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Overview • there is appropriate empowerment of people to influence decisions that affect their work;

• team members are getting on with each other reasonably well; and,

• stress levels are not too high and morale is good enough.

PROBLEM-SOLVING AND CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT:

‘Problem-solving’ is about dealing with things that are hindering the achievement of objectives. That might be a breakdown in a procedure, in a technology or in a relationship. Or it might be an unplanned event such as someone being off work through illness or a delay in receiving needed supplies. For most managers, dealing with problems is a substantial part of their work.

Included in this area of work is doing things to improve work processes - such as providing additional training or updating a computer system or redesigning ways of working by changing roles and responsibilities. Managers are expected to invest time in making changes that improve quality and/or productivity.

Problems in this area are typically “Technical” or “Tame”. They typically involve ‘hierarchical leadership’ – i.e. the team leader or department head managing change within their own team or department. However, there is always scope for more “lateral leadership” – engaging across boundaries with other teams or departments to jointly solve problems.

lateral leadership

KEY WORDS:

Cross-boundary working. Systems perspective. Lateral leadership. Personal initiative-taking. Leadership without authority. Trust. Ladder of Inference. Dialogue. Action Learning. Appreciative Inquiry. Shadowing.

For example, the Health Centre Manager who works on improving the appointments system within the Health Centre with others members of Health Centre staff (see Figure 5).

In working across boundaries, leaders need to exercise influence by relying on personal authority - so-called “lateral leadership”. This differs from the traditional hierarchical approach through which an individual is influential by using the power of their position as leader within a team, department or organisation. At its heart, “lateral leadership” requires a re-appraisal of how best to add value – in terms of our priorities, how we spend our time and who we choose to work with.

The work within an organisation or wider system can be categorised in three types (see Figure 7):

PERSONAL INITIATIVE-TAKING

PROBLEM-SOLVING AND CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

MAINTENANCE

Figure 7: Types of work

MAINTENANCE:

This is about just getting on with the job. Work objectives are being met. Productivity and quality are good enough or better. The required processes are effective enough and relationships with co-workers are good enough.

This means that:

• there are enough people with the right skills to undertake the tasks;

• the mechanisms to provide feedback about the achievement of objectives are effective;

• people have the information and skills they need to do a good job;

PERSONAL INITIATIVE-TAKING:

This is about going beyond what is normally expected in order to innovate in ways that challenge current assumptions about how best to do the work. It is ‘thinking out of the box’ - usually to tackle “Adaptive” or “Wicked” challenges - and it very often involves “Lateral Leadership”.

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32. Jeffrey Yip, Chris Ernst and Michael Campbell (2011) Boundary Spanning Leadership. Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) Organizational Leadership White Paper Series.

Taking a personal initiative is facilitated by:

• finding a broader system perspective through which to see new possibilities for creating “Public Value” – e.g. by better deployment of the “operating capacity” of different teams, departments, and/or organisations; and,

• choosing not to be constrained by the demands and limitations of the “Authorising Environment”.

THE CASE FOR LATERAL LEADERSHIP

In a recent study by the Center for Creative Leadership32, 86% of senior executives surveyed said that it was “extremely important” for them to work effectively across boundaries in their current leadership role. Yet, only 7% of these executives believed they were currently “very effective” at doing so. Closing this skills gap is a critical challenge for organisations and a transformative opportunity for leaders if they are to survive and ultimately thrive in today’s business environment.

“Lateral leadership” is leadership without authority - joining with others over whom you have no direct control in order to achieve a common cause. Such leadership is shared, collective, distributed and held temporarily by individuals across a network. The person who leads an activity today must be able to play the role of follower equally well tomorrow.

FEATURES OF LATERAL LEADERSHIP

The biggest difference between hierarchical and lateral leadership is reciprocity. Lateral leaders:

• Build relationships with people from across a network of inter-dependent stakeholders.

• Create opportunities for potential allies to get together to explore together the possibilities for delivering outcomes in a different way.

• Have the ability to take a systems perspective and to invite a renewed consideration of vision and goals which in turn attracts other people who are feeling dissatisfied about what is currently being achieved.

• Invite a holistic consideration of how all the resources, both tangible and intangible, can be used more effectively.

