Action Learning
(Reg Revans)

Why Read It?

What is the difference between a puzzle and a problem? According to Revans, there is an existing solution to a puzzle and it simply needs to be found. There is no existing solution to a problem. The solution has to be worked out by a process of inquiry that begins at the point where one does not know what to do next and expertise is no help. Action Learning explains that process and offers an alternative method of learning to the traditional one, which is based on programmed knowledge instead of encouraging students to ask questions and roam widely around a subject.

Getting Started

As a young man, Reg Revans competed in the 1928 Olympics and worked in the famous Cavendish laboratories at Cambridge, in the United Kindom, alongside such fathers of nuclear physics as Ernest Rutherford and J. J. Thompson. Action learning is his systematization of the methods used by the Cambridge team to deal with problems. He developed them further when working for the National Coal Board after World War II. He also later went on to become Britain’s first professor of industrial administration at the University of Manchester.

Action Learning is all about an alternative to traditional education and training. The method it sets out is a form of “learning by doing,” but its proponents are careful to distinguish it from simply “learning on the job” or “learning by experience.” It involves a collaborative effort, humility, a “trading of one’s confusion with that of others,” and deep reflection on one’s experience and on the nature of the problem. Its outcome is personal growth as much as a way out of a current difficulty.