The Alchemy Action Learning Programme
“Working and learning with managers from other organisations”
Is continual learning necessary for achieving your strategic aims?
Do you value learning from experience?
Would you value input from other major organisations?
“The coaching of my set members helped me to build support for the project and to perform far beyond my expectations”
Purpose
Many organisations are committed to Action Learning as a means of developing managers and of making real progress on important projects and tasks. They see important benefits from their employees working with people from other organisations.
The opportunity to be challenged by others - and the requirement to understand and contribute to new scenarios and issues - is seen as a vital source of renewal.
What is special about Action Learning?
It quite literally means working and learning simultaneously.
Participants focus on work-based issues, problems and questions. A typical Action Learning programme would be a group of half a dozen people meeting six times over six to eight months to explore each individual’s project or task.
The real power of Action Learning is in how this group works together. The members of the group help each other through skilful listening, questioning and challenging – not by giving each other advice. It is by trying to answer ‘good’ questions that participants learn to access all of the knowledge and expertise that they have acquired through courses, studying and reading – and primarily through experience.
“I could reflect and learn in a safe environment, away from the manic schedule of everyday work”
The Benefits of Action Learning
- Action oriented
- Delivers ‘useable’ learning
- Adds significant value to work projects
- Develops listening, questioning and coaching skills
- Draws on the experience of others
- Integrates high level goals with day-to-day actions
- Stimulates thinking ‘outside the box’
- Yields a high return on time invested
What will I personally get from the programme?
- Taking personal responsibility
- Helping others to learn – coaching through listening and questioning
- Reflecting – the ability to see current reality more clearly
- “Oiling the wheels” – helping the change process, with insight
- Learning to learn
The Action Learning Process
- Prepare – gain support and sponsorship; agree a project
- Join a small group - the learning set - which will meet six times for one day, over six to eight months
- Bring a current project or task to the set
- Explore each other’s projects at each meeting
- Identify and progress issues by questioning and coaching
- Commit to actions on the project or task
- Review the learning from each session – ‘plan, do, study, act’
- Listen to coaching from the set adviser and the group as it works and learns
- Return to the organisation and carry out committed actions utilising the learning
- Create new networks to carry on learning
“What did I get from others? Support, challenge and ideas from different and diverse perspectives”
© 2021 The Alchemy of Coaching