• Are open-minded to new ideas coming from people with whom they do not normally work – people who may have differing values, attitudes and assumptions to their own.

This implies a substantially different decision-making model to the one typically used for everyday problems. It is not about consulting or involving stakeholders; it is about co-production.

Taking a lateral leadership approach means moving from having specialist expertise to being more of a generalist. It depends on the ability to engage in meaningful conversation with multiple stakeholder groups, each with its own version of what is in the best interests of the end users / the community / wider society.

Investing in building relationships is a pre-requisite to problem solving (see Table 1). First build trust. Lateral leaders must know how to be trusted and how to be trusting. It is not enough to be trustworthy. They must also be risk-takers and know how to be vulnerable - the two key pre-requisites of being trusted.

That takes time - especially if the people involved have previously experienced each other as parochial, competitive and/or protective of their own ways of thinking and working. Not surprisingly, the research shows that effective leaders of transformational change are typically compassionate and co-operative by nature.

For example, the Health Centre Manager who thinks about the wider system in finding an integrated system for appointments, taking a personal initiative which requires lateral leadership to engage with people outwith their normal sphere of influence (see Figure 6).

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Table 1: Applying a "lateral leadership" approach

ANYONE CAN BE A LATERAL LEADER

Going back to the example of improving the appointments system in a Health Centre. Anyone in the system could initiate an exploration of how to improve the wider appointments process. For example:

• It could be the Health Centre Receptionist who notices that a sizable percentage of GP patients also need to see a counsellor, physiotherapist or occupational therapist and starts asking questions about how these other appointments are made. That might lead to identifying ways in which these appointments could be handled by the Health Centre computer system.

• Or it might be a Social Worker who wonders if anticipatory care planning could be better managed by joint GP/Social Work appointments and that this would be greatly aided by an integrated appointments process. The Social Worker initiates conversations with colleagues, GPs and receptionists to see how much interest there is in the idea and to test its feasibility.

• Or it might be the Health Centre Manager thinking more broadly about upgrading the computer system and wondering if there would be potential benefits from involving others who also need a good appointments process. That exploration might lead to consideration of an integrated receptionist function.

Lateral leadership is also important within a single public sector organisation where typically the culture is to manage resources within silos.

For example:

• A manager who chooses to step back from the requirement to deliver a service within given resources (staff and budget) and is able to see the potential benefits of co-operating with another team.

• That might then lead to an exploration with the other team manager to identify an initiative that is outside of both of their job descriptions. Both need to feel responsible for achieving the potential greater “Public Value” – and both need to feel reasonably free of hierarchical control.

"Lateral Leadership"

Approach ... when facing a "Technical"/ "Tame" challenge

... when facing a "Adaptive"/ "Wicked" challenge

Making sense of the challenge

Be reasonably clear about where we are, where we are going and how to get there.

Accept that complex, messy and seemingly insoluble problems make it difficult to find easy answers.

Making progress in addressing the challenge

Share this understanding to persuade others of the need for change and the required direction of travel.

Seek a critical mass of support through thoughtful communication and stakeholder involvement.

Build engagement and deal with anxiety and resistance.

Monitor progress and deal with the issues that arise.

Make progess through experimentation.

A continuous exploration of possibilities with a broad range of stakeholders and through engaging on many fronts simultaneously.

The essential relationships are not within corporate silos but with people across group, community and organisational boundaries.

Change management

Manage change in a logical, consultative and focussed way.

Be knowledgeable, humane, authoritive and intelligent.

Take a whole systems view.

Identify the right question.

Genunine coproduce.

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32. Jeffrey Yip, Chris Ernst and Michael Campbell (2011) Boundary Spanning Leadership. Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) Organizational Leadership White Paper Series.

FURTHER RESOURCES FOR LATERAL LEADERSHIP

1. Chris Ernst and Donna-Chrobot-Mason (2010) Boundary Spanning Leadership: Six Practices for Solving Problems, Driving Innovation, and Transforming Organizations. McGraw-Hill Professional.

