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Action Learning in Practice 4th Edition Mike Pedler
Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Mike Pedler
ISBN(s): 9781409418412, 1409418413
Edition: 4
File Details: PDF, 3.64 MB
Year: 2011
Language: english

Action Learning in Practice
Edited by
Mike Pedler
4th Edition

This page has been left blank intentionally

Action Learning
in Practice
Edited by
Mike Pedler
Henley Business School, UK

IV
© Mike Pedler and the contributors 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Mike Pedler has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the editor of this work.
Published by
Gower Publishing Limited Gower Publishing Company
Wey Court East Suite 420
Union Road 101 Cherry Street
Farnham Burlington
Surrey VT 05401-4405
GU9 7PT USA
England
www.gowerpublishing.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Action learning in practice. – 4th ed. 1. Active learning. 2. Organizational learning.
3. Executives – Training of.
I. Pedler, Mike (Mike John), 1944–
658.4’07’1245–dc22
ISBN 9781409418412 (hbk)
ISBN 9781409418429 (ebk)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Action learning in practice / [edited by] Mike Pedler. – 4th ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-1841-2 (hbk. : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4094-1842-9
(ebook) 1. Executives – Training of. 2. Organizational change – Study and teaching.
I. Pedler, Mike (Mike John), 1944–
HD30.4.A3 2011
658.4’07124–dc23
2011018047

Contents
List of Figures ix
List of Tables xi
Notes on Contributors xiii
The State of the Artxxi
Mike Pedler
PART 1 Origins
Introduction to Part 1 3
Chapter 1 Action Learning: Its Origins and Nature 5
Reg Revans
Chapter 2 The Enterprise as a Learning System 15
Reg Revans
Chapter 3 The Power of Action Learning 21
bob garratt
Chapter 4 Minding our Ps and Qs 35
John Morris
Chapter 5 Continuity in Action Learning 45
Jean Lawrence
Chapter 6 David Casey on the Role of the Set Adviser 55
Ddavid Casey
Chapter 7 Digging Deeper: Foundations of Revans’ Gold Standard of
Action Learning 71
Verna J. Willis
Chapter 8 Ad Fontes – Reg Revans: Some Early Sources of His Personal
Growth and Values 81
Yury Boshyk
Chapter 9 Getting Started: An Action Manual 93
David Pearce

vi A cti o n Lear nin g in Pract ice
Part 2 Varieties
Chapter 10 Self-Managed Action Learning 113
Tom Bourner
Chapter 11 Action Reflection Learning 125
Lennart Rohlin
Chapter 12 Business-Driven Action Learning Today 141
Yury Boshyk
Chapter 13 Virtual Action Learning 153
Mollie Goodman and Jean-Anne Stewart
Chapter 14 Critical Action Learning 163
Kiran Trehan
Chapter 15 The Practice and Politics of Living Inquiry 173
Judi Marshall
Chapter 16 The Varieties of Action Learning in Practice: A Rose by Any
Other Name? 183
Judy O’Neil and Victoria J. Marsick
part 3 Applications
Chapter 17 Leadership 199
Richard Thorpe
Chapter 18 Developing Facilitative Leaders: Action Learning Facilitator
Training as Leadership Development 211
Katie Venner
Chapter 19 Action Learning in SME Development 221
Lisa Anderson, Jeff Gold and Allan Gibb
Chapter 20 Addressing Systemic Issues in Public Services 233
Clare Rigg
Chapter 21 Action Learning for Organization Development in South Korea 249
Yonjoo Cho and Hyeon-Cheol Bong

vii
Contents
Chapter 22 Facilitation and the Affective Domain 261
Ian McGill and Anne Brockbank
Chapter 23 Learning to be an Action Learning Facilitator:
Three Approaches 273
Christine Abbott and Tom Boydell
Chapter 24 Action Learning and Organization Development 285
John Edmonstone
Chapter 25 Network Learning in an Austrian Hospital – Revisited 297
Otmar Donnenberg
Chapter 26 Action Learning and Social Capital 313
Mike Pedler and Margaret Attwood
Chapter 27 Action Learning around the World 325
Michael J. Marquardt
Part 4 Questions
Chapter 28 Action learning: A Pragmatic and Moral Philosophy 343
John Burgoyne
Chapter 29 Practical Knowing: The Philosophy and Methodology of
Action Learning Research 357
David Coghlan
Chapter 30 The Action Modalities: Action Learning’s Good Company 369
Joe Raelin
Chapter 31 Action in Action Learning 381
Roland Yeo and Jeff Gold
Chapter 32 Learning in Action or Learning Inaction? Emotion and
Politics in Action Learning 391
Russ Vince
Chapter 33 Reflective Practice: Origins and Interpretations 403
Michael Reynolds
Chapter 34 Adult Learning Theories and the Practice of Action Learning 415
Deborah Waddill and Michael Marquardt

viii A cti o n Lear nin g in Pract ice
Chapter 35 Evaluating Action Learning: A Perspective Informed by
Critical Realism, Network and Complex Adaptive Systems
Theory427
John Burgoyne
Index439

List of Figures
Figure I.1 Three types of problem xxiii
Figure 3.1 The crucial formula for the survival of an organism 24
Figure 3.2 Diagram of the typical amount of risk taken by a manager 26
Figure 3.3 The two worlds of the organization and the integration mechanism 26
Figure 3.4 The organizational hierarchy 27
Figure 3.5 Operational and strategic learning loops 28
Figure 3.6 Action-fixated cycle of learning 31
Figure 3.7 Action learning cycle 31
Figure 3.8 Projects and participants in the project set 31
Figure 3.9 The job/organization matrix 32
Figure 4.1 The Good Company model 42
Figure 9.1 The action learning decision process 95
Figure 9.2 The learning matrix 96
Figure 9.3 Deciding the type of action learning programme 97
Figure 9.4 The set 99
Figure 9.5 Action learning web 106
Figure 10.1 Conclusions about the values and beliefs that underpin
action learning 118
Figure 11.1 The Actor strategy for change and development 126
Figure 11.2 An Action Reflection Learning perspective on human beings 127
Figure 11.3 The learning actor model 128
Figure 11.4 The both-and principle in design of learning interventions 130
Figure 11.5 Action Reflection Learning, a summary highlighting the
learning dimension 131
Figure 11.6 Some dimensions in the paradigmatic shift (as perceived in 1994) 133
Figure 11.7 The context of leadership 134
Figure 11.8 Adapted from Rhinesmith 1993 135
Figure 12.1 What is Business-Driven Action Learning today? 143
Figure 12.2 Example of voluntary and fluid self-organization by Business
Challenge teams working on the Business Challenge 147
Figure 12.3 Business-Driven Action Learning and its component parts 150
Figure 16.1 Formal and informal learning 184

x A cti o n Lear nin g in Pract ice
Figure 16.2 Schools of action learning 185
Figure 16.3 Action learning pyramid 190
Figure 17.1 A comparison of the conceptual building blocks of
entrepreneurship and leadership (Perrin, 1991) 203
Figure 19.1 Modes of learning and reflection 225
Figure 20.1 Members of the Public Service Leadership Alliance: national
leadership bodies in England (2009) 234
Figure 25.1 Elements of the ‘learning care’ hospital management
development programme 299
Figure 25.2 Project topics in the ‘learning care’ hospital management
development programme 300
Figure 25.3 The four basic approaches of ‘flexible coaching’ 306
Figure 25.4 Three-fold goal orientation of action learning 310
Figure 28.1 Critical realism and action learning 346
Figure 28.2 World as open system with emergent properties 347
Figure 28.3 The map is not the territory 351
Figure 28.4 Trajectories in the recent multiple development of action learning 351
Figure 29.1 The DNA of an action learning dissertation 365
Figure 31.1 Continuum of actions 382
Figure 31.2 Vygotsky’s action triangle 387
Figure 33.1 Experience – experience revisited 404
Figure 34.1 Elements of action learning 418
Figure 35.1 The Kirkpatrick evaluation model 428
Figure 35.2 Cause and effect in a simple world 429
Figure 35.3 Cause and effect in a complex world 430
Figure 35.4 Levels of the vertical ontology and emergence from the
physical to the social 432

List of Tables
Table 13.1 Varieties of Virtual Action Learning 154
Table 21.1 Two types of action learning 250
Table 21.2 Profile of case companies 252
Table 21.3 Differences of case companies’ action learning practices 255
Table 22.1 Contrasting roles of facilitator and coach 263
Table 23.1 Three approaches to development as an action learning facilitator 274
Table 26.1 Processes of social capital formation and possible indicators 321
Table 29.1 Philosophy of action learning research 364
Table 32.1 The organization of ‘learning inaction’ 399

Notes on Contributors
Christine Abbott is Co-Director of the Centre for Action Learning Facilitation and an
independent action learning facilitator. Her background is in the health and social care
sector where she has worked in a number of senior management roles. More recently she
has been engaged in action learning facilitation in the private sector in Europe, Morocco,
Syria, China, USA and South America. Christine co-wrote the action learning qualification
standards for the UK Qualification and Curriculum Framework and has developed
and delivered facilitator training in the UK social care sector and local government.
Christine, a former chairman, is a Director and Trustee of the Institute for Leadership and
Management. She is working towards a PhD at York University, researching the impact of
action learning in global organizations.
christine@c-alf.org (or cabbott0@gmail.com)
Lisa Anderson is Senior Lecturer in Management Education at the University of
Liverpool Management School where she leads the online MBA and DBA (by Critical
Action Learning) programmes. Lisa has been facilitating and researching action learning
for over ten years with groups of postgraduate students and with sets comprised of
owner–managers of small businesses. She has a particular interest in the nature of critical
reflection in action learning and in evaluating its impact both on individuals and small
businesses.
l.anderson@liverpool.ac.uk
Margaret Attwood is a Director of Action Learning for Service Improvement and
a Non Executive Director of the Dimensions Group, a large charity serving people
with learning disabilities and autism throughout England and Wales. She also chairs
Dimensions Community Enterprises – a growing social enterprise organization, providing
employment and training. Her consultancy work ranges from action learning and self-
managed learning, to work with management teams and boards, single organization
development and whole system approaches across organization boundaries, fostering
partnerships and improving service delivery through collaboration and the strengthening
of innovation.
Hyeon-Cheol Bong is a Professor of the Department of Business Administration at
Chonbuk National University in South Korea and Chairperson of the Korean Action
Learning Association, which has about 700 members and has operated actively since 2005.
His research interest is focused on action learning and human resource development. His
activities as a consultant and learning coach include facilitation of action learning teams,
design and implementation of action learning programmes as well as training learning.
coaches. hcbong@hanmail.net

xiv A cti o n Lear nin g in Pract ice
Yury Boshyk is an adviser, educator and author. He is Chairman of the Global Executive
Learning Network (www.GEL-net.com) and the annual Global Forum on Executive
Development and Business Driven Action Learning (www.globalforumactionlearning.
com). He was formerly Professor at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland. He received his doctorate
from the University of Oxford and his MSc from the London School of Economics. He is
the editor of Business Driven Action Learning: Global Best Practices (2000); Action Learning
Worldwide: Experiences of Leadership and Organizational Development (2002); Action Learning:
History and Evolution (2010) and Action Learning and Its Applications (2010), the last two
with Robert L. Dilworth. He is presently working on a biography of Reg Revans, and
Accelerating Business Results, a guide to Business Driven Action Learning.
Yury@gel-net.com
Tom Bourner is Emeritus Professor of Personal and Professional Development at
the University of Brighton. He discovered action learning in the mid-1980s when he
was much influenced by the first edition of this book. After that, most of what he did
professionally was influenced by action learning and the values that support it. Until he
retired from full-time work he was Head of Research in the Business School and led the
Management Development Research Unit. He is still an active researcher and scholar with
continuing interests in action learning, reflective learning, identifying talents/strengths,
service learning, developing students’ powers of learning and developing the idea of the
fully-functioning university.
tom.bourner@ntlworld.com
Tom Boydell is Joint Managing Director of Inter-Logics and specializes in using
action learning and coaching processes in leadership, management and organization
development within public services and commercial sectors in the UK and overseas. He
has authored and co-authored over 40 books including the best-selling A Manager’s Guide
to Self-development (5th Edition, 2006).
tom@inter-logics.net
Anne Brockbank is a learning and development consultant and her activities include
action learning and executive coaching. She is co-author with Ian McGill of Facilitating
Reflective Learning in Higher Education published in 1998 by the Open University Press,
with a second edition in 2007. She is co-author with Ian McGill of The Action Learning
Handbook (2004) and Facilitating Reflective Learning through Mentoring and Coaching (2006)
A second edition is in preparation for Kogan Page.
A.Brockbank@mailbox.ulcc.ac.uk
www.BrockbankMcGill.co.uk
John Burgoyne is Professor of Management Learning in the Department of Management
Learning and Leadership at Lancaster University Management School. He is also an
Associate at Ashridge Management College and Henley Business School. In addition he is
a Trustee of Brathay Trust, an outdoor development charity, and a fellow of the Leadership
Foundation and the British Academy of Management. His interests are management,
leadership and organization development and the evaluation of initiatives in these areas.
He has been interested in the learning organization since the late 1980s and is currently
working on network theory as applied to all these areas.

