CHAIR

My work has always been around the development of people and organisations. I’ve tended to baulk at being categorised as a professional ‘this or that'. And I even use the word ‘career’ tentatively when considering my navigation through life. 

A snapshot look at my work life shows I’ve done some things by the book: education, job progressions, sector experience, blue chip consulting, academic research, publications, teaching. It’s just that in reality I’ve not done them in an orthodox order, if there is one, or according to a plan. 

It may sound trite but it’s true to say we live life forward but understand it (better) looking back. My formative work years were with the General Electric Company (G.E.C.), one of the most successful corporations in the U.K. back in the day, under the leadership of Lord Weinstock the industrialist, darling of Mrs T. Within a few years of my departure the megalith was crumbling - of course more to do with Arnie’s departure than mine! Most people I mention G.E.C. or Weinstock to now who are under the age of 40 have never heard of either. 

I took with me some great disciplines around training, learning and business education and qualities that were instilled around pride and professionalism.  

Having gravitated towards the ethos and practice of ‘action learning’ later on in life, I was interested to read the historic accounts of how G.E.C. provided a model case study of how action learning supports organisation development. Professor Reg Revans, the research physicist turned action learning guru was delighted to have been invited in by Weinstock through the ‘front door’ to do his work. Rest assured Weinstock wouldn’t have invited anyone in unless he thought they could help the business. So Revans and his team applied the social dynamic methodology of action learning to tackle the ‘wicked problems’ of the day in his corporate empire. Great work was done resulting in business transformation, innovation and recovery. 

My experience from eight years at G.E.C. in the 80s, however, was that in the Avionics (Marconi) part of the business there was no obvious legacy of the Revans work. I was part of a rather well oiled bureaucratic and paternalistic machine that delivered training more than learning and the aim was to scale up the inputs, impart predetermined knowledge and skills and secure the status of the expanding ‘training’ department. 

We pushed new boundaries for sure, for instance pressing top U.K. universities to incorporate management awareness into their engineering degrees, partnering with secondary education and offering teacher placements in industry and attracting non-scientists and more women into software engineering. nThe financial system of training was nicely subsidised by smart use of European Social Fund grants and government support for the various iterations of Youth Training Scheme enabling us to train 600 apprentices at any one time. We were making our contribution to young person development as many sons and daughters followed in the footsteps of their forefathers. Those were modern apprenticeships we were running in the 80s and I put much effort into transforming a time-serving programme to a standards based one, often against some resistance from the die-hards who themselves had earned their indentures the hard way. 

Looking back I realise that although I wasn’t an engineer I must have been influenced by what was very much an engineering led business operating under a financially led industrialist. I think this served me well when I was presented with the challenge around 20 years ago to develop an accredited business based route to masters degrees in management in the financial services and banking sector. 

Action learning seemed a great method to incorporate: starting with business challenges rather than theory and using the group dynamic of ‘learning with and from others’ in order to ensure real change and action on the ground. Particularly relevant when facing an accelerating rate of change and where reliance on the old knowledge was inadequate. Finding the more innovative universities and business schools to accredit these programmes was also a challenge and my experience echoed that of Reg Revans who clearly saw how counter-cultural his methodology was for the burgeoning business education market in his day. However several such institutions and individuals did come forward and offer their accreditation system to the modern version of the Action Learning Question methodology, realising this was about accrediting the experience of adult work based learning where practising managers were working on real business problems and reflecting on their practice. 

So at the turn of the millennium and with the help of a few folks who had worked with Revans I developed the Action Learning Question approach which I believe has stood the test of time in part because I used a form of systems thinking in its design. So participants in ALQ programmes work on challenges hooked into the business strategy, they research their question by thinking outside their own professional boundaries, considering the sociological, financial and psychological context. And to effect positive change they have to impact and influence within the political and organisational system. At a personal level their biggest learning comes from insight into the hitherto unrecognised and hidden human dynamics at work behind the technical and professional activities, procedures and rules. Time and again I see evidence of action learning when working at its best supporting the upward communication of doubt and challenging the downward communication of certainty. Those were Revans’ words only now it’s called speaking ‘truth to power’. 

Hundreds of managers and professionals have now completed their qualifications this way whilst gaining recognition at postgraduate level from universities and professional bodies in the U.K., Australia and the USA. The approach seems to work equally well across sectors including engineering, outsourcing, construction, financial and government. Maybe that’s because human systems transcend sectors, nations, professions and cultures. 

So what are my own insights from this contribution I have made, and I like to think am still making. Well my ‘aha moment’ came to me as I wandered around the National Gallery in Singapore recently. I felt drawn to the contemporary art section where I found the work shown here called Chair by Matthew Ngui. At the risk of explaining too much rather than simply feeling its impact, this for me in an instant captured the essence of Gestalt, that way of viewing the world and systems as connected, interconnected and whole. Of recognising the place and power of the invisible as well as the visible. 

This is something which I have come to recognise and believe more recently and which has impacted my way of being in my now very connected work, family, professional, academic and social life. Allowing the systemic and feeling side to emerge from the logical, deconstructionist intellectual has been a revelation. More than that it is enabling me to make a deeper positive impact on others in my own practice. 

And back to the impact of the pragmatic engineering disciples learned in my GEC days I now recall some 30 years on a conversation with my boss at the time when he advised me that ‘we’ believe such approaches as T-Groups and Gestalt do not work. It was clear I should focus my energy on the visible, practical aspects of knowledge and skills transfer in the training that I designed or delivered. Predetermined measurable objectives had to be designed into all training. As a younger man I swallowed this and spurned the idea of allowing too much emotion to infect the logic of our programmes. 

Sometimes unlearning has a long gestation period. With the help of my own action learning practice group over the past few years I have come to recognise how my prior conditioning may have created blind spots. I now see the chair differently. 

Richard Hale, October, 2019

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