Action Learning: Are We Getting There?

Five Earlier Stages We ought by now to be seeing a few results. Sometimes, they are what we hoped for; indeed, a signal may be so close to what we thought we were aiming at as to be quite suspicious, as if, like the traditional foreman, it reports precisely what the management want to know, whether true or not. Sometimes, the outcome is in the right direction, but off the target sufficiently for us to check and recheck the figures, and perhaps to change some of the inputs, a bit more of this, and a bit less of the other. And, not seldom, the results are so far from what we first expected that we cannot believe the evidence of our own senses; going through the findings once more may then convince us that our approach, from the very start, is all wrong, opening with inaccurate measures of the problem, confusing the method with something that may have worked on a different occasion, assembling quite inappropriate resources — especially the client group of helpers. All of this, the product of the sixth stage, review or control, follows what we worked over in the previous five: