Critical Action Learning

Origins, Traditions and Key Ideas

The term Critical Action Learning can first be found in print in a 1994 article by Hugh Willmott that called for greater application of critical thinking to management [Page 200]education and development. The concern in CAL is that learning be seen as a means for individual or collective transformation or emancipation and not be simply confined to performance improvement. CAL has a number of distinguishing features, including its emphasis on the way learning is supported, avoided or prevented through power relations; the linking of questioning insight to complex emotions, unconscious processes and relations; and a more active facilitation role than is implied within traditional Action Learning. Key ideas in CAL are critical reflection, organizing insight, learning inaction, systems psychodynamics and active facilitation.

Traditional Action Learning

Action Learning is underpinned by the central assumption that learning derives from taking action and asking insightful questions about urgent problems or enticing opportunities. Action Learning was formulated around the formula L = P + Q, where L stands for learning, P for programmed knowledge (i.e. existing theory) and Q for questioning insight. Formal instruction and theory are not sufficient. External training, instruction or expertise cannot be relied upon, because the existing codified knowledge, whilst it may be drawn from, may not suit the specific context of a particular problem. Processes such as action and feedback, asking fresh questions, learning from and with peers and creating a multiplier effect between individual and organizational learning are central to Action Learning.

The objectives of Action Learning, as originally expressed by Reginald Revans, are

• to make useful progress on the treatment of some real problems or opportunities,
• to give participants sufficient scope to learn for themselves with others and
• to encourage teachers and others engaged in management development to help participants learn with and from each other.

Based on a philosophy of action (praxeology), Action Learning is a challenging educational method that is much more than simply learning by doing, in that it engages participants in risk-taking experimentation and a degree of self-challenge, on the basis that individuals cannot expect to change others or an organization if they cannot change themselves.

Critical Reflection

Although reflection is integral to the classical principles of Action Learning, this is often interpreted to mean simply an instrumental encouragement of participants to think about their individual experience of action, as in, for example, ‘What did I do? What happened? What went well? What would I do differently next time?’ This emphasizes the rational but excludes the emotional and political aspects of the learning process. Purely instrumental reflection neglects the fact that action and learning are always undertaken in a context of power and politics, which inevitably carries a potential for conflict, anxiety and obstruction of learning. In response to this critique, CAL is a development of conventional Action Learning in that it aims to promote explicit critical thinking, giving recognition to the way politics and emotion are integral to organizing, as well as to the role they can play in facilitating and constraining the scope for learning. Critical reflection as a pedagogical approach emerges because these dynamics are treated centrally as a site of learning about managing and organizing.

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