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WHAT IS ACTION LEARNING
Much has been written about action learning, beginning
with Socrates (470 BC), Plato (428 BC) and Aristotle (384BC)
who referred to learning by doing. They were followed much
later by Johann Pestalozzi, the Swiss educator (1746-1827)
and then by Reg Revans (1980), Chris Argyris (1983) and many
others. Although Revans, the pioneer of action learning,
didn’t fully operationalise the approach, the consensus is
that action learning advocates learning in groups (Revans’
comrades in adversity), spontaneous questioning (Revan’s
questioning insights), taking action to solve real issues,
programmed instruction and “experiential learning”.
Action learning, or learning by doing as it is often
called, suggests that the process of learning works best
when individuals take action to improve performance and,
while they are doing this or immediately after, they reflect
on their experiences, compare their behaviour to “best
practice” and from this process learn how to do something
better next time. That is, learning flows from action taken
and the process of reflection on experiences had while
taking action. This is often compared to the approach to
management development, which focuses on the provision of
knowledge, usually in a classroom situation which then
assumes, somewhat naively, that this knowledge is fully
understood, transferred to the workplace and leads to
appropriate action being taken.
ICOM’S
APPROACH TO ACTION LEARNING
Our approach to action learning shifts the primary focus
of management development from the individual to the
organisation. That is, the primary objective of management
development should be to improve the performance of the
organisation and, while this is being done, to use the
experiences gained to improve individual performance. That
is, improving individual competence is NOT the primary
purpose of management development, it is the secondary
purpose. The primary aim is to produce a measurable
improvement in departmental and organisational OUTPUT. How
we do this is what makes our approach to action learning
unique.
THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE OF
ICOM’S PROGRAMMES
This rests on two primary characteristics of our
programmes:
 They are
CUSTOMISED to the particular cultures of specific countries
and to the needs of their organisations. For example, if
tourism is critical to the economy we will deliver
programmes which tackle key issues in this area (e.g.
service delivery, hotel management, engineering service in
hotels). If poor infrastructure is the problem we will
deliver programmes in the management of water, electricity,
waste, airports, construction, ports etc. ICOM’s
faculty have designed and delivered programmes in all these
areas. That is, we deal with TECHNICAL and MANAGERIAL
issues with faculty who are experts in the client’s
particular technology. We do not focus our intervention
purely on generic management principles. We begin with best
practice in the strategic and operational activities of our
clients.
They have a
distinctive delivery mechanism, which focuses on taking
action to improve performance and learning from the
experiences gained. ICOM is a leading proponent of
this ACTION LEARNING approach, its faculty having delivered
65 programmes throughout the world. This approach focuses
on closing the strategy-execution gap through an emphasis on
the dual task of developing appropriate strategies and
IMPLEMENTATION/EXECUTION skills. Improved business
performance has these two sides to it, that is, better value
creation and greater operational effectiveness. In focusing
on both we recognise the importance of organisations having
state of the art technology, process excellence and a
progressive approach to people management. | 