xv
David Casey (1931–2005) was a schoolteacher at St. Benedicts, Ealing, a research scientist
at Berger Paints, a manager at Reed International and, from 1972, a freelance consultant.
He met Reg Revans in a pub on the Tottenham Court Road in 1969 and worked with
action learning in the GEC Programmes and later with chief executive sets at Ashridge
College. His 1977 book (with David Pearce) More than Management Development: Action
Learning at GEC was seminal for many early practitioners. He wrote in the 1997 edition
of this book that ‘he was changing from a consultant who does the odd bit of painting in
watercolour to a watercolour artist who does the odd bit of consulting’.
Yonjoo Cho is an Assistant Professor of Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana
University at Bloomington, USA. She has worked as a human resources professional for
more than ten years in South Korea, in both the business and academic sectors. Her latest
position was MBA Director and Visiting Professor at KAIST Business School. Based on
her experience as an external facilitator in large companies in South Korea, she conducts
research on organizational learning and action learning.
choyonj@indiana.edu
David Coghlan is Professor of Organization Development at the School of Business, Trinity
College Dublin, Ireland and is a Fellow of the College. He has published over 70 articles and book
chapters. Recent co-authored books include: Doing Action Research in Your Own Organization
(Sage, 1st Edition, 2001, 2nd Edition, 2005 and 3rd Edition 2010) and Collaborative Strategic
Improvement through Network Action Learning (Edward Elgar, 2011). He is co-editor of the four-
volume set, Fundamentals of Organization Development (Sage, 2010). He is on the editorial
reviews boards of Journal of Applied Behavioral Science and Action Research. He is currently Co-
Editor of the Accounts of Practice section of Action Learning: Research and Practice.
dcoghlan@tcd.ie
Otmar Donnenberg is Austrian by origin and became an independent OD-consultant in
1987, focusing on learning strategies of change and working on projects in the Netherlands,
Germany and Austria, chiefly in industry and health care. In 1999 he published Action Learning:
A Handbook, a reader in the German language, offering a combined view on Action Learning,
Action Science and the Critical Pedagogy of Paulo Freire. At present he is concentrating on
coaching for change and is engaged in the field of community currencies as an essential
means to establish favourable conditions for urgently needed social development.
otmar@donnenberg.nl
www.donnenberg.nl
John Edmonstone tries to walk the line between practice and theory in the fields of
action learning, clinical leadership and coaching. He runs a consultancy based in North
Yorkshire working largely with the UK National Health Service and he also holds a
number of part-time academic appointments. His action learning work is largely with
clinical leaders and managers. He is author of The Action Learner’s Toolkit (Gower, 2003).
Bob Garratt is a ‘pracademic’ who consults on board and top team development,
strategic thinking and organizational change through action learning processes. He
is Visiting Professor in Corporate Governance at Cass Business School, London, and

xvi A cti o n Lear nin g in Pract ice
Professor Extraordinaire at the University of Stellenbosch Business School, South Africa,
where he chairs the Centre for Corporate Governance in Africa. His books include The
Fish Rots From The Head (3rd Edition); Thin on Top; The Learning Organisation.
www.garrattlearningservices.com
Allan Gibb is Professor Emeritus at the University of Durham. He has a lifelong interest
in small business development and entrepreneurial research, policy and practice.
enterprise@allangibb.com
JeffGoldisProfessorofOrganisationLearningatLeedsBusinessSchool,LeedsMetropolitan
University and a Fellow of the Northern Leadership Academy. He is a founding member
of the School’s HRD and Leadership Research Unit. He is also the co-author of Human
Resource Management: Theory and Practice (Palgrave, 2007) (with John Bratton), Leadership
and Management Development (CIPD, 2010) (with Alan Mumford and Richard Thorpe) and
co-editor of Human Resource Development: Theory and Practice (Palgrave) (with Paul Iles,
Rick Holden, Jim Stewart and Julie Beardwell) and The Gower Handbook of Leadership and
Management Development (Gower) (with Alan Mumford and Richard Thorpe).
j.gold@leedsmet.ac.uk
Mollie Goodman has been in academic and professional book publishing most of her
working life, taking time out to train as an executive business coach, and doing a Masters in
the adaptation of informal learning approaches, particularly action learning, coaching and
mentoring, to virtual environments, to support learning within an organizational culture.
She now works for ‘the book experts’ who help individuals to write, publish and distribute
their own books and to maximize the Internet and social media to develop their businesses.
m.goodman380@btinternet.com
http://pentacorbookdesign.co.uk
Jean Lawrence (1924–2010) was a Managing Partner (with John Morris) in the
Development Consortium, a management consultancy specializing in action learning and
organizational change. She had long associations with both Henley Management College
and Templeton College, Oxford and was previously a production manager at Cadburys and
a staff member at the Manchester Business School where she and John Morris employed
action learning ideas in joint development activities with partner organizations.
Michael Marquardt is Professor of Human Resource Development and International
Affairs at George Washington University. He also serves as President of the World Institute
for Action Learning (www.wial.org). He is the author of 24 books and over 100 professional
articles in the fields of action learning, leadership, globalization and organizational
change. Over one million copies of his publications have been sold in nearly a dozen
languages worldwide. His writings and accomplishments in action learning have earned
him honorary doctoral degrees from universities in Asia, Europe and North America.
marquard@gwu.edu.
Judi Marshall is Professor of Leadership and Learning in the Department of Management
Learning and Leadership at Lancaster University Management School, which she joined
in 2008. She had previously been a core member of the Centre for Action Research in

xvii
Professional Practice at the University of Bath’s School of Management. Judi currently works
on a range of leadership for sustainability activities, including Lancaster’s MA in Leadership
for Sustainability. Her interests also include inquiry as life practice, action research, women
in management, systemic change, the gendering of corporate responsibility and ‘responsible
careers’. She always seeks to integrate inquiry, research, practice and life.
judi.marshall@lancaster.ac.uk
Victoria Marsick is a Professor of Adult Learning and Leadership at Columbia University,
Teachers College. She holds a Ph.D. in Adult Education from the University of California,
Berkeley, and an M.P.A. in International Public Administration from Syracuse University. She
co-directs the J.M. Huber Institute for Learning in Organizations, dedicated to advancing the
state of knowledge and practice for learning and change in organizations. She is also a founding
member of Partners for Learning and Leadership, a group that works with organizations to
design, develop and implement strategic learning interventions. She has written extensively
on informal learning, action learning, team learning and organizational learning culture,
often in collaboration with Martha Gephart, Judy O’Neil, and/or Karen Watkins.
Ian McGill is a learning and development consultant. He facilitates action learning sets,
as well as enjoying friends, Spain and life in North London. His academic career and work
as a senior manager in central and local government led directly to his interest in and
writing on action learning and coaching. As well as The Action Learning Handbook, co-
authored with Anne Brockbank, a number of his books have related to action learning such
as Facilitating Reflective Learning in Higher Education. He is currently preparing a publication
which will enable coaches to facilitate action learning.
ian.mcgill@mailbox.ulcc.ac
www.brockbankmcgill.co.uk
John Morris (1923–2005), the first chair in management development in Britain, was a
founding academic at the Manchester Business School. As a Professor he maintained his
role was learning as much as he could from practising managers and telling others what
he had learned. For his pioneering work in project-based learning he was awarded The
Burnham Medal from The British Institute of Management. He left Manchester Business
School in 1982 to work as a consultant in action learning and organizational change,
finishing a distinguished career as a Visiting Professor with the Revans Centre for Action
Learning and Research at Salford University.
Judy O’NeilisPresidentoftheconsultingfirmPartnersforLearningandLeadership,Inc.which
specializes in action technologies including action learning. She holds an EdD and MA in Adult
Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, New York and is on the adjunct faculty
at Teachers College. Her publications include Understanding Action Learning (2007) co-authored
with Victoria J. Marsick. Her clients have included Covidien, the Government of Bermuda,
Nielsen Media, Berlex Pharmaceuticals, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, Fidelity Investments,
PSEG, RR Donnelley, ATT, Ernst and Young, Norwest, and New York Transit Authority.
jaoneil@aol.com www.partnersforlearning.com
David Pearce first worked with Reg Revans on the GEC Senior Management Development
Programme in the mid 1970s, which was captured in More than Management Development

xviii A cti o n Lear nin g in Pract ice
– Action Learning at GEC, edited by Casey and Pearce. All sorts of action learning
experiences followed – a highlight was Action Learning for Chief Executives at Ashridge
Business School. Recently he was involved with Robin Ladkin of Ashridge Consulting in
the project to develop the management abilities of Welsh farming families. Managed by
Menter a Busnes, this programme is ongoing with more than 2,000 participants in more
than 175 sets: see Seeds For Change – Action Learning for Innovation edited by Pearce and
Williams (also available in Welsh).
Mike Pedler works, researches and writes on leadership, action learning, the learning
organization and network organizing. He is Emeritus Professor at Henley Business School,
University of Reading and co-edits the journal Action Learning: Research and Practice. He
first edited this book in 1983.
mikepedler@phonecoop.coop
Joe Raelin is an internationally-recognized scholar in the fields of work-based learning
and leadership. He holds the Asa. S. Knowles Chair of Practice-Oriented Education at
Northeastern University in Boston, USA, and is also Professor in the College of Business
Administration. He is the author of well over 100 articles and many books, including his
well-known Creating Leaderful Organizations and its accompanying Leaderful Fieldbook, as
well as Work-Based Learning: Bridging Knowledge and Action in the Workplace.
j.raelin@neu.edu
http://www.northeastern.edu/poe/about/raelin.htm
Reg Revans (1907–2003) was the founder of the action learning idea, although he
always attributed the essence of it to ancient wisdom. He was successively an Olympic
athlete for Britain (1928), a researcher in nuclear physics at the Cavendish Laboratory in
Cambridge (1928–1935), an educational reformer with Essex County Council (1935–45),
Professor of Management in Manchester (1955–65), and an independent researcher and
consultant thereafter. Politically a Liberal, he was a life-long pacifist and was involved in
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In a tribute, David Casey wrote that Revans had
‘shifted forever some of the world’s assumptions about how managers learn’.
Michael Reynolds is Emeritus Professor of Management Learning at Lancaster
University. He has been director of full-time and part-time postgraduate programmes and
the doctoral programme in the Department of Management Learning and is currently
Director of the Doctoral Programme in e-Research and Technology Enhanced Learning in
the Department of Educational Research. His research interests are in student experiences
of experiential and participative learning designs, the application of critical perspectives
to pedagogy and in students’ experience of difference. He is co-editor with Russ Vince
(University of Bath) of Organizing Reflection (2004) and the Handbook of Experiential
Learning and Management Education (2007).
m.reynolds@lancaster.ac.uk
Clare Rigg is based at the Institute of Technology, Tralee, where she leads an action
learning-based MBA programme. She has worked with practitioners from all sectors
integrating action learning into management and leadership development programmes,
and is particularly interested in the fostering of inter-agency and cross-disciplinary

