I integrated Action Reflection Learning into my Developing Leaders class, as I blogged about recently here and here. It went as I expected, with some people being more comfortable with the collaborative and interactive methodology than others. I recall the first time I experienced action learning, and wondered why so many people were involved with team building and other strategies to begin working through organizational problems together. I just wanted to get the answer; it seemed so simple from my vantage.

From a theoretical perspective however, major organizational problems are never easily solved within silos, for if they were, then they would not be organizational problems in the first place. Rather, large problems that organizations want and need to address can only be done on an organizational level, involving people from throughout the organization. They are always more complex than they seem, and thus require strategies that give voice to name these complexities and view them from as many angles as possible. Only then can a learning coach or facilitator help the team through the problem they are facing and have agreed to try to solve.

I wanted to bring this experience to a class, which is a challenge for learners who are used to being told what content is right and what works best. If only this were the case, but by the constantly growing list of books and articles on leadership continually growing, there seems to be no end in sight for getting the "right" answer or way of leading. No two organizations or people are the same, so how could a solution here easily be transferred to over there?

It is so much easier to give a list of leadership theories, best practices, or case studies. However, they are always contextually and organizationally and historically bounded; thus they are unable to be implemented as-is. Period. Yes, we can learn form the experience of others, and we can use best practices to guide us through our own issues–that is exactly the premise that action reflection learning is based upon–we already have most of what we need to solve our own problems. We have read books and worked in organizations and have lived enough of life to know that a cross-sectional team will bring the variety of experiences and perspectives to create a richer product than a simple sum of the parts. We only need help reflectively putting things together.

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