THE SYSTEMIC NATURE OF ACTION LEARNING PROGRAMMES

Abstract

A lot of attention has been paid on action learning in the last four decades or so and the success of suchprogrammes has also been widely publicized. But why have these programmes been so effective in helpingorganizations cope with change? Many authors state that the success of such programmes is due to the factthat they link learning to actions. Yet others claim that action learning programmes succeed because theyinvolve employee empowerment and provide a much greater learning curve. In this paper the authors holdthat action learning programmes succeed because they are partly systemic and can be made even moreeffective if they are fully designed and implemented systemically. The essential features of a systemic methodinclude the ability to help organizations deal with organic, cultural and power complexity. The conclusionthat action learning programmes can succeed if they are fully designed and implemented systemically isreached by comparing the essential features of a systemic method with that of an action learning programme.The authors make use of a case study to support their conclusion.