: HERE THERE BE DRAGONS.
In the world of action learning, there are plenty of opportunities to explore these undiscovered territories, to find new ways to wrestle with the real-world challenges of business leadership through action learning. We know that what we've mastered until now won't be enough to take us into the future. And so we're always exploring new territory: new ways of supporting action learning teams, of helping the business get everything it can out of the action learning experience, and of helping leaders learn the most from the action learning experience.


Michael Stanford is Executive Director of IMD's Partnership Program business, and serves on the Boards of the University Consortium for Executive Development (UNICON) and the International Consortium for Executive Development Research (ICEDR). He has been at IMD for 18 years.

This content requires Flash.

Download the free Flash Player now!