2. Dr Paul Williams, Reader in Public Management and Collaboration Cardiff School of Management (February 2010) Special Agents: The Nature and Role

of Boundary Spanners, Paper to the ESRC Research Seminar Series – ‘Collaborative Futures: New Insights from Intra and Inter-Sectoral Collaborations’, University of Birmingham.

3. Paul Williams (2011) The Life and Times of the Boundary Spanner, Journal of Integrated Care, Vol 19, Issue 3, pp 26-33.

Also see the Toolkit for Lateral Leadership.

4. Action learning

5. Appreciative Inquiry

6. Shadowing and Exploratory Visits

Toolkit for Lateral Leadership

1. The Leadership Journey

2. The Ladder of Inference

3. Dialogue

1. The Leadership Journey

It can be helpful to have a mental route map of the leadership journey. It can be described in seven phases. These are not steps. Phases merge into each other and the whole is more like a flow:

Dialogue to explore possibilitiesINSTIGATION EXPLORATION PROJECT SCALING UP ANCHORINGEXPERIMENTATION DECISION MAKING

1. The first phase is instigation.

There is a trigger that prompts action. Something motivates leadership initiative.

There could be an external trigger. This might be critical information, obtained from observation of what is happening in practice or from feedback from the stakeholder networks, indicating a need or opportunity for change.

There could be an internal trigger. This might come from a personal commitment to find new ways forward with respect to specific concerns or a personal interest in the possibility of applying new ideas. Or it might spring from frustration that barriers are getting in the way of making improvements.

Usually there will be a combination of both personal motivation and the identification of a problem or opportunity that might be addressed by cross-boundary working.

INSTIGATION

In the Health Centre appointments example given above, we saw how different individuals in different parts of the system might want to explore possibilities for change.

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2. The second phase is exploration.

Instigation merges into exploration when opportunities are taken to get more information about what is happening currently and what interest there might be in a collaborative effort to make improvements.

This exploration phase is about engaging with other people, sharing perspectives and finding out about each other’s motivation to make changes. It is important that the leader does not have solutions that he/she wants to sell to others – rather that he/she is motivated to “co-produce” with others who share some of their concern to find ways to make improvements.

Data needs to be shared from a range of perspectives to get a sense of how things look from different parts of the system. This is best done in a non-judgmental way using Appreciative Inquiry, Dialogue Interviews, or Peer shadowing.

The main objective is to build and maintain respectful relationships both with potential allies and with those who might be affected by change. Through inquiry, more people get involved in the exploration. The broadening of involvement leads to more insight into the relationships between different problems and between the people who are concerned about the problems. People start to see the inter-connections and understand the possibilities for change.

In the Health Centre appointments example, we can see how individuals might reach out to other people to share perspectives.

INSTIGATION EXPLORATION

INSTIGATION EXPLORATION EXPERIMENTATION

Exploration needs time. It is an emergent process. Motivated people will be eager to get on with action planning – but it is important resist taking shortcuts. It is important to take time to develop a real sense of shared purpose and generate imaginative possibilities for doing things differently together.

Key leadership skills include: empathy, open- mindedness, active listening, the ability to synthesise information, emotional maturity, and integrity.

It is important at this early stage to share leadership. Others with motivation to make improvements will have their own ideas about what to explore and who to engage. If the initiative is too strongly owned by one individual, this can have a de-motivating impact on others.

Links are forged between potential allies and they come together to share their findings and ideas. System Mapping can be a useful tool for collating information and understanding what is going on from different stakeholder perspectives. This leads to the next phase.

3. The third phase is experimentation.

In this phase an attempt is made to find starting points from which something new can be done. By harnessing the ideas of those prepared to take steps to tackle the issue, there is room for agreeing tests of change on a small scale.

Finding new ways of working across boundaries requires hard-nosed pragmatic decision-making. The question is what might work in practice, what would be good enough - and not what is right because it conforms to existing beliefs about how things should be done. If we find a test of change that is reasonably successful, then that can be extended and built upon. If it does not work well, there is still valuable learning that can help inform other experiments.

In striving to find tests of change together, the critical requirement is often the ability to re-frame. In other words, to let go of current assumptions about what is needed, what is best and what is right. The professional skill of being an effective advocate and educator tends to be highly valued. But it has to be balanced equally by open-mindedness to the legitimacy of others’ points of view. This is the skill of Dialogue described below.