xix
working through collaborative learning. She has co-authored three books and numerous
chapters and articles on action learning, critical action learning, management learning
and HRD. She i currently co-editor of the Account of Practice section of the journal Action
Learning: Research and Practice.
clare.rigg@staff.ittralee.ie
Lennart Rohlin is the founder of MiL Institute (www.milinstitute.se) and the Action
Reflection Learning (ARL™) concept for ‘earning while learning’ and to ‘make strategy
happen’. He has had appointments at universities and business schools in Sweden, Finland
and the USA, and he has co-founded international institutions for executive education and
action research. He has written and edited about 50 books in the business and management
areas. He is the owner/president of MiLgårdarna – conference sites designed exclusively for
innovative professional meetings (www.milgardarna.se). Lennart has been world champion
in fencing and he lives in Lund, Sweden, with his two children, Mikaela and Melvin.
lennart.rohlin@milgardarna.se
Jean-Anne Stewart is responsible for corporate MBA programmes for a wide variety of
internationalclientsatHenleyBusinessSchool.Shespecializesinfacilitationandleadership
development and has led several European and UK research projects, particularly focused
on facilitation, action learning, third sector leadership and leadership development
and evaluation. Prior to joining Henley, she worked at British Airways developing their
internal facilitation and change capability programme.
jean-anne.stewart@henley.com
Richard Thorpe is Professor of Management Development at Leeds University Business
School. His interests include management learning and development and leadership. His
early industrial experiences inform the way his ethos has developed. Common themes
are: a strong commitment to process methodologies and a focus on action in all its
forms; and interest in and commitment to the development of doctoral students and
the development of capacity within the sector; a commitment to collaborative working
on projects of mutual interest. He is a fellow of the British Academy of Management and
Chair of the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies.
Kiran Trehan is Professor in Management Learning and Leadership at Birmingham
University, prior to this Kiran was Director of HRD and Consulting at Lancaster
University Management School. Kiran is co-editor of Action Learning: Research and
Practice – the first international journal dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and
practice through action learning research and practice. Kiran’s key research interests are
in the field of action learning and action research, she is a key contributor to debates
on the distinctiveness of critical action learning, and how it can be applied in a variety of
organizational and policy domains.
K.trehan@lancaster.ac.uk
Katie Venner is an independent action learning facilitator and Senior Associate at Action
Learning Associates. Her background is in the cultural sector where she has worked in a
number of different roles. With colleagues at Action Learning Associates she developed
the Leadership Facilitation Skills course for the Government-funded Cultural Leadership

xx A cti o n Lear nin g in Pract ice
Programme. Katie has a Masters in Change Agent Skills and Strategies (Dist) from University
of Surrey and continues her interest in organizational change as a practitioner researcher.
kvenner@btinternet.com
Russ Vince is Associate Dean (Research) and Professor of Leadership and Change in the
School of Management, University of Bath. His research investigates the emotional and
political dynamics of organizing, as well as the impact of these dynamics on management
learning, management development, change and leadership. He has authored five books
as well as many journal articles, book chapters and conference papers. Russ is a former
Editor-in-Chief of the journal Management Learning (2005–2010). He is an internationally
recognized expert in organizational learning and action learning.
R.Vince@bath.ac.uk
http://www.bath.ac.uk/management/faculty/russ_vince.html
Deborah Waddill has a special interest in leadership learning and development enabled by
technology. Her new, co-authored text entitled The e-HR Advantage (2011) demonstrates ways
in which technology can support and enhance Human Resource functions. She publishes
regularly and speaks at conferences on the topic of technology-enabled learning, including
ways to extend the reach of action learning through technology. As President of Restek
Consulting, Dr Waddill provides strategic planning assistance for the design of technology-
enabled learning systems for government, for-profit, and non-profit organizations. Dr
Waddill is an instructor for The George Washington University’s Graduate School of
Education online and at its U.S., Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Africa locations. In all of
her endeavors, Dr Waddill seeks to enhance learning and provide leadership development
opportunities to both current and potential leaders, including those in developing countries.
Verna J. Willis is Emeritus Professor, Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia, where
she took a firm stand that there should be chief learning officers in organizations, fully
empowered to serve as members of executive teams. First insights regarding action learning
came from interaction with Revans, beginning in 1994. Thereafter, collaborating often
with Prof. Robert Dilworth at Virginia Commonwealth University, she began research
and practice of action learning in both university and corporate settings. Verna saw that
Revans’ ideas matched well with her extensive practitioner experience, with executive chief
learning officer accountabilities, and with applications of General Systems Theory that had
been a sustained interest in her doctoral work at The State University of New York at Buffalo.
Currently, she contributes to the Global Forum on Business Driven Action Learning.
vwillis@gsu.edu
Roland Yeo is Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and International Business
at the Kuwait Maastricht Business School. He is also an Adjunct Senior Researcher with
the International Graduate School of Business at the University of South Australia and
teaches on the EMBA program at the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals
in Saudi Arabia as a visiting faculty. He has recently co-authored a book with Michael
Marquardt entitled Breakthrough Problem Solving with Action Learning: Concepts and Cases.
In addition to action learning, he has carried out research in organizational learning,
experiential learning and problem-based learning.
yeokkr@yahoo.com

The State of the Art
Mike Pedler
Action learning originates with Reginald Revans (1907–2003), Olympic athlete, student
of nuclear physics, educational administrator and professor of management. Drawing on
ancient sources of wisdom and more recent forbears such as Dewey and Lewin, Revans
sought the improvement of human systems for the benefit of those who depend on them.
Action learning is a pragmatic and moral philosophy based on a deeply humanistic view
of human potential that commits us, via experiential learning, to address the intractable
problems of organizations and societies.
Action learning emerged as a developmental innovation in the late 1960s, especially
through initiatives undertaken in a consortium of London Hospitals (Clark 1972; Wieland
and Leigh 1971; Wieland 1981), and in the UK’s GEC (Casey and Pearce 1977). Though
not to be limited to organization development or management education, action learning
has gained prominence here through its opposition to expert consultancy and traditional
business school practice. In 1965, following negotiations over the new Manchester
Business School, Revans resigned his Chair in protest at the victory of the Owens College
‘book’ culture over the ‘tool’ culture of the College of Technology (later UMIST), which
he saw as being closer to the needs of managers (1980: 197).
So, What is Action Learning?
Revans never offered a single definition. Action learning is not:
… job rotation ... project work ... case studies, business games and other simulations ... group
dynamics and other task-free exercises ... business consultancy and other expert missions
... operational research, industrial engineering, work study and related subjects ... simple
commonsense
(2008: 89–103)
To which could be added many more recent enthusiasms. The refusal to define action
learning is initially confusing, and has several consequences, not least that ‘it means
different things to different people’ (Weinstein 1995: 32). Yet the lack of a final definition
also maintains its vitality and longevity by making necessary a continual reinterpretation
and reinvention. Action learning is an idea, a philosophy, a discipline and also a method,
and never just one of those things.
The essence is to be found in Revans’ epithet: ‘There can be no learning without
action, and no (sober and deliberate) action without learning.’ Learning is ‘cradled in the
task’, and comes via reflection upon the experience of taking action. His change equation:
L ≥ C

xxii A cti o n Lear nin g in Pract ice
argues that people and organizations flourish when their learning is equal to or greater
than the rate of environmental change. His learning equation holds that:
L = P + Q
where learning is a combination of P (Programmed knowledge, or the content of traditional
instruction), and Q (Questioning insight, derived from fresh questions and critical
reflection).
Q is the key to the distinction Revans made between puzzles and problems; whilst
the former have ‘best’ solutions and can be solved by applying P with the help of experts,
problems have no right answers and are best approached through questioning to provoke
new lines of thinking, action and learning. Action learning is not for puzzles, which
are ‘difficulties from which escapes are thought to be known’, but for situations where
‘no single course of action is to be justified ... so that different managers, all reasonable,
experienced and sober, might set out by treating them in markedly different ways’ (Revans
2008: 6).
That is about as much as you need to know to get on with action learning: an
injunction Revans made to everyone he met. However, doing action learning soon reveals
what we do not know, together with a desire to understand more, especially in exchange
with colleagues.
Practising Action Learning…
Practice is a useful word because it holds together the doing and the learning. What we
do, we can also learn from – if we reflect on our actions and their outcomes. We will ever
be asking the questions ‘What is Action Learning?’ and ‘Am I doing it right?’ because, in
the context of trying to do something for the first time, these are always fresh questions.
…especially for the wicked problems
Keith Grint (2008: 11–18) proposes a leadership model (Figure I.1) in which the progression
from ‘critical’ to ‘tame’ to ‘wicked’ problems is marked by an increase both in uncertainty
about solutions and the need for collaboration. Critical problems are the domain of
command: crisis situations such as heart attacks, train crashes or natural disasters demand
swift action, leaving little time for procedure or uncertainty. Tame problems, though they
can be very complex, such as timetabling a school, planning heart surgery or building
a new hospital, are amenable to rational tools and constitute the natural domain of
management. Wicked problems defy rational analysis and are the domain of leadership.
Wicked issues are messy, circular and aggressive, where action often provokes
contradictions due to complex interdependencies on site. Eliminating drug abuse,
homelessnessorcrimeinaneighbourhood,motivatingpeople,developingentrepreneurship
or working across boundaries in organizations are all tricky in this way. Action learning
is the process intended for such problems: proceeding by questions, by not rushing to
solutions, by learning from making deliberate experiments and deliberated risks.

xxiii
Figure I.1 Three types of problem
Humanistic Values
The focus on daunting problems makes for a demanding practice, and yet there is more.
Revans’ action learning is also founded on an uncompromising moral philosophy about
how to be, and how to act. Whilst the action learning ‘rules of engagement’ can be
written down easily enough, they have to be enacted via:
• starting from ignorance – from acknowledging inadequacy and not knowing;
• honesty about self – ‘What is an honest man, and what do I need to do to become one?’
(Belgian manager quoted in Revans 1971: 132);
• commitment to action, and not just not thought – ‘Be ye doers of the word, and not only
hearers of it’ (St. James quoted in Revans 2008: 6);
• in a spirit of friendship – ‘All meaningful knowledge is for the sake of action, and all
meaningful action for the sake of friendship’ (John Macmurray quoted in Revans
2008: 6);
• for the purpose of doing good in the world – ‘To do a little good is better than to write
difficult books’ (The Bhudda quoted in Revans 2008: 6).
Revans was passionate in encouraging people to help themselves, and to help those who
cannot help themselves (1982: 467–492). In contrast to more cognitive and individualistic
learning theories, heart and courage are as important as intelligence and insight in action
learning. In challenging situations, the warmth and support of friends and colleagues is
as vital as their knowledge and critique.
These values are held and symbolized in the set – ‘the cutting edge of every action
learning programme’ (Revans 2008: 10). This small group meets regularly over time on
the basis of voluntary commitment, peer relationship and self-management, to help one
another to act and learn. The first difficulty in practising action learning is often that of
finding and founding the right conditions for this self-direction and peer inquiry to flourish.

