From nurturing the H in HR to developing the D in OD – systemic benefits where action learning and organisational development combine

The authors review the Organisational Development and Design (OD&D) capability building programmes they have facilitated in the UK Civil Service and consider the learning and impact which they have had at an individual and organisational level. These programmes have been delivered to over 350 professional civil servants across a broad range of business functions, ministries, departments and agencies. This paper builds on the article published in this journal entitled ‘Nurturing the H in HR’ (Hale, R. and Saville, M. 2014. “Nurturing the H in HR: Using Action Learning to Build Organisation Development Capability in the UK Civil Service.” Action Learning: Research and Practice 11 (3): 333–351) which explained the early stages of programme roll out. Data to inform these findings has been drawn from a desk based review of the postgraduate level accredited papers written by participants as an integral requirement of the programme and an impact review exercise which used a storytelling approach in order to understand and interpret real accounts of practice. It can be seen how combining the Action Learning Question methodology with a humanistic approach to organisation development has made a significant cultural contribution beyond individual learning and this is impacting the wider system of a complex and dynamic government organisation that has faced, and most likely will continue to face, unprecedented and unpredictable political, social and economic change.     

试论20世纪70年代美国文官制度的改革及其影响

1978年美国国会通过了《文官制度改革法》，这是美国历史上进行的第二次文官制度改革，也是在对近百年来的美国文官制度进行全面总结的基础上产生的。这次改革影响极其深远。因为改革法不仅第一次用法律的形式确立了联邦政府人事制度应遵循的九条功绩制原则，而且，为了更好地贯乇功绩制的九项原则，1978年改革还采取了一系列重要措施，例如：为了提高高级人员的素质，建立了“高级行政职位”；推行“工绩工资制”；改革了传统的考核制度；撤消文官委员会，建立了新的人事管理机构；还明确规定了禁止官员采取的人事措施，这样明确规定官员的“被禁止的人事措施”，有利于监督、防止和罅官员们利用人权在人事管理方面营私舞弊。扩大了政府各机关的用人权；关少了退伍军人的优待范围等，总之，1978年对公务员制度所进行的改革，对提高政府工作效率，调动公务员积极性，消除互相扯皮现象，以及推动公务员管理理论的研究等，都发挥了一定的作用。     

Moving from opportunism to expediency when introducing action learning into an organisation

During my first year of practice as a new action learning facilitator undertaking an ‘ILM Level 5 Certificate in Action Learning Facilitation’, an innovative Individual Service Fund pilot was launched by ‘Certitude’, the organisation for which I work. The aim of this pilot was to enable people with learning disabilities and mental health needs in London to have more choice and control over their support. By recognising the opportunity that this pilot provided, I was able to design, introduce and facilitate an action learning intervention to develop the confidence of leaders and managers involved in implementing the pilot's project plan and in turn explore my own emerging practice. This paper focuses on my journey from an opportunistic to expedient action learning facilitator; responsible for introducing, planning and establishing a new model of learning and development in Certitude.     

Evaluation of an action learning programme for leadership development of SME leaders in the UK

This paper presents the findings from an evaluation research project undertaken by Henley Management College in 2006. This project followed an earlier research study that focused on identifying the leadership development needs for leaders of small and medium sized-enterprises (SMEs) in the UK, developed a leadership development model and made recommendations for a leadership development programme. The principle challenges facing the SME organisations overwhelmingly concerned leading change in their organisation. Their personal challenges concerned implementing change initiatives, communicating these and motivating the people in their organisation. In consideration of the challenges identified, one of the key recommendations was to pilot an action learning programme and evaluate the effectiveness of action learning to develop leadership skills in SME leaders. Henley Management College then conducted a research project to evaluate the pilot programme. This pilot consisted of three learning sets, run in three geographical areas in the UK and facilitated using three very different styles. Following the pilot programme, there were several wider reviews by academics, advisors and representatives of relevant government boards. This has since resulted in a significant programme of action learning for SME leadership development being implemented. This paper provides an overview of the relevant literature and research methodology and then presents the evaluation results from the pilot programme. The dominant theme was that action learning does indeed deliver significant business benefits and provides a real opportunity for SME leaders to develop their leadership skills.     

Action learning for professionals: a new approach to practice

Following on from the article ‘Building Capacity in Social Care: An Evaluation of a National Programme of Action Learning Facilitator Development’ (Abbott, C., L. Burtney, and C. Wall. 2013. Action Learning: Research & Practice 10 (2): 168–177), this article describes how action learning is being introduced in Cornwall Council, UK and explores the relationship between social work and action learning in practice. In essence social work needs to perform well and achieve positive outcomes for users of its services. Cornwall Council's Children's Social Work and Psychology Services is introducing action learning for professionals as a new approach to practice.     

