Action learning turns your own everyday work into the learning space. You frame your developmental edge as a question, design small experiments, observe, and write things down. Here is re:lead's approach, along with a five-step guide to getting started yourself.
Action learning is a method in which your own everyday working life is the primary learning space. You do not learn by reading about leadership or by sitting in a classroom. You learn by examining your own practice: you design a small experiment, try it out in a real situation, reflect on what happened, and then design the next one.
Most leaders know the feeling: reflection becomes something you do when there is time. And there is rarely time. Action learning removes that excuse, because the work itself becomes the education.
This article is an introduction to how we at re:lead work with action learning, and a guide to how you can get started yourself.
As a leader, your personal development is the engine of the organization's development. You go first, and the way you act directly shapes the culture and the work processes around you. Behavior is contagious: it spreads to your leadership team and further down through the organization.
There is also a signaling value. When you work systematically on your own development, you show that learning is a priority and an opportunity for everyone. Perhaps even an expectation.
Action learning suits the busy leader particularly well, because it does not require you to leave the workplace. Development happens while you are solving your tasks, and it shifts your actual behavior instead of merely adding new knowledge. At the same time, studies of learning indicate that even short, deliberate reflection on the day's experiences strengthens both the learning itself and your sense of mastering the leadership task.
Action learning is often used to make leaders aware of their integrity: the gap between what they stand for and what they actually do. That is an important track. But the method can be used to develop both understanding and practice in far more areas.
What matters is that you have a question you want to become wiser about, and that it can only be answered by acting. For example:
None of those questions can be answered at a desk. The answers only appear when you try something out and notice what happens, in yourself and around you.
At re:lead, we emphasize that the development edge should be formulated as a question rather than a goal. A goal invites performance: did it succeed or not? A question invites inquiry. And that is exactly what experiments are for.
There is one more reason. A development edge is rarely a straight road. There is almost always something at stake that pulls in the opposite direction. When you formulate the edge as a question, you can build that dilemma into the formulation itself:
| As a goal | As a question |
|---|---|
| I want to delegate more | How can I delegate better, without feeling that I lose control? |
| I want to give more feedback | How can I give feedback, without feeling condescending or arrogant? |
| I want to solve the collaboration problems in the team | How can I solve collaboration problems, without the employees losing their own ownership? |
The real learning often lies in the "without" part. It puts words to what you are afraid of losing when you do something other than what you usually do. It is not an obstacle you have to remove. It is part of what you need to examine.
Action learning is a cycle, not a program with an end date. You move through five steps, and when you have finished the last one, you start over with a new experiment.
A good experiment is small enough that you dare to try it, and big enough that you can learn from it. And it cannot fail, because whatever happens, you get data about yourself and your practice.
It is worth noting that several weighty traditions within leadership and change theory land on the same basic move, even though they disagree about much else: take a small, real action, notice what happens, reflect, and adjust. That holds for Bill Torbert's action inquiry, Robert Kegan's Immunity to Change, and Dave Snowden's safe-to-fail experiments.
One of the most important pieces of advice in the whole process is the simplest: write it down. Reflection that only takes place in your head often stays too vague and evaporates in daily operations. When you write, you gain distance from your own feelings and actions, and you can look at them a little from the outside.
If you want a structure, you can use the basic metacognitive model:
Reflection does not have to be written. Some prefer a free-form diary, others record short audio or video clips, actively ask for feedback from the people around them, or think things through on a walk. Find the form that gives you the best learning.
Whatever the form: keep your earlier experiments in your log instead of overwriting them. When you read back, you can see patterns over time, so your decisions are not driven only by the mood of the moment. And the log becomes visible proof of the development you have actually been through.
Many leaders experience that effectiveness is measured in fast decisions. Then reflection can feel like a waste of time. But it is rarely busyness alone that gets in the way.
Reflection requires you to let go of control and accept that the process may move in directions you had not planned. It challenges your autopilot: skilled, highly educated leaders in particular are experts at optimizing what already exists, and they can become defensive when the mindset itself is put up for debate. And it can feel like a weakening of your authority to show doubt, even though that openness is precisely what creates the foundation for a learning organization.
If you repeatedly fail to carry out your experiment, it is rarely laziness or poor planning. It is a sign that you have run into something important. Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey call it immunity to change: alongside what you say you want, you hold hidden competing commitments that protect you from something you fear. Behind them lie big assumptions about how the world works, assumptions you do not see, because you see the world through them.
That is why the gap between what you stand for and what you actually do is rarely something you close by practicing a skill. It is an "immune system" doing its job. The good news is that you can examine it with the same moves: small, safe experiments that test whether your assumptions actually hold. And the "without" part of your question is often the first clue.
You can certainly get started with action learning on your own. But it is often far more effective to reflect together with others who hold different perspectives than you do. Involve your leadership team or a trusted sparring partner.
At re:lead, we typically work with action learning groups of 4 to 6 leaders who meet at intervals of a few weeks between the modules of a development program. Here each participant shares what happened in the experiment, and the group helps examine it. The discipline is questions rather than good advice, because it is in the questions that you truly become wiser about yourself.
Which question about your leadership are you carrying around right now without having examined it? What are you afraid of losing if you do something other than what you usually do? When did you last change your view of yourself as a leader, and what prompted it? And who around you could help you see what you cannot see yourself?
If you would like to hear more about how we use action learning in development programs and coaching, write to us at info@relead.dk.
Please note: some of the sources below are in Danish only.