xxiv A cti o n Lear nin g in Pract ice
What has Action Learning Now Become?
Since its appearance in the 1960s and 1970s, action learning has been controversial in
promoting learning over teaching, and championing practitioner knowledge over that
of experts. Is it closer now to the ‘mainstream’ than at any other time in its history?
Fourteen years after the last edition of this book, the state of the art is different. Since
1997 there has been a substantial growth of action learning activity in both corporate and
academic contexts; and alongside this growth have come changes in how it is practised
and perceived.
There are two main reasons for the growth of activity:
• The use of action-based approaches in corporate leadership programmes: Leadership
development programmes are reported as increasingly using ‘context specific’
approaches such as coaching, work-based learning, problem-based learning and action
learning (Mabey and Thomson 2000; Horne and Steadman Jones 2001; Bolden 2005).
Michael Marquardt (2010) has suggested that 73 per cent of corporations in the USA
now use action learning for leadership development, a trend also apparent in other
developed and developing economies (see Marquardt, Action Learning around the World
in this volume). As an example, Yonjoo Cho and Hyeon-Cheol Bong (in this book)
detail the rapid adoption of action learning by large businesses in South Korea.
• New interest from academics: Increasing academic interest partly reflects corporate
usage which creates opportunities for research and consulting and also demands for
more practice-oriented postgraduate programmes. However, interest also comes from
those questing for a more critical business and management education (McLaughlin
and Thorpe 1993; Vince and Martin 1993; Wilmott 1994, 1997; Burgoyne and
Reynolds 1997; Reynolds 1999; Rigg and Trehan 2004). Critical action learning (see
Trehan in this volume) finds its voice in questioning the uncritical assumptions of
much management and business development. A second front of academic interest
is found in the turn by organizational researchers towards ‘practical’ and ‘actionable
knowledge’ (See Coghlan in this volume). Action learning contributes here to the
theorizing of organizations as activity systems through the practice of action learners
as ‘actors-in-complex-contexts’ (Ashton 2006: 28).
Alongside this growth of use and interest, action learning itself is changing. This is evident
in both how it is practised, and in how it is perceived:
• As a family of approaches: Arguably action learning has spread more as an ethos than
as a specific method, and whilst there is agreement on the key features of the idea,
there are wide variations in its practice (Pedler et al. 2005: 64–5). These variations can
be construed either as departures or developments from ‘Revans Classical Principles’
or the action learning ‘Gold Standard’ (Willis in this volume). For example, much
current practice focuses on ‘own job’ projects and personal development, rather than
on intractable organizational problems. There are new practice developments not
envisaged by Revans, such as Virtual Action Learning (VAL), and others that he both
predicted and warned against, especially as in the now widespread use of ‘trained
facilitators’. It is also now clear that different practice communities have developed
their own versions of action learning (see the Varieties section in this volume). The

xxv
existence of these means that it is no longer sensible to think of action learning as a
unitary practice.
• As a member of the family of action-based approaches to research and learning: From a
broader perspective, action learning is also part of a wider growth of interest in action
approaches or modalities in management and organizational research (See Raelin in
this volume). In contrast to more positivist approaches that separate theory from
practice, action strategies focus instead on ‘knowledge (as) produced in service of, and
in the midst of, action’ (Raelin 1999: 117). As part of a wider family of action-based
approaches, action learning has been described as ‘non-directive’ (Clark 1972:119)
and can be distinguished by the sovereignty it accords to those actual facing the
difficult problems and challenges and its scepticism regarding experts of all kinds,
including academics.
The aim of this book is to exhibit these changes and practice developments in the essential
context of Revans’ profound idea.
Contents
It is a pleasure to introduce a book which is 80 per cent newly commissioned, and for
which every invited contributor has delivered. Authors were encouraged to set out their
ideas, to give examples of their practice and also to reflect and theorize, so that each
chapter contains elements of the whole. Working as an editor with each author, often
over several drafts, has created for me an intimacy and coherence which is greater than
in the three previous assemblies. The book is in four parts:
• Origins
• Varieties
• Applications
• Questions
These parts variously illustrate the roots of action learning, the diversity that has flourished,
the uses to which it is being put and current questions of research and practice. If this
sounds suspiciously neat, it is true that the contents could have been otherwise ordered,
and that the final arrangement happened late in the day.
Origins presents the views of the early practitioners of action learning. Revans’ own
Action Learning: Its Origins and Nature comes first, as it has since the first edition in 1983,
which also included Bob Garratt and David Pearce’s chapters and the first part of the David
Casey’s as it appears here. David Pearce’s Getting Started: An Action Manual encapsulates
the learning from the GEC action learning programmes of the 1970s, where he was then
a management development adviser, and where several of these contributors first learned
their trade. The chapters by Morris, Lawrence, Casey (Part 2) and Revans’ The Enterprise
as a Learning System all appeared in the second and third editions of 1991 and 1997. New
to this fourth edition are Verna Willis’ appreciative analysis of the 23 critical markers of
the ‘Revans’ Gold Standard’ for authentic action learning, and Yury Boshyk’s biographical
account of Revans’ early life and influences.

xxvi A cti o n Lear nin g in Pract ice
The seven chapters of Varieties represent rather than exhaust the seemingly endless
ways in which action learning can be interpreted. These differing forms either did not exist
or would not have been so clearly seen when this book was last compiled. Taken together
they display a remarkable inventiveness in emphasizing and elaborating particular
aspects of action learning. Take your pick of self-managed, reflection, business-driven or
personal practice; each arising in different contexts and circumstances, each offering a
distinctive flavour. CAL (Critical Action Learning) is a notable new arrival which proposes a
corrective to the yoking of action learning to short-term ends, by acting as a reminder of
its liberationist and democratic values. The infant VAL (Virtual Action Learning) is bound
to thrive via advancing technologies in distributed enterprises and networked worlds.
Underpinning this rich picture, Judy O’Neil and Victoria Marsick present five action
learning schools of thought and show how the varieties are shaped by the pedagogical
beliefs of their designers.
With 11 chapters, Applications reveals more yet variety. These cases of practice
illuminate action learning as applied in the service of management, leadership and business
development in small and large organizations, and in public and in private enterprises.
Two chapters focus on the development of facilitators, an increasingly popular pursuit that
parallels the growth of action learning in large organizations. Others chapters build on
particular applications to develop broader findings and theories on facilitative leadership,
organization development, network learning and social capital formation. Michael
Marquardt completes this part with a survey of the rapid growth of action learning in
Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, Australia and North America.
Questions of practice and theory make up the final part of the book. These contributions
take on some of the knottier problems of action learning, many stemming from Revans’
unified theory, or ‘praxeology’, which seeks to connect actor and context through the
three overlapping systems of Alpha, Beta and Gamma (1971: 33–67). John Burgoyne tops
and tails, first by revealing Revans’ philosophy as simultaneously pragmatic and moral,
and later by seeking to explain how this might be evaluated. Continuing philosophically,
David Coghlan and Joe Raelin make the cases for action learning as ‘practical knowing’,
and as one of the ‘action modalities’ aiming for collaborative and democratic social
change. Complementing these holistic efforts, are four chapters tackling the constituent
themes of action, inaction, reflective practice and learning, which, taken together,
demonstrate how recent research has enriched and added to Revans’ legacy.
References
Ashton, S. (2006) ‘Where’s the action? The concept of action In Action Learning’, Action Learning:
Research Practice, 3 (1) April, 5–29.
Bolden, R. (2005) What is Leadership Development? Research Report 2, Leadership South West,
University of Exeter.
Burgoyne, J. and Reynolds, M. (eds) (1997) Management Learning: Integrating Perspectives in Theory
Practice, London: Sage.
Casey, D. and Pearce, D. (eds) (1977) More than Management Development: Action Learning at GEC,
Aldershot: Gower Press.
Clark, P. A. (1972) Action Research Organisational Change, London: Harper Row.
Grint K. (2008) Leadership, Management and Command – Rethinking D-day, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

xxvii
Horne, M. and Steadman Jones, D. (2001) Leadership: The Challenge for All? London: Institute of
Management Demos.
Mabey, C. and Thomson, A. (2000) ‘The determinants of management development’, British Journal
of Management, 11, Special Issue, S3–S16.
Marquardt, M. (2010) ‘The evidence for the effectiveness of Action Learning’ Presentation to
International Action Learning Conference, Henley Business School, UK, 30 March.
Mclaughlin, H. and Thorpe, R. (1993) ‘Action Learning – a paradigm in emergence: the problems
facing a challenge in traditional management education and development’, British Journal of
Management, 4 (1), 19–27.
Pedler, M., Burgoyne, J. G. and Brook, C. (2005) ‘What has Action Learning learned to become?’,
Action Learning: Research Practice, 2 (1) April, 49–68.
Raelin, J. (1999) ‘Preface to special issue: the action dimension in management: diverse approaches
to research, teaching and development’, Management Learning, 30 (2), 115–125.
Revans, R. W. (1971) Developing Effective Managers, New York: Praeger.
Revans, R. W. (1980) Action Learning: New Techniques for Managers, London: Blond Briggs.
Revans, R. (1982) The Origins and Growth of Action Learning, Bromley: Chartwell-Bratt.
Revans, R. W. (2008) ABC of Action Learning, Aldershot: Gower.
Reynolds, M. (1999) ‘Grasping the nettle: possibilities and pitfalls of a critical management
pedagogy’, British Journal of Management, 10 (2), 171–184.
Rigg, C. and Trehan, K. (2004) ‘Reflections on working with critical Action Learning’, Action Learning:
Research Practice, 1 (2), 149–165.
Vince, R. and Martin, L. (1993) ‘Inside Action Learning: an exploration of the psychology and
politics of the Action Learning model’, Management Education and Development, 24 (3), 205–215.
Wieland, G. F. (1981) Improving Health Care Management, Ann Arbor, Michigan: Health Administration
Press.
Wieland, G. F. and Leigh, H. (eds) (1971) Changing Hospitals: A Report on the Hospital Internal
Communications Project, London: Tavistock.
Weinstein, K. (1995) Action Learning: A Journey in Discovery and Development, London: HarperCollins.
Wilmott, H. (1994) ‘Management education: provocations to a debate’, Management Learning, 25
(1), 105–136.
Wilmott, H. (1997) ‘Critical management learning’ in J. Burgoyne and M. Reynolds (eds), Management
Learning: Integrating Perspectives in Theory Practice, London: Sage, 161–176.