Enquiry-based learning workshop for deep learning in Middle Eastern classrooms – an action research approach

The senior year design students and I were dismayed when my linear teaching and their habitual rote learning failed in a Middle Eastern University. The gulf between the curricular objectives and our teaching-learning methods intrigued me. I turned this into an action research project that sought to answer the questions, ‘What paradigm shift might we need to migrate from traditional rote learning to deep learning? What attitudinal change and philosophical beliefs would that call for in an instructor?’ The search for a solution metamorphosed me from a disengaged instructor into an empathizing reflecting practitioner. It led my students to active engagement in an enquiry-based learning workshop, which significantly improved their performance. This paper celebrates the journey of our collective deep learning. It explicates how I built my personal theory of teaching praxis through critical consciousness and meta reflection. This knowledge-creation process is empowering and may draw many teacher researchers towards meta-reflexive engagement with the social systems around. These change drivers can initiate institutional overhaul to effect systemic reforms.     

Action research and organisational learning: a Norwegian approach to doing action research in complex organisations

The purpose of this article is to present a specific approach to the practice of action research ‘in complex organisations’. Clearly, there are many approaches to the challenge of doing action research in organisations; approaches that are, and also must be, quite context dependent and specific. But my purpose is neither to give an overview nor a recommendation of how action research is or should be done in complex organisations by different schools of action researchers around the world. The approach I will present has grown through practical experience accumulated over many years with doing action research in many different Norwegian organisations with organisational change and development as the specific objective. I will limit myself to an outline of this Norwegian context, and to how I and others have worked specifically with organisational learning both practically and theoretically within or in relation to a broad Norwegian or Scandinavian approach to action research and organisation development represented by many individuals.     

Exploring the challenges in scaling up the delivery of action learning facilitator training within a global organisation

Action learning is often used as an element of leadership development programmes. The intention is to support classroom learning with an experiential thread which runs throughout the life of the programme. Action Learning Associates (ALA) has been working with an international organisation for three years to deliver the global ‘First Line Manager Programme’ (FLMP). The action learning facilitator training (ALFT) programme is designed to enable participants to run action learning sets in their operational companies across the world. Originally created in English – the official business language – the ALFT is now also delivered in French. The focus of the paper is to explore learning, challenges and opportunities created by scaling up the delivery of ALFT to a global target audience of approximately 700 people. To date ALA has trained over 165 internal action learning facilitators from different countries, languages, cultures and professional backgrounds. The value to the participants of being skilled to run their own action learning sets, within the context of the FLMP, is explored along with the opportunities for organisational development and learning.     

Action learning and organisation development: overlapping fields of practice

This paper explores the relationship between action learning and Organisation Development (OD). It proposes that they are overlapping fields of practice, with interesting similarities and differences. Both fields of practice are experienced as challenging to conventional ways of viewing organisations and people but are also subject to increasing challenge themselves and both aspects are examined. Two accounts of practice are included, which cast light on action learning and OD and some preconditions for a more fruitful future relationship between the two fields are proposed.     

Improving the work climate in a TVET college through changing conversations

Abstract

As an HRD manager in a college, I am responsible for employee wellness within the organisation. However the culture of the college in which I work is toxic, characterised by bullying, destructive leadership, gossip and victimisation. Such a culture is difficult to change and requires a different approach to the expert-led, training interventions that are underpinned by diagnostic organisational development. In this article, I provide evidence that supports my claim that a participatory action research approach, embedded within a dialogic organisational development paradigm, succeeded in improving the work climate as it enabled individuals to identify the factors which contributed to the toxic environment and take action to improve it. The participatory methods employed allowed the x participating college mangers to deal with their own feelings, and enabled them to describe and evaluate the workplace climate as toxic. Armed with a discourse to discuss the problem, they were able to move from helplessness and self-blame to acceptance of responsibility for change. Viewing the problem as a systemic issue enabled them to understand how to modify their practice to embody life-enhancing values that diminished the toxic patterns of communication. By changing conversations, negativity was diminished and negative interactions were replaced by more positive workplace relations. The process described in this account of my learning may be useful to improve the climate in other similarly toxic workplaces.     

Cultural historical activity theory and professional learning

In this article I will discuss the route by which I came to work with Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). The brief tracing of my own biography will highlight theoretical and methodological milestones. I will then discuss my current work, with colleagues, on approaches to investigating and improving the learning of professionals who are involved in interagency work, which intends to reduce the risks of social exclusion for marginal groups. In this case I will consider those young people who become excluded from school and whose needs are complex and rapidly fluctuating. This project is concerned with the learning of professionals in the creation of new forms of practice, which require joined‐up solutions to meet complex and diverse client needs. We study professional learning in services that aim to promote social inclusion through supporting clients as effective actors in their worlds. At any given time in their lives individuals may take part in particular configurations of several, diverse social practices. In this discussion I will draw on recent developments in CHAT and theories of learning at work.     