We need conversations in which all parties are open-minded to new thinking. The effective leader strives to accommodate proposals that challenge his/her personal and professional views and organisational policies. The leader also invites others to let go of some of their assumptions to help make progress with the problem. Seeking to understand and accept others’ perspectives is as important as seeking to be understood and to persuade other people. One well-established

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group process for exploring new possibilities is Action Learning described below.

Understanding The Ladder of Inference (described below) can help you behave in ways that create the conditions for mutual understanding and compromise.

Through exploration of possibilities, the leader helps people build a positive vision for the future – then used to inform pragmatism and action. The leader knows that it is highly unlikely there will be a single clever answer. Making progress will be about trying lots of different ideas and building on those that work. Consensus is not essential, there just has to be enough support for something new to be tried as a test of change. What is important is to experiment with whatever has some prospect of success.

By definition, there is vested interest in the current ways of working. The status quo is accepted as legitimate

In experimentation, experiences are acquired. Insofar as some of the tests of change have been successful, there comes about a more challenging conversation between those who represent what is possible and those who are still wedded to what exists now.

The fourth phase is about seeking a decision to move to a larger scale project involving more people and involving making changes to current ways of working.

In the Health Centre appointments process example, the Social Worker might find one of the Health Centre GPs who is willing to try co-ordinating appointments for patients requiring anticipatory care plans.

But the other GPs and Social Workers may not yet see this as a high priority and so it is too early to be thinking about one shared Appointments System.

Nevertheless, The Social Worker and GP identify a test of change involving the Receptionists – as a way of co-ordinating their diaries to ensure joint appointments with patients.

Referring back to our simple example, we can imagine the situation where the Social Worker, GP and Receptionists are agreed that their test of change has gone well but further progress depends on broader agreement to developing a more integrated Appointments process.

In our example, this could be by having a single point of contact for patients through a co-ordinated and co-located Reception Service.

In our example, we can imagine Receptionists being concerned about where their place of work will be, leaving colleagues and having to learn new work practices in order to work with running appointments systems in parallel.

GPs, Social Workers, Counsellors, Therapists and GPs might have concerns about client confidentiality, how status differences might affect the quality of support they get from Reception staff and whether Receptionists unfamiliar with their work practices might make mistakes.

4. The fourth phase is decision-making.

by a significant proportion of the wider community of stakeholders.

INSTIGATION EXPLORATION EXPERIMENTATION DECISION MAKING

Decision-making in this fourth phase can be fraught with tension because attitudes to the change are bound up in personal, professional and organisational concerns. Those involved can see they are being invited to move towards a tipping-point of change. Again the leader needs to use inter-personal skills involved in Dialogue.

What has worked in the past comes up against aspirations for the future. But where sufficient inspiration exists, and the decision-making conversations are compassionate and respectful, the energy of people is mobilised to redirect resources towards the future.

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On one level, the decision can be regarded as a rational cost-potential benefit analysis. However, more important are the feelings of anxiety and loss that accompany any change to the status quo. The skills of Dialogue are key. It is important to strike the right balance between standing up for the “bigger prize” and advocating from the experience of the test of change - and actively listening to the legitimate concerns of others and seeking a compromise that appreciates the differential power relationships between the people involved.

5. The fifth phase is the project phase.

Leaders, especially those with little or moderate formal power, need to be mindful of the rate at which they create discomfort amongst those with a stake in the status quo (the formal system). Keith Grint33 describes the need to disappoint people at a rate they can tolerate. Again, the touchstone for the lateral leader is pragmatism – the art of what is possible.

Furthermore, the decision people are being asked to make is about an experiment on a bigger scale. Success cannot be guaranteed.

In our example, let’s assume the compromise agreement was only to co-locate reception staff in order to better co-ordinate appointments. Receptionists would continue to work for the same professional group as before, using the same appointments booking procedures, but would be able to communicate more easily with each other.

In the example, the impact on the Receptionists, changed use of accommodation and organising the transition of people and equipment to new premises.

In our example, it might include Receptionists becoming more flexible in who they work for, more familiar with each other’s systems and the implementation of ways to integrate appointments more effectively.