3
Introduction to Part I
Introduction to Part 1
When this book first appeared in 1983, Revans wrote this about himself and the origins
of the idea:
Reg Revans has been writing about action learning since 1945 and practicing it since 1952;
this work was totally disregarded in Britain save where it was held to ridicule by Social Science
‘experts’. After the first GEC programme in 1974/5 his ideas have been transformed by large
numbers of original thinkers presenting his few simple and naïve facts in rich elaborations
essential to commercial viability. Students interested in semantic equivocation are invited to
compare the current literature on management development with any of his early papers. These
are now being made available (The Origins and Growth of Action Learning, Chartwell-
Bratt, 1982) by a number of top British executives who believe that an understanding of what
Revans has so long been saying is vital to our economic recovery. (xvii)
The original thinkers who developed the practice of action learning on the basis of their
experiences of the GEC programme are represented here by Bob Garratt The Power of
Action Learning, David Casey Set Advising and David Pearce Getting Started. With Revans’
two chapters, Action Learning: Its Origins and Nature and The Enterprise as a Learning System,
all appear here, as in previous editions, hardly altered from 1983. These first practitioners
took the ‘naïve and simple facts’ of action learning and turned them into the practice
recognizable today. The idea of the set, for example, later hailed by Revans as the ‘cutting
edge of every action learning programme’, originates in David Casey’s early experiences
as a schoolteacher. John Morris and Jean Lawrence, Minding our Ps Qs and Continuity in
Action Learning (which first appeared in the second 1991 Edition), are notable pioneers,
especially in their application of action learning to the joint development Programmes at
the Manchester Business School,which gave that establishment its celebrated ‘Manchester
Method’ (Wilson 1992). Four of these remarkable people – Casey, Morris, Lawrence and
Revans himself – have died since 2003.
The two remaining chapters were newly commissioned. Verna Willis’ Digging Deeper:
Foundations of Revans’ Gold Standard of Action Learning provides a benchmark for the
question ‘What is action learning?’ in reviewing the critical markers that characterize
Revans’ vision. Yury Boshyk’s Ad Fontes – Reg Revans: some early sources of his personal
growth and values helps with a sister question: ‘Where does action learning come from?’
This biographical account of Revans’ life to the age of 28 sheds new light on the thinking
and values that go to make up the idea.
Reference
Wilson, J. F. (1992) The Manchester Experiment: A History of Manchester Business School 1965–1970,
London: Paul Chapman.

chapter
1 Action Learning:
Its Origins and Nature
REG REVANS
Written for the first edition of Action Learning in Practice in 1983, this has
been the first chapter in all subsequent editions.
In 1971 action learning circumnavigated the globe; in the summer of that year I visited
New York (to discuss the publication of Developing Effective Managers, where it had
appeared), Dallas (where Southern Methodist University was initiating a programme),
Sydney (to lay the foundations of future programmes), Singapore (where discussions
about starting a programme continue), Delhi (now the headquarters of a programme run
by the Government of India) and Cairo (to follow up the Nile Project).
In this chapter I try to explain what action learning may be, but this is not easy when
those who read my lines have not tried action learning themselves. There is nothing
in this chapter about what teachers of management ought to do about getting started,
for that is dealt with by others. My only suggestion to those running the management
schools is, over and above what they are already teaching, they should set out to contrive
the conditions in which managers may learn, with and from each other, how to manage
better in the course of their daily tasks.
Action learning takes so long to describe, so much longer to find interesting, and
so much longer still to get started because it is so simple. As soon as it is presented
as a form of learning by doing the dismissiveness pours forth. ‘Not unlike learning by
doing? … But that’s precisely what everybody here has been up to for donkeys’ years!
Anybody in management education can tell you that lectures and bookwork alone are
not sufficient for developing people who have to take decisions in the real world. We all
know that practise alone makes perfect, and ever since our first programmes were set up
we’ve made all our students, however senior, do a lot of case studies. Some we fit into
practical projects, and others do job rotation in their own firms. What’s more, all our staff
have been managers themselves, averaging over ten years of business experience, so they
can get in on local problems to write up as our own cases. Quite often the initiative for
this comes from the firms down on the industrial estate; one man has a quality problem,
another is trying to cut his stock levels, and they ask us if we’d like to help both them
and our own students. So, what with one thing and another going on here, we don’t see
what this excitement is about. Action learning? Learning by doing? What’s so new? And
who wants another book about it?
We may all agree that learning by doing is, in many forms, nothing very new. It is
one of the primary forces of evolution, and has accompanied mankind since long before
our ancestors came down from the trees. Even the most primitive creatures must have

6 A cti o n Lear nin g in Pract ice
learnt from their own experience, by carrying on with what they found good for them
and by refraining from what they found to be harmful. The earliest living things, without
any memory worth mentioning, also learnt by doing; if it was fatal to their life style they
died, and if it was agreeable they flourished. Their behaviour was self-regulatory and its
outcomes either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. But, as evolution went forward and the brain developed,
the results of more and more experiences were remembered and the organisms grew more
and more discriminating: outcomes were no longer just black or white, life or death, go
or no-go. They took on more subtle differences of interpretation, like ‘good’ or ‘bad’; ‘try
again’ or ‘that’s enough for now’; ‘carry on by yourself’ or ‘ask someone to help you’.
These experiences are enshrined in our proverbs: ‘The burned child dreads the fire’; ‘Once
bitten, twice shy’; and (Proverbs ch. xiv, v. 6) expresses clearly the regenerative nature of
learning, knowledge building upon knowledge in a true desire to learn: ‘A scorner seeketh
wisdom and findeth it not: but knowledge is easy unto him that understandeth.’ Once
the first point has been grasped the others readily follow: ‘Nothing succeeds like success’
is, perhaps, a more modern way of saying the same thing. Even the failure to learn has its
aphorism: ‘There’s no fool like an old fool’ tells of those to whom experience means little,
and who go on making the same mistakes at 70 that might have been excused at 17. With
so much common testimony to learning by doing, therefore, what can be said for action
learning that we find it necessary to keep on about it?
One reason is that it is a social process, whereby those who try it learn with and
from each other. The burned child does not need to be told by its mother that it has
been hurt, nor that the fire was the agent of pain. Action learning has a multiplying
effect throughout the group or community of learners. But this effect has also long
been known: ‘Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend’
(Proverbs ch. xxvii, v. 17) expresses well one aspect of action learning today. The best
way to start on one’s really difficult problems is to go off and help somebody else with
theirs. To be sure, the social strength of action learning (as I believe it to be) has a subtlety
of its own: it is more than mutual growth or instruction, whereby each partner supplies
the manifest deficiencies of the others with the knowledge or skill necessary to complete
some collective mission. Lending a hand to the common cause may well be part of
any action learning project – but it remains incidental, rather than central, to it. Nor is
action learning the essence of the mutual improvement societies so morally essential to
the Victorians and still, to some degree, the contract tacitly uniting all communities of
scholars. We must applaud the free exchange of what is known between the experts who
know it; the sophisticated approach of operational research, in which teams of scientists,
engineers and mathematicians work together on the complexities of vast undertakings,
such as international airports, new towns, atomic energy plants and so forth, demands
that one professional shall learn with and from the other. Nevertheless, what they are
doing, for all its intricate teamwork, may be far from action learning – and may even be
flatly opposed to it. For in true action learning, it is not what a man already knows and
tells that sharpens the countenance of his friend, but what he does not know and what
his friend does not know either. It is recognized ignorance, not programmed knowledge,
that is the key to action learning: men start to learn with and from each other only when
they discover that no one knows the answer but all are obliged to find it.
In practice, we find small groups are more effective at learning than simple pairs,
provided that every member can describe his need to learn to the others in his set. The
explanation of our paradox – that the learning dynamic is the recognition of a common

7
Act ion Learning: Its Origins and Nature
ignorance rather than of some collective superfluity of tradeable knowledge – is both
simple and elusive. Action learning, as such, requires questions to be posed in conditions of
ignorance, risk and confusion, when nobody knows what to do next; it is only marginally
interested in finding the answers once those questions have been posed. For identifying
the questions to ask is the task of the leader, or of the wise man; finding the answers to
them is the business of the expert. It is a grave mistake to confuse these two roles, even if
the same individual may, from time to time, occupy them both. But the true leader must
always be more interested in what he cannot see in front of him, and this is the mark of
the wise man; the expert’s job is to make the most of all that is to hand. To search out the
meaning of the unseen is the role of action learning; to manipulate to advantage all that
is discovered is the expression of programmed teaching. Action learning ensures that,
before skills and other resources are brought to bear in conditions of ignorance, risk and
confusion, some of the more fertile questions necessary to exploring those conditions
have been identified: there is nothing so terrible in all human experience as a bad plan
efficiently carried out, when immense technical resources are concentrated in solving the
wrong problems. Hell has no senate more formidable than a conspiracy of shortsighted
leaders and quickwitted experts. Action learning suggests that, only if a man, particularly
the expert, can be persuaded to draw a map of his own ignorance, is he likely to develop
his full potential. In an epoch of change, such as that in which the world now flounders,
there is no handicap to exceed the misconception of past experience – particularly that
on which present reputations are founded. The idolization of successes established in
circumstances unlikely to recur may well guarantee one’s place in The Dictionary of
National Biography, but it is of little help in the fugitive present; there are times when we
do well to put our fame aside:
At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of
heaven? And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them and said,
Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter
into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the
same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
(Matthew ch. xviii, v. 1)
In times such as now, it is as imperative to question the inheritance of the past as it is to
speculate upon the uncertainties of the future. As indicated in the quotation above Jesus
warns of the need to be converted, to become once more as little children, since there
is little hope for those who cannot unclutter their memories of flattery and deceit. It is
advice most worthy of attention among all peoples with such tremendous histories as the
British, although its classical illustration is in the parable of David and Goliath (I Samuel
ch. xvii); here the experts, the warriors of Israel, faced with an adversary unknown in
their experience (an armoured giant), could do nothing. They could only imagine what
they had been taught: a bigger and stronger Israelite was needed to crush Goliath. Since
no such man existed they were facing disaster. But the little child, David, proved himself
the greatest among them; he was a child who had no experience of armour and could see
that the search for the bigger and stronger Israelite was misconceived, so that Goliath had
to be dealt with in some other fashion. The way was therefore open for him to pose the
key question: ‘Given that there is no man to throw at Goliath, how else do we kill him?’
It is a fair statement of action learning to paraphrase this question as: ‘Now all of us can

see – even the experts, too – that our ideas simply do not work, what we need is to look
for something that is quite new.’ No question was ever more important to the denizens
of this Sceptred Isle; somebody should launch a campaign to change its patron saint to
David from Saint George.
We must not give the impression that it is only traditionalists such as the soldiers
who have trouble in changing their conceptions; on the contrary, many of the greatest
inventions are the products of conflict, for then we are obliged to think to save our skins.
Nor must we imagine that our (supposed) intellectual leaders will necessarily come up
with the new ideas; for example, an extrapolation of the current unemployment figures
recently made by some professor suggests that 90 per cent of the population will be out of
work by the year 2000 – although he does not say how many of these will be professors.
What can be done to deflect the course of history, so as to avert this terrible calamity with
but one person out of ten in work? The academic seer, exactly like the Israelites, finds the
answer in his own past experience: more education. At the very moment in which the
country needs as many Davids as possible, to help the rest of us become again as little
children and to enter the kingdoms of heaven of our choice, we are to be exposed still
more mercilessly to the dialectic of scholars and the sophistry of books.
So far action learning has been presented merely as another interpretation of well-
known historical events and biblical quotations. It is as old as humanity, illustrated in the
Old Testament, justified in the New and implicit in classical philosophy. What, then, is
original about it? Only, perhaps, its method. But, before we dismiss this as incidental, let
us recall that every branch of achievement advances only as fast as its methods: without
telescopes there could be no astronomy, without computers no space missions, without
quarries and mines no walls, no houses, no tools and therefore not much else.
This relation of what can be done to the richness of the means of doing it is, of course,
another statement of action learning itself, its specifically useful method is not only in
making clear the need for more Davids, but in setting out to develop them. It may, in
essence, be no more than learning by doing, but it is learning by posing fresh questions
rather than copying what others have already shown to be useful – perhaps in conditions
that are unlikely to recur. Most education, and practically all training, is concerned in
passing on the secrets and the theories of yesterday; before anything can be taught, or
before anybody can be instructed, a syllabus must be prepared out of what is already
known and codifed. But if today is significantly different from yesterday, and tomorrow
is likely to be very different from today, how shall we know what to teach? Does not the
parable of David and Goliath justify this question? Action learning is not opposed to
teaching the syllabus of yesterday, nor of last year, nor even of antiquity; action learning
merely asks that, in addition to programmed instruction, the development of our new
Davids will include the exploration of their own ignorance and the search for fresh
questions leading out of it. Action learning is a method of building on the academic
tradition, not (as some seem to fear) a simplistic challenge to that tradition. As another
authority has it:
Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to
fulfil.
(Matthew Ch v, v. 17)