Professional experience: learning from the past to build the future

The title of the 2014 Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA) conference was Teacher Education, An Audit: Building a platform for future engagement. One of the conference themes was Professional Experience: What works? Why? I seized upon this theme and the title of the conference as it afforded me an opportunity to do an audit of my research in professional experience over the last 25 years. This article presents this evidence base and the messages I have taken from this evidence. I have done this in the hope that, by collating some of the insights gained from the past and the present, it will help to “build a platform for future engagement” in professional experience. In preparing this article I was asked by the Editors to reflect also on how I developed my distinctive line of inquiry and expertise in relation to the practicum across an extended period. These reflections are included. I hope they will support university-based teacher educators in enhancing their satisfaction and achievements from working in this stimulating and provocative field of study.     

Rules of Engagement: Boys, Young Men and the Challenge of Effective Sex and Relationships Education

Over the last decade, the relationship between boys, young men and sex and relationships education (SRE) is one that has been characterised by a history of problematising. One of the main difficulties lies with young men's engagement with the subject, and in this article I make a retrospective examination of recent classroom experience with young people and training with professionals who deliver SRE. In the exploration of how best to engage this client group, I argue that masculinity and sexuality are potent issues in their lives and an understanding of these helps explain patterns in young men's behaviour, sexual health and attitudes towards SRE. Autoethnography is used as a method of enquiry to produce short vignettes in which I evaluate my successes and failures with four different boys and young men in terms of engagement. From these primary data, I have distilled four key domains in the form of a framework that I offer as a springboard for researchers, policy-makers and practitioners to consider more positive implications for future practice.     

Working with negative emotions in sets

This account draws upon learning from an incident in an action learning set where an individual challenged a mandatory organisational requirement. As a facilitator I reflect upon my initial defensive reaction to this challenge. The use of critical action learning to inform ourselves as facilitators of the underlying tensions between set members and the organisations within which we work is explored. The importance of recognising and working with emotions objectively in action learning sets in order to maximise opportunities to learn about ourselves as individuals and the organisations we work in is emphasised.     

The leadership crisis – can Action Learning Questions provide any answers?

This article provides a reflective account of the author's experience over the past 12 years of introducing a structured approach to accredited action learning to corporate organisations. The generic Action Learning Question method is outlined and specific examples of programmes in the financial services/banking and education sector are described. Included is an example of how Action Learning Facilitators have been developed. It is proposed that this approach has a place in supporting leadership development in a period of great uncertainty and change.     

Following the action in action learning: towards ethnomethodological studies of (critical) action learning

Action learning is a pedagogical practice that helps participants learn by talking about their workplace action with fellow participants (‘comrades in adversity’) in their action learning set. This paper raises questions about the action in action learning, such as: how do members of an action learning set learn from and through each other? How do they learn through their developing conversation and interaction?

To answer such questions, I argue that, ‘ethnomethodology’ (the study of ‘member's methods’ or ‘folk methods’ for doing any kind of practical action) is useful for showing the intricacy of the practical learning process in action learning, as in learning in action, more generally. The paper illustrates the conversational and interactional work of members doing things and learning together in action (for example discovering things in science and in board meetings); and argues that this approach may also be used to study action learning in practice.     

STEM learning research through a funds of knowledge lens

This article examines STEM learning as a cultural process with a focus on non-dominant communities. Building on my work in funds of knowledge and mathematics education, I present three vignettes to raise some questions around connections between in-school and out-of-school mathematics. How do we define competence? How do task and environment affect engagement? What is the role of affect, language, and cognition in different settings? These vignettes serve to highlight the complexity of moving across different domains of STEM practice—everyday life, school, and STEM disciplines. Based on findings from occupational interviews I discuss characteristics of learning and engaging in everyday practices and propose several areas for further research, including the nature of everyday STEM practices, valorization of knowledge, language choice, and different forms of engagement.     

Lost and Found in Translation: An Education in Narrative in Fieldwork and the Classroom

One of the most important questions I ask as both a cultural anthropologist and a university teacher is: How do people come to know what they think they know? In this article, I adopt a narrative approach to processes of learning and discovery in two very different locales, an indigenous society in the South Pacific, and a senior seminar on contemporary anthropological theory in a Canadian university. I show how I developed an exercise to “bring the field into the classroom” and how my students helped me to take what we learned in the classroom back to the field. In my conclusions, I discuss lessons I and my students learned about the link between experience and understanding, about the nature of interpretation, and about the role of reflexivity in the construction of meaning.     

Walk Little,Look Lots: Tuning into Teachers’ Action Research Rhythm

This article is a narrative résumé of a year-long collaborative critical inquiry into teaching methods with teachers of modern languages in Irish secondary schools. Putting myself, a cultural stranger and first-time qualitative researcher, at the core of this self-study, I discuss first the context and methodological framework of the study to later speak about several aha-moments that shaped my journey. The initial aim of making my participants become action researchers was fulfilled only partially. Because I allowed participants to co-create this action research study in tune with their needs and capacities, I needed to change my expectations. Rather than seeing parts of this study as a failure, given that so far none of my participants published their action research outcomes, I began to embrace an organic approach to continuing professional development that is based on active listening and collaboration.