33. Keith Grint (2008) Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions: The Role of Leadership. Originally published in Clinical Leader, Volume 1, Number 11, BAMM Publications

Dialogue to explore possibilitiesINSTIGATION EXPLORATION PROJECTEXPERIMENTATION DECISION MAKING

With a decision to proceed, we enter the project phase in which people will translate the decision into worked out actions for people, time and money to be mobilised. Once in the project phase, leadership roles have formal authority. It is clear to everyone that the project has general approval.

The projects undertaken in this phase set the context for scaling up. It is of great importance that projects show success early on. If agreement to undertake a project has been hard won, there will be dissenters looking for evidence that it was not such a good idea. Leaders may have to work hard to iron out glitches and keep people on board.

If that can be achieved then success results in more confidence to extend the idea.

In this phase, there is a need for change management. Individuals need to take on responsibilities to deal with planning and implementing the change.

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6. The sixth phase is scaling up.

Leadership at the scaling up phase involves being skilful in influencing - both formally and informally. At this stage, it may be that different people take on the leadership role – perhaps people with more status or authority to engage with key decision-takers. This is a time for systems leadership skills.

This results in the final phase.

It is clear that in each phase there is the risk that the initiative stalls because of insufficient support and/or because the experiments taken at that stage have been judged not successful enough. Along the way, the level of success provides feedback both about the experiment and about the quality of engagement with those whose support was needed. If progress has stalled that might mean back-tracking to an earlier phase to find a different way forward using the learning from the experience gained.

1. Positive expectations – after all your intention is to make things better for other people and you just need to discover what is possible in terms of taking one more step in that direction. Focussing on why the other person might be resistant and thinking the person will need to be persuaded can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the other person gets the impression that you think they might resist, then their starting-point is likely to be what they do not like about your proposal.

Dialogue to explore possibilitiesINSTIGATION EXPLORATION PROJECT SCALING UPEXPERIMENTATION DECISION MAKING

Dialogue to explore possibilitiesINSTIGATION EXPLORATION PROJECT SCALING UP ANCHORINGEXPERIMENTATION DECISION MAKING

This is the point at which those with formal power commit to long-term change. Even when projects are clearly successful, this can be a precarious time. There are lots of examples in cross-boundary working where money has been found or allocated from central funds and used for successful small-scale projects which then have not been scaled up because of insufficient commitment to divert resources from the formal system.

7. The seventh phase is anchoring.

This final stage results in the initiative becoming ‘business as usual’. New ways of working are ‘anchored’ in the organisation by being slotted into new roles or teams, with new policies and supportive procedures and new budget allocations.

SKILLS FOR THE LEADERSHIP JOURNEY

There are cultural conditions that facilitate and support lateral leadership initiatives and make it more likely that there will be learning from success and failure. See Systems Leadership.

There are core skills that make it more likely that others will engage with change, as follows:

In our example, we can envisage that a new generic receptionist role is created, with all receptionists working as a team reporting to one manager. There is investment in a single computer system to manage all appointments. All of the professionals served by the new ways of working contribute to the costs of salaries, systems development and on-going overheads.

At the same time there is a culture change. Professionals start to see themselves as more inter-dependent – there is a re-framing of who is seen as co-worker rather than a professional from another discipline.

Leadership practices have to adapt to accommodate less hierarchical relationships. There are meetings to jointly manage the new integrated appointments systems and these lead to explorations of other ways in which collaboration could be of mutual benefit. Over time, the changing of one structure eventually has an effect on all other structures.

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2. Appreciating the diversity of attitudes and values – thinking about how other people might see things and getting ready to accommodate their vested self-interest to help them join in. There are always legitimate reasons for difference. Also see Appreciative Inquiry.

3. Being genuinely interested in the other person - and concerned to understand their thinking and feelings about the way forward. The Ladder of Inference model might help you plan how to do that.

4. Being flexible / open to change – it is unreasonable to expect someone else to change their mind if you are not at least equally prepared to change yours. The Dialogue approach might help you plan how to do that.