9
The search for innovation began at the nationalization of the British coal industry,
when it emerged that much less was known about how to run a pit than the experts
would admit to – particularly when they were overwhelmed by the political hurricane
that had struck their ancient culture. The colliery managers themselves were soon able
to recognize that their new problems were beyond their individual capabilities, and in
those early days they had little confidence in the administrative hierarchies established
as their new masters. Thus, the suggestion made to the colliery managers’ professional
organization by its former president, Sir Andrew Bryan, that the managers themselves
should work together, despite their self-confessed shortcomings, upon the here-and-now
troubles of their own mines, was discussed with a cautious curiosity and accepted with a
confident determination.
For three years a representative sample of 22 managers, drawn from pits all over
England and Wales, worked together to identify and to treat their own problems; they
were helped by a small team under the technical leadership of a seconded manager (who
returned to run his own pit again) and by a dozen graduate mining trainees. Together with
the staffs of the 22 pits themselves, the team worked through the symptoms of trouble
indicated by the managers themselves, who met regularly at each other’s mines to review
not only the evidence that had been collected, but also the use made of it to improve
the underground performances of the systems to which that evidence referred. Learning
by doing took on both a structure and a discipline: identifying the problem by following
up the symptoms, obliging those who owned the emergent problem to explain to their
colleagues how they imagined it to have arisen, inviting proposals about early action to
deal with it, reporting back to those same colleagues the outcome of such proposals for
evaluation, and reviewing progress and prospects. The managers met regularly in stable
sets of four or five; they were constrained by the nature of their operations and by the
discipline of observation not only to examine with their own underground officials what
might be going on around them, but also to disclose to their learner–colleagues why they
might have held the many misconceptions uncovered by these practical exercises.
One manager agreed to study in depth the system by which he maintained his
underground machinery; he encouraged interested parties from other pits to share
his results, not merely to instruct him on how to do a better job but because they had
to understand more clearly some troubles of their own. In this way he is launching a
community of self-development whose credentials are the ultimate values of the managers
themselves. There are many forms, no doubt, of education and training that enable the
well-informed to make a point or two for the benefit of others, but invariably it is not
clear that the points so made are also for the benefit of the here-and-now conditions
in which those others may work. Facts that are incontrovertible in discussion may be
ambiguous in application, and those unskilled in application may, simply by instructing
others, nevertheless deceive themselves. There can be no place for this in action learning:
all statements, whether of fact or of belief, whether of observation or of policy, whether
about one’s problems or about oneself, are all subject to the impartial responses of nature
and to the sceptical judgements of relentless colleagues. Only those who have suffered
the comradeship in adversity of an action learning set, each manager anxious to do
something effective about something imperative, can appreciate the clarifying influences
of compulsory self-revelation. This alone can help the individual to employ better his
existing talents and internal resources, revealing why he says the things he says, does the
things he does, and values the things he values. As one of the fellows in an early Belgian

programme remarked at its final review: ‘An honest man, did you suggest? What is an
honest man? And what ought I to do to become one?’ It is the participants themselves,
each wrestling with his own conditions of ignorance, risk and confusion, who drag such
questions from the newly-explored doubts of their macerated souls: they have no need
for case leaders nor for programmed instruction (save on such technical details as they
themselves can spot), since their growth is symbiotic, with and from each other, out of
their own adversities, by their own resources and for their own rewards.
The reference to how action learning (as a specific social process) began in the collieries
offers the chance of its further description. First, we notice that it was intended, not as an
educational instrument, but as an approach to the resolution of management difficulties;
the principal motivation to action learning was not a desire to teach anybody, nor even
the hope that somebody else might learn: it was to do something about the tasks that the
colliery managers were under contract to master. The argument was simple: the primary
duty of the National Coal Board is to ensure that coal is drawn up the shafts of its pits at
a reasonable price and in adequate amount; the training of colliery managers to help the
Board fulfil this duty is quite incidental. Action learning maintains the proper priorities
by suggesting that the managers continue with their contractual obligations of drawing
coal, which they now do in such fashion that they succeed in doing it better tomorrow by
reporting to their colleagues how well they are doing it today. The managerial task itself
is both the syllabus and the lesson.
Secondly, the learning of the managers, manifested by the improvement in
productivity, consists mainly in their new perceptions of what they are doing and in their
changed interpretations of their past experiences; it is not any fresh programme of factual
data, of which they were previously ignorant but which they now have at their command,
that enables them to surge with supplementary vigour through the managerial jungles.
Perhaps for the first time in their professional lives they are able to relate their managerial
styles (how to select objectives, evaluate resources and appraise difficulties) to their own
values, their own talents and their own infirmities. If, as will at times occur, any particular
member of an action learning set recognizes that he has need of technical instruction or
programmed knowledge, he may make such arrangements as he can to acquire it. But his
quest need no longer be seen as cardinal to action learning, even if his further success
in treating his problems must depend upon the accuracy of his newly-to-be-acquired
techniques; action learning will soon make clear the value of his latest lessons, and may
even encourage him to be more discriminating in any future choice of technical adviser.
Thirdly, we see from this distinction between the reinterpretation of what is already
knownontheonehand,andontheother,theacquisitionofknowledgeformerlyunfamiliar,
another characteristic of action learning: it is to attack problems (or opportunities) and not
puzzles, between which there is a deep distinction, yet one frequently overlooked. The
puzzle is an embarrassment to which a solution already exists, although it may be hard
to find even for the most accomplished of experts. Common examples are the crossword
puzzle, the end game at chess and the A-level examination question demanding a
geometrical proof. Many technical troubles of industrial management are largely puzzles,
such as how to speed work flow, measure costs, reduce stock levels, simplify delivery
systems, optimize maintenance procedures and so forth; industrial engineering and
operational research are systematic attacks upon manufacturing puzzles more often than
not. The problem, on the other hand, has no existing solution, and even after it has been
long and deliberately treated by different persons, all skilled and reasonable, it may still

11
suggest to each of them some different course of subsequent action. This will vary from
one to another, in accordance with the differences between their past experiences, their
current values and their future hopes.
In the treatment of problems, therefore, as distinct from puzzles, the subjectivities
of those who carry out that treatment are cardinal. All who treat the same puzzle should
arrive at much the same conclusion, consonant with some observable outcome. But,
in the treatment of a problem, none can be declared right or wrong; whether any
particular upshot is acceptable or not, and to whom, depends (and must depend) upon
the characteristics of the individual to whom that upshot is made known. While it may
be a substantial puzzle to measure how many unemployed persons there will be in Britain
next New Year’s Eve, those who set out to do the measurement should be in significant
agreement. But the managerial (political, governmental) problem as to what, if anything,
to do about it will scarcely be an object of agreement. Such proposals for action will be
strongly coloured by all manner of personal beliefs and interests, ranging from bank
balances to international sentiments, and from the estimate of oneself being out of work
to the (possibly subconscious) appreciation of what a power of good this experience
would do to those who write so eloquently about its reinvigorating effects.
However, action learning makes no claim to develop the skills for solving puzzles: this
is the role of programmed instruction in the appropriate profession, trade or technology;
the mission of our method is to clarify the problems that face managers, by helping them
to identify, through the enticing distortions and deceitful recollections of their own past
triumphs and rebuffs, what possible courses of action are open to them. It is when these
are then surveyed in detail that the puzzle-solving expertise is called for. Our experience
of many action learning programmes then suggests that this expertise is generally at hand
in the very organization tormented by the problem to be resolved; if it is not, then there
is almost invariably another organization represented in the action learning programme
that will be most happy to supply it.
All may learn with and from each other, not just the participants alone but on a
larger scale; the concept of a learning community, that emerged from the Inter-University
Programme of Belgium, is perhaps the highest expression of the social implications of
action learning that we can find. The ease with which such a community may be formed
out of the organizations that choose to work together in an action learning programme
is evidently a measure of the readiness with which they communicate both within and
between themselves. It has long been known that high morale and good performance are
marked by speedy and effective systems of communication, and it is these which enable
their managements to learn. When tasks are carried out in settings that soon make clear
the consequences of those tasks, then life becomes not only intelligible, but is in itself a
learning process and an avenue to self-respect and confidence.
So far this chapter has concentrated on the advantages of working in the set of
manager–colleagues, each of whom is endeavouring to understand and treat some problem
allocated to him. It may be (as it was with the participants in the pioneering programme
among the mining engineers) a series of troubles arising in his own command, so that,
if the manager is to carry on with his own job, he is able to work only part time on his
assignment; on the other hand, the manager (as in the first top-level exchange programme
in Belgium) may be working full time in some other enterprise and upon a problem in
some functional field remote from his own. There are many different options available
to the designer of action learning programmes, but all must be characterized by two

criteria: the set, in which real managers tackling real problems in real time are able freely
to criticize, advise and support their fellows, helped as the participants feel appropriate by
external specialists; and the field of action, wherein the real problem exists to be treated
by other real persons in the same real time. In other words, action learning demands not
only self-disclosure of personal perception and objective, but the translation of belief and
opinion into practice; all that goes on in the set must have its counterpart in the field of
action, and the progress of this counterpart activity is constantly reviewed within the set.
Thus, action learning not only makes explicit to the participant managers their own
inner processes of decision, but makes them equally attentive to the means by which
those processes effect changes in the world around them. After 20 years observing what
the set members have to say to each other about success and failure in the field of action,
it is possible to suggest that what might reasonably be called the ‘micropolitical’ skills
needed by managers to judge what is relevant to building into a decision, on the one
hand, and to secure what is essential to implementing that decision, on the other, can
be significantly developed by action learning. In other words, those who participate in
successful sets can also learn to penetrate the mists of field diagnosis more clearly and to
bring a surer touch to their field achievements.
This is not the place to enter into a detailed discussion of what these micropolitical
skills may be, but an understanding of them seems cardinal to any general theory of
human action. For the present, it is sufficient to summarize the successful diagnosis in
the three questions: What are we trying to do? What is stopping us from doing it? What
might we be able to do about it? (and it is interesting to write down what David might
have answered to them all); and to perceive effective therapy as a campaign of allies who
answer to the specification: Who knows about this problem? Who cares about it? Who
can do anything about it?’ It is the quality of the successful fellow to identify these allies
and to recruit them throughout his project into an action team (known in Belgium as
the structure d’accueil) to serve whoever may own the problem on which the fellow is to
exercise and develop his managerial skills.
The literature of project design and negotiation must be consulted by those who wish
to take action learning beyond the report writing stages that many see as its conclusion,
for the complexities of taking action (which demand commitment and anxiety) go far
beyond those of suggesting what action might be taken by others (which call only for
intelligence and loquacity); all that must be observed now is that exercises that call only
for (supposed) analysis of field problems, and are completed without the (supposed)
analysis being put into action, are simply not action learning as it is defined in this
chapter. This, of course, is no reason whatsoever for regarding them unfavourably; as with
the case study, in which the participants neither collect the evidence from the field before
discussing it nor, after their discussion, do anything to implement their conclusions,
much may still be gained – in particular, dialectical skill in knocking the arguments of
others to bits. For many of life’s occasions such skill may be a most useful asset. It is, all
the same, a mistake to imagine that the facts of nature in all her raw relentlessness are
quite as readily disposed of as are the arguments of one’s more vulnerable opponents in
the classroom. It is not enough for managers to know what is good, nor even to convince
other managers that they know what is good: they must also be able to do it in the real
world. In this life it is generally a mistake to confuse talking about action with action itself.
The other contributions to this book will give some indication of the present condition
of our subject; the central thesis – that responsible action is our greatest disciplinarian