5. Going with the intention to give – time, commitment, money. Your risk-taking makes you trustworthy.

6. Expressing gratitude - to everyone who makes a contribution.

2. The Ladder of Inference

All of the time we are gathering huge amounts of information through our senses. In order to process and make sense of this information, we have to filter and extract key pieces of information. Making inferences is therefore largely an automatic and unconscious process in adults.

Our assumptions or attributions about other people are drawn from the data we have perceived - at various levels of abstraction. Chris Argyris34 describes this as “a ladder of inference” – i.e. the higher up the rung in the ladder, the more abstract and less reliable the inference. See Figures 8 and 9.

In the course of our lifetime, attitudes and beliefs become reinforced by our selective attention to events. We tend to pay attention to confirming - rather than dis-confirming -data. In the main, this is a natural and helpful process because it helps us avoid information overload and continuous re-appraisal of people and situations.

However, it does mean that we all operate on the basis of prejudices and biases: “a man sees what he wants to see and dis-regards the rest” (as Simon & Garfunkel put it!). No two people experience the same event the same way.

Figure 8: The Ladder of Inference (Argyris, 1985)

Figure 9: The Ladder of Inference – a worked example

Our natural mental shortcuts (assumptions, expectations, biases, prejudices, beliefs, attitudes) can prove to be unhelpful at times.

Problems arise from not testing our attributions about other people's behaviour. The higher the level of inference, the more difficult it is to be explicit about our thinking process. In threatening situations, it becomes more difficult. Very often, when things go wrong, we attribute to others our own weaknesses, assuming that we all fail for the same reasons. We seek to protect

I TAKE ACTIONS BASED ON MY BELIEFS

I ADOPT BELIEFS ABOUT THE WORLD

I MAKE ASSUMPTIONS BASED ON THE

MEANINGS I ADDED

I ADD MEANINGS (CULTURAL AND PERSONAL)

I SELECT DATA FROM WHAT I OBSERVE

OBSERVABLE DATA AND EXPERIENCES

BEHAVE IN WAYS THAT AVOID MAKING

OTHER ANGRY

REASONABLE PEOPLE AVOID MAKING OTHERS ANGRY

PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT LEADS TO

ANGER AND WHAT AVOIDS ANGER

SHE SHOULD HAVE BEEN MORE TACTFUL.

JOHN FEELS UNFAIRLY CRITICISED BY CAROL.

JOHN IS ANGRY

SHOUTING IN CAROL’S OFFICE. JOHN SLAMS THE DOOR OF CAROL’S

OFFICE AS HE LEAVES

34. Chris Argyris (1985) Strategy, Change and Defensive Routines. Pitman Publishing Limited

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ourselves and the others involved by not telling them the negative attributions we are making about them; and this is considered to be the "right" thing to do.

Unfortunately, by avoiding confrontation and leaving attributions untested, they can become self-fulfilling prophecies, even if inaccurate.

For example, if I assume she is autocratic and behave to protect myself from her “autocratic” decisions, e.g. by avoiding discussing important issues with her, she is likely to end up acting autocratically because of what she sees as my untrustworthy behaviour.

The better strategy is to have the ‘difficult’ conversation and - through dialogue - reach a shared understanding of each other’s thinking.

See Figures 10 and 11 for further examples of the “Ladder of Inference” in operation.

Figure 10: The Ladder of Inference

Figure 11

We need to get a new joint system

They will resist using our system

It won’t work for us

It works for them

They have a di�erent system

PERSONAL STRATEGY

PERSONAL THEORY

PERSONAL INTERPRETATION

CULTURALINTERPRETATION

OBSERVED DATA

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3. Dialogue

Dialogue is a process of shared inquiry into attitudes, assumptions and beliefs of other people. It can be viewed as trying to discover each other’s ladder of inference with respect to some problem or dilemma. Through open questioning, each of the people involved in a dialogue is invited to reveal what data they have paid attention to and what inferences they have drawn. The aim is to develop a higher level of shared understanding by each person doing their best to suspend their judgments/assumptions in order to actively listen to the other(s).

RESOURCES FOR DIALOGUE PRACTICE:

7. Alison Jones (2007) Speaking together: applying the principles and practices of dialogue. http://www.spaceforlearning.com/docs/Speaking%20Together%20-%20Alison%20Jones%20Sep%2007.pdf [accessed November 2015]

8. Video: Simon Keyes (2014) from the St Ethelburg's Centre for Reconciliation and Peace discusses the theory and practice behind dialogue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfBtMWN2-oc [accessed November 2015]

9. Dialogue Interviews on the Presencing Institute website. https://www.presencing.com/tools/dialogue-interviews [accessed November 2015]

Also see: Dialogue Community of Practice [insert link].

4. Action learning

Action Learning is about experiential learning – learning from our own experience and tapping into the experience and expertise of other people to get help to tackle the challenges and difficulties we face at work. It is called ‘action’ learning because the core concept is that we learn by doing – by trying out new ideas and by experimenting with new approaches. The aim of being a member of an action learning set is to get new perspectives and discover new possibilities that you can put into action in the workplace.

The action learning concept was developed in the 1940s by Reg Revans. Recreating his early experiences of the benefits of a scientific research laboratory where colleagues share and compare problems, ideas and solutions, Revans transferred these "action learning" techniques to management development programmes for the National Coal Board. To enable managers to

learn from each other's best practice, he put them into groups which he called ‘action learning sets’. Through the meetings of their action learning set, managers could gain support and confidence from peers to take initiatives to implement new ways of working. Revans demonstrated that action learning was successful by measuring improvements in coal pit productivity.

In over half a century, Revan’s original methodology has been adapted into a range of techniques - with various names such as: “peer assisted learning”, “problem-solving groups”, and “work-based learning”. It has only become ‘mainstream’ in the toolkit of organisation and management development in the last twenty years or so.

The underlying proposition is that questioning what we believe and want can be difficult at the best of times, and especially difficult when we most need to do it. But we can benefit greatly from the informed perspectives of others. The confidence we have in our attitudes and beliefs is usually justified, but not always - especially when making choices in the face of complexity, emotional challenge or when we are in uncharted territory. An objective observer is more likely to challenge our attitudes and assumptions than we are.

RESOURCES FOR DIALOGUE PRACTICE:

10. A site with lots of resources for action learning – Centre for Action Learning Facilitation: http://www.c-alf.org/about-us/16-mike-pedler [accessed November 2015]

11. A. Brockbank & I. McGill (2003) The Action Learning Handbook: Powerful Techniques for Education, Professional Development and Training. Routledge.

12. M.J. Marquardt (2004) Optimizing the Power of Action Learning: Solving Problems and Building Leaders in Real Time. Davies-Black Publishing.

13. I. McGill & L. Beaty (2000) Action Learning, Kogan Page.

14. E. Moorby (2002) Action Learning for Practitioners and Managers. CIPD.

15. M. Pedler (ed.) (1997) Action Learning in Practice. 3rd edition. Gower.

16. R. Revans (1998) A B C of Action Learning, Mike Pedler Library: Developing People and Organisations.

17. K. Weinstein (1998) Action Learning – a practical guide, 2nd Edition, Gower.

Also see: Action Learning Topic [insert link to Action Learning resources on Portal]

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5. Appreciative Inquiry

Appreciative inquiry (AI) is a model for analysis, decision-making and the creation of strategic change within and across organisations.

It was developed at Case Western Reserve University's department of organizational behavior, starting with a 1987 article by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva35. They felt that the overuse of "problem solving" as a model often held back analysis and understanding, focusing on problems and limiting discussion of new organisational models.

For more information on Appreciative Inquiry:

J. Passmore (2005) Appreciative Inquiry: positive psychology for organisation change. Selection & Development Review, 21 (5)

Also see: Further Resources for “Systems Thinking”

6. Shadowing and Exploratory Visits

Shadowing entails spending time with and observing the work of another member of staff in a department or role of interest in order to gain insight into work in that area. Exploratory visits to another organisation / part of the system are undertaken to discover similarities and differences in culture and ways of working.

Also see: Workforce Scotland website on Leadership Exchanges.

35. Cooperrider, D.L. & Srivastva, S. (1987) Appreciative inquiry in organizational life. In Woodman, R. W. & Pasmore, W.A. (eds) Research in Organizational Change And Development, Vol. 1 (129–169). Stamford, CT: JAI Press.