13
as well as our most sympathetic helper – will appear in every light, in every setting and
in every culture. It will do so, not because action learning has any claim to greatness
nor to originality, but because it is in the very nature of organic evolution. Nevertheless,
so numerous are the possible variations upon the themes that run through this book
that action learning may seem to be all things to all men. Certainly, I for one am often
confused by reading of some development that is what I would have called pure action
learning, but that is described by some other name, such as ‘activity learning’, or ‘action
teaching’, or ‘participative management’, or ‘management action teamwork’, or any of
a score of other titles; it is only when I refer to the date of publication of such accounts
(usually in the past couple of years) that I can be assured that my writings of the 1940s
are not unconscious plagiarism. I am also mystified, from time to time, to read confident
reports of successful achievements in the field of management education that are listed
as action learning, but later perusals still confirm my inability to detect in them what I
have set forth in this chapter as characteristic (for me) of action learning. But of what
importance is my failure? If we give our attention to the main process by which mankind
has dragged itself up from the abyss to which some of its representatives seem so anxious
to return, we must not be surprised if there is disagreement as to the nature of that
process. For all that, however, I cannot put out of my mind two references, whenever
the nature of action learning is compared with what, during my spell as President of the
European Association of Management Training Centres, was for a generation regarded as
management education. The first is from Plutarch’s Lives (Agesilaus p. 726):
Agesilaus being invited once to hear a man who admirably imitated the nightingale, he
declined, saying he had heard the nightingale itself.
The origin of the second I can no longer recall, except as a threat by my mother when
I was inclined to stray beyond the garden wall; it was that I might be stolen by the gipsies
and then so disfigured that even she would be unable to recognize me were I offered back
to her on sale. It is astonishing to discover, so late in life, how vividly I remember her
words on reading yet one more article on what is new in action learning.

chapter
2 The Enterprise as a
Learning System
reg revans
This chapter first appeared in The Origins and Growth of Action Learning
(Bromley: Chartwell-Bratt 1982, pp. 280–286), but according to the note there
was written in Brussels in 1969. The text is as the original and unedited.
This paper was written in the last months of the Inter-University Programme of the
Fondation Industrie-Université of Belgium. It had been discovered during the course of
that momentous experiment how the presence of a visiting manager within an enterprise
whose management had become convinced of the need for a lot of those employed
there to learn, particularly when supported by a band of allies, could in fact engender
an enlightenment previously unsuspected. Our key assumption was that the presence
within each enterprise of an outsider undisguised, simply behaving as the intelligent
learner about some problem he had never before encountered, soon set off a secondary,
but nonetheless powerful, campaign of learning among the subordinates on the spot and
with whom he regularly discussed his lines of enquiry.
Since the visitor was not only trying to understand his own approach to conditions of
ignorance, risk and confusion, but was also the agent of the home management equally
concerned to make sense of what appeared to them an intractable difficulty, a very simple
question arose: Was the secondary (autonomous) learning process engendered merely
because the majority of subordinates had become aware that the problem existed, and that
it was seen by their top management to be serious? Or was the visitor more than an agent,
in the sense that without him there could not possibly have started any autonomous
curiosity among the home subordinates at all? If there is in most organizations staffed
with normally intelligent persons a latent desire to behave sensibly in front of colleagues
(as the visiting fellows of the programme seemed to have discovered) could this desire
not be identified and turned to constructive use without needing to go through the
elaborate ceremonies of exchanging senior managers? If the enterprise was, in fact,
already a potential learning system, could its capacity for self-development be exploited
autonomously by the top management taking the lead? Why, except when the learning
of the senior managers was the cardinal objective, do more than get the local staffs and
their existing subordinates running their own enquiries?
Alas, the suggestion was grossly premature; it was rejected even by those who had had
the courage to open their secrets to the exchanges of the Inter-University Programme.
Not until the Japanese menace of the late 1970s introduced the Q-circle to Europe could
the issue once more be raised.

16 Acti o n Lear nin g in Pract ice
The Enterprise as a System of Systems
Many persons concerned with the business enterprise, whether as director, employee
or adviser, will have their own professional reasons for perceiving it as some manner of
system: for example, the controller, who needs to ensure that its total revenue exceeds,
one year with another, its total expenditure, without the specific costs of such-and-
such a department necessarily being met by its own specific income; the manufacturing
superintendent, who will expect some overall balance between its flow of goods and
materials, not being embarrassed at one moment by a chronic shortage of stock to meet
his orders, nor at another by a sharp reminder that too much capital is tied up in a super-
abundance of raw materials; the personnel director, who hopes that, five years hence, the
enterprise will still be able to rely upon 80 per cent of the staff now serving it, each and
every one richer by five intervening years of precious experience.
All these senior men, to ensure continuity and balanced effectiveness, need to think
in terms of inputs, flows and outputs; none must envision the enterprise as a series of
isolated and independent jerks of activity, springing at random into local effect and
unrelated to any larger and continuous totality. Such systemic approaches would be
readily claimed by most departmental heads: to ensure such organic thinking there exists
a vast range of professional teaching and qualification, embracing such arts as budgetary
control and standard costing; production scheduling and inventory control; manpower
planning and staff development, and an inexhaustible army of managerial techniques
marching in acronymic procession across the prospectuses of the business schools – PERT,
CPA, DCF, IVI, MBO, OD, OR, X or Y, and a score of others.
The Individual and the Task
Such unifying ideas arouse little contention. They have, indeed, entered deeply into
the planning both of the working organizations themselves, and of many education
programmes enticing managers to think of their firms or departments as ‘systems’ with
many interacting parts. It would hardly be rash to suggest that one-third of all published
management literature is concerned with such issues of functional organization, nor that
an even larger proportion of time is devoted to them on management courses.
There is now evidence that, however useful, however valid, this functional approach
may be, the concept of the enterprise as a system has quite other but no less significant
interpretations. The tasks that every person carries out in the course of his daily
employment, whether at first sight concerned with purchasing, design, manufacture,
marketing, transport, accountancy, personnel development or wages payment, contain
another systemic element, the potential power of which is only of late becoming
recognized. As the chief executive of one of Britain’s largest firms recently remarked:
Our main concern is no longer to ensure that we find, train and keep the biggest share of
Britain’s leading chemists; nor is it solely to concentrate on the maximum return on our
investment. These are necessary ends, but of themselves are insufficient. Our need in the 1970s
is to see ourselves as a developing system of two hundred thousand individuals.

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(upper) Cranial Dome of Pithecanthropus erectus from river gravel in Java.

(lower) Skull of a Greek from an ancient Cemetery.

THE
KINGDOM OF MAN
BY
E. RAY LANKESTER
M.A. D.Sc. LL.D. F.R.S.
HONORARY FELLOW OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD; CORRESPONDENT
OF THE INSTITUTE OF FRANCE; EMERITUS PROFESSOR
OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON; PRESIDENT
OF THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE
ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE
DIRECTOR OF THE NATURAL HISTORY DEPARTMENTS OF THE
BRITISH MUSEUM
LONDON
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE CO LTD
10 ORANGE STREET, LEICESTER SQUARE
1907

EXTINCT ANIMALS
BY
Prof. E. RAY LANKESTER, F.R.S.
With a Portrait of the Author, and 218 other Illustrations
Demy 8vo. Price 7s. 6d. net
DESCRIPTIVE NOTE.
The author gives us here a peep at the wonderful history of the kinds of
animals which no longer exist on the surface of the globe in a living state,
though once they flourished and held their own. Young and old readers will
alike enjoy Prof. Lankester’s interesting narrative of these strange creatures,
some of which became extinct millions of years ago, others within our own
memory. The author’s account of the finding of their extant remains, their
probable habits and functions of life, and their places in the world’s long
history, is illustrated profusely from point to point, adding greatly to the
entertainment of the story.
Nature: “ ... We give the book a hearty welcome, feeling sure that its perusal will
draw many young recruits to the army of naturalists, and many readers to its pages.”
The Times: “There has been published no book on this subject combining so
successfully the virtues of accuracy and attractiveness.... Dr. Lankester’s methods as
an expositor are well known, but they have never been more pleasantly exemplified
than in the present book.”
The Athenæum: “Examples of Extinct Animals and their living representatives
Professor Lankester has described with a masterly hand in these present pages.”
LONDON
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EYRE SPOTTISWOODE, H.M. PRINTERS, LONDON

DESCRIPTION OF THE FRONTISPIECE
The upper figure is from a cast of the celebrated specimen found in a river
gravel in Java, probably of as great age as the palæolithic gravels of Europe.
Though rightly to be regarded as a ‘man’—the creature which possessed this skull
has been given the name ‘Pithecanthropus.’ The shape of the cranial dome differs
from that of a well-developed European human skull (shewn in the lower
photograph, that of a Greek skull) in the same features as do the very ancient
prehistoric skulls from the Belgian caves of Spey, and from the Neanderthal of the
Rhineland. These differences are, however, measurably greater in the Javanese
skull.
The three great features of difference are: (1) the great size of the eye-brow
ridges (the part below and in front of A in the figures) in the Java skull; (2) the
much greater relative height of the middle and back part of the cranial dome (lines
e and f) in the Greek skull; (3) the much greater prominence in the Greek skull of
the front part of the cranial dome—the prefrontal area or frontal ‘boss’ (the part in
front of the line A C, the depth of which is shewn by the line d).
The parts of the cranial cavity thus obviously more capacious in the Greek skull
are precisely those which are small in the Apes and overlie those convolutions of
the brain which have been specially developed in Man as compared with the
highest Apes.
The line A B in both the figures is the ophryo-tentorial line. It is drawn from the
ophryon (the mid-point in the line drawn across the narrowest part of the frontal
bone just above the eye-brow ridges), which corresponds externally to the most
anterior limit of the brain, to the extra-tentorial point (between the occipital
ridges) and is practically the base line of the cerebrum. The lines e and f are
perpendiculars on this base line, the first half-way between A and B, the second
half-way between the first and the extra-tentorial point.
C is the point known to craniologists as ‘bregma,’ the meeting point of the
frontal and the two parietal bones.
The line A C is drawn as a straight line joining A and C—but if the skull is
accurately posed it corresponds to the edge of the plane at right angles to the
sagittal plane of the skull—which traverses both bregma (C) and ophryon (A)—and
where it ‘cuts’ the skull marks off the prefrontal area or boss. (See for the full-face
view of this area in the two skulls—Figs. 1 and 2.) The line d is a perpendicular let
fall from the point of greatest prominence of the prefrontal area on to the
prefrontal plane. It indicates the depth of the prefrontal cerebral region. Drawn on

both sides on the surface of the bone and looked at from in front (the white
dotted line in Figs. 1 and 2) it gives the maximum breadth of the prefrontal area.
By dividing the ophryo-tentorial line into 100 units, and using those units as
measures, the depths of the brain cavity in the regions plumbed by the lines d, e,
and f, can be expressed numerically and their differences in a series of skulls
stated in percentage of the ophryo-tentorial length.

CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I. — Nature’s Insurgent Son 1
CHAPTER II. — The Advance of Science, 1881–1906 66
CHAPTER III. — Nature’s Revenges: The Sleeping Sickness 159
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Frontispiece: — Profile views of the Cranial Dome of Pithecanthropus
erectus, the ape-like man from an ancient river
gravel in Java, and of a Greek skull.
Fig. 1. — Frontal view of the Cranial Dome of Pithecanthropus 16
Fig. 2. — Frontal view of the same Greek skull as that shown in the
frontispiece 16
Fig. 3. — Eoliths, of ‘borer’ shape, from Ightham, Kent 18
Fig. 4. — Eoliths of trinacrial shape, from Ightham, Kent 20
Fig. 5. — Brain casts of four large Mammals 23
Fig. 6. — Spironema pallidum, the microbe of Syphilis discovered by
Fritz Schaudinn 37
Fig. 7. — The Canals in Mars 43
Fig. 8. — The Canals in Mars 44
Fig. 9. — Becquerel’s shadow-print obtained by rays from Uranium
Salt 73

Fig. 10. — Diagrams of the visible lines of the Spectrum given by
incandescent Helium and Radium 76
Fig. 11. — The transformation of Radium Emanation into Helium
(spectra) 83
Fig. 12. — Dry-plate photograph of a Nebula and surrounding stars 90
Fig. 13. — The Freshwater Jelly fish, Limnocodium 97
Fig. 14. — Polyp of Limnocodium 97
Fig. 15. — Sense-organ of Limnocodium 97
Fig. 16. — The Freshwater Jelly-fish of Lake Tanganyika 98
Fig. 17. — Sir Harry Johnston’s specimen of the Okapi 99
Fig. 18. — Bandoliers cut from the striped skin of the Okapi 99
Fig. 19. — Skull of the horned male of the Okapi 100
Fig. 20. — The metamorphosis of the young of the common Eel 101
Fig. 21. — A unicellular parasite of the common Octopus, producing
spermatozoa 102
Fig. 22. — The Coccidium, a microscopic parasite of the Rabbit,
producing spermatozoa 102
Fig. 23. — Spermatozoa of a unicellular parasite inhabiting a Centipede 103
Fig. 24. — The motile fertilizing elements (antherozoids or
spermatozoa) of a peculiar cone-bearing tree, the Cycas
revoluta 104
Fig. 25. — The gigantic extinct Reptile, Triceratops 106
Fig. 26. — A large carnivorous Reptile from the Triassic rocks of North
Russia 107
Fig. 27. — The curious fish Drepanaspis, from the Old Red Sandstone
of Germany 107
Fig. 28. — The oldest Fossil Fish known 108
Fig. 29. — The skull and lower jaw of the ancestral Elephant,
Palæomastodon, from Egypt 109
Fig. 30. — The latest discovered skull of Palæomastodon 110
Fig. 31. — Skulls of Meritherium, an Elephant ancestor, from the Upper
Eocene of Egypt 111

Fig. 32. — The nodules on the roots of bean-plants and the nitrogen-
fixing microbe, Bacillus radicola, which produces them 114
Fig. 33. — The continuity of the protoplasm of vegetable cells 116
Fig. 34. — Diagram of the structures present in a typical organic ‘cell’ 117
Fig. 35. — The Number of the Chromosomes 119
Fig. 36. — The Number of the Chromosomes 120
Figs. 37 to 42. — Phagocytes engulphing disease germs— drawn by
Metschnikoff
136-
7
Fig. 43. — A Phagocyte containing three Spirilla, the germs of
relapsing fever, which it has engulphed 137
Fig. 44. — The life-history of the Malaria Parasite 142
Fig. 45. — The first blood-cell parasite described, the Lankesterella of
Frog’s blood 144
Fig. 46. — Various kinds of Trypanosomes 145
Fig. 47. — The Laboratory of the Marine Biological Association on the
Citadel Hill, Plymouth 155
Fig. 48. — The Tsetze fly, Glossina morsitans 172
Fig. 49. — The Trypanosome of Frog’s blood 173
Fig. 50. — The Trypanosome which causes the Sleeping Sickness 176
Fig. 51. — The Trypanosome of the disease called “Dourine” 177
Figs. 52 to 56. — Stages in the growth and multiplication of a
Trypanosome which lives for part of its life in the blood of
the little owl, Athene noctua, and for the other part in the
gut of the common Gnat (Culex)
180-
3

PREFACE
This little volume is founded on three discourses which I have
slightly modified for the present purpose, and have endeavoured to
render interesting by the introduction of illustrative process blocks,
which are described sufficiently fully to form a large extension of the
original text.
The first, entitled ‘Nature’s Insurgent Son,’ formed, under another
title, the Romanes lecture at Oxford in 1905. Its object is to exhibit
in brief the ‘Kingdom of Man,’ to shew that there is undue neglect in
the taking over of that possession by mankind, and to urge upon our
Universities the duty of acting the leading part in removing that
neglect.
The second is an account, which served as the presidential
address to the British Association at York in 1906, of the progress
made in the last quarter of a century towards the assumption of his
kingship by slowly-moving Man.
The third, reprinted from the Quarterly Review, is a more detailed
account of recent attempts to deal with a terrible disease—the
Sleeping Sickness of tropical Africa—and furnishes an example of
one of the innumerable directions in which Man brings down disaster
on his head by resisting the old rule of selection of the fit and
destruction of the unfit, and is painfully forced to the conclusion that
knowledge of Nature must be sought and control of her processes
eventually obtained. I am glad to be able to state that as a result of
the representations of the Tropical Diseases Committee of the Royal
Society, and, as I am told, in some measure in consequence of the
explanation of the state of things given in this essay, funds have
been provided by the Colonial Office for the support of a

professorship of Protozoology in the University of London, to which
Mr. E. A. Minchin has been appointed. It is recognized that the only
way in which we can hope to deal effectually with such diseases as
the Sleeping Sickness is by a greatly increased knowledge of the
nature and life-history of the parasitic Protozoa which produce those
diseases.
I have to thank Mr. John Murray for permission to reprint the
article on Sleeping Sickness, and I am also greatly indebted to
scientific colleagues for assistance in the survey of progress given in
the second discourse. Amongst these I desire especially to mention
Mr. Frederick Soddy, F.R.S., Prof. H. H. Turner, F.R.S., Prof. Sydney
Vines, F.R.S., Mr. MacDougal of Oxford, and Prof. Sherrington, F.R.S.
To Mr. Perceval Lowell I owe my thanks for permission to copy two
of his drawings of Mars, and to the Royal Astronomical Society for
the loan of the star-picture on p. 90.
E. Ray Lankester,
January, 1907.

ERRATUM.
Page 98: first line of description beneath Fig. 16.,
for Limnocodium read Limnocnida.

CHAPTER I
NATURE’S INSURGENT SON
1. The Outlook.
It has become more and more a matter of conviction to me—and I
believe that I share that conviction with a large body of fellow
students both in this country and other civilized states—that the time
has arrived when the true relation of Nature to Man has been so
clearly ascertained that it should be more generally known than is at
present the case, and that this knowledge should form far more
largely than it does at this moment, the object of human activity and
endeavour,—that it should be, in fact, the guide of state-
government, the trusted basis of the development of human
communities. That it is not so already, that men should still allow
their energies to run in other directions, appears to some of us a
thing so monstrous, so injurious to the prosperity of our fellow men,
that we must do what lies within our power to draw attention to the
conditions and circumstances which attend this neglect, the evils
arising from it, and the benefits which must follow from its
abatement.
2. The word ‘Nature.’
The signification attached to the word ‘Nature’ is by no means the
same at the present day as it has been in the past: as commonly
used it is a word of varied meanings and limitations, so that
misconception and confusion is liable to be associated with it. By the
professed student of modern sciences it is usually understood as a
name for the entire mechanism of the universe, the kosmos in all its
parts; and it is in this sense that I use it. But many still identify
‘Nature’ with a limited portion of that great system, and even retain
for it a special application to the animals and plants of this earth and
their immediate surroundings. Thus we have the term ‘natural

history’ and the French term ‘les sciences naturelles’ limited to the
study of the more immediate and concrete forms of animals, plants,
and crystals. There is some justification for separating the
conception of Nature as specially concerned in the production and
maintenance of living things from that larger Nature which
embraces, together with this small but deeply significant area, the
whole expanse of the heavens in the one direction and Man himself
in the other. Giordano Bruno, who a little more than 300 years ago
visited Oxford and expounded his views, was perhaps the first to
perceive and teach the unity of this greater Nature, anticipating thus
in his prophetic vision the conclusion which we now accept as the
result of an accumulated mass of evidence. Shakespeare came into
touch with Bruno’s conception, and has contrasted the more limited
and a larger (though not the largest) view of Nature in the words of
Perdita and Polyxenes. Says Perdita:—
‘ ... the fairest flowers o’ the season
Are our carnations, and streak’d gillyvors,
Which some call Nature’s bastards; of that kind
Our rustic garden’s barren; and I care not
To get slips of them.... For I have heard it said,
There is an art which, in their piedness, shares
With great creating nature.’
To which Polyxenes replies:—
‘Say there be—
Yet nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean: so, over that art,
Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentle scion to the wildest stock;
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race; this is an art
Which does mend nature,—change it, rather: but
The art itself is nature.’
The larger proportion of so-called educated people even at the
present day have not got beyond Perdita’s view of Nature. They
regard the territory of Nature as a limited one, the play-ground or
sport of all sorts of non-natural demons and fairies, spirits and occult

agencies. Apart from any definite scheme or conception of these
operations, they personify Nature and attribute a variety of virtues
and tendencies to her for which there is no justification. We are told,
according to the fancy of the speaker, that such a course is in
accordance with Nature; that another course is contrary to Nature;
we are urged to return to Nature and we are also urged to resist
Nature. We hear that Nature will find a remedy for every ill, that
Nature is just, that Nature is cruel, that Nature is sweet and our
loving mother. On the one hand Man is regarded as outside of and
opposed to Nature, and his dealings are contrasted favourably or
unfavourably with those of Nature. On the other hand we are
informed that Man must after all submit to Nature and that it is
useless to oppose her. These contradictory views are in fact
fragments of various systems of philosophy of various ages in which
the word ‘Nature’ has been assigned equally various limitations and
extensions. Without attempting to discuss the history and
justification of these different uses of the word Nature, I think that I
may here use the word Nature as indicating the entire kosmos of
which this cooling globe with all upon it is a portion.
3. Nature-searchers.
The discovery of regular processes, of expected effects following
upon specified antecedents, of constant properties and qualities in
the material around him, has from the earliest recorded times been
a chief occupation of Man and has led to the attainment by Man of
an extraordinarily complex control of the conditions in which his life
is carried on. But it was not until Bruno’s conception of the unity of
terrestrial nature with that of the kosmos had commended itself that
a deliberate and determined investigation of natural processes, with
a view to their more complete apprehension, was instituted. One of
the earliest and most active steps in this direction was the
foundation, less than 250 years ago, of the Royal Society of London
for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge, by a body of students who
had organized their conferences and inquiries whilst resident in
Oxford.[1]

All over Western Europe such associations or academies for the
building up of the New Philosophy (as it was called here) came into
existence. It is a fact which is strangely overlooked at the present
day, when the assumption is made that the acquirement of a
knowledge of Greek grammar is the traditional and immemorial
occupation of Oxford students—that until the modern days of the
eighteenth century (‘modern’ in the history of Oxford) Greek was
less known in Oxford than Hebrew is at present, and that the study
of Nature—Nature-knowledge and Nature-control—was the
appropriate occupation of her learned men. It is indeed a fact that
the very peculiar classical education at present insisted on in Oxford,
and imposed by her on the public schools of the country, is a
modern innovation, an unintentional and, in a biological sense,
‘morbid’ outgrowth of that ‘Humanism’ to which a familiarity with the
dead languages was, but is no longer, the pathway.
4. The Doctrine of Evolution.
What is sometimes called the scientific movement, but may be
more appropriately described as the Nature-searching movement,
rapidly attained an immense development. In the latter half of the
last century this culminated in so complete a knowledge of the
movements of the heavenly bodies, their chemical nature and
physical condition—so detailed a determination of the history of the
crust of this earth and of the living things upon it, of the chemical
and physical processes which go on in Man and other living things,
and of the structure of Man as compared with the animals most like
him, and of the enormous length of time during which Man has
existed on the earth—that it became possible to establish a general
doctrine of the evolution of the kosmos, with more special detail in
regard to the history of this earth and the development of Man from
a lower animal ancestry. Animals were, in their turn, shown to have
developed from simplest living matter, and this from less highly
elaborated compounds of chemical ‘elements’ differentiated at a still
earlier stage of evolution. There is, it may be said without
exaggeration, no school or body of thinkers at the present day who

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