CHAPTER 4

The Scandinavian Rebels’ Initiative

In the late 1970s, a group of academics, consultants, and corporate managers came together in the south of Sweden to address a topic of common concern. The group felt that the way managers were being developed in business schools was not adequately preparing them for the demands of corporate life. They thought that the business world needed better-prepared leaders, not simply managers. The business school curricula abounded in theory about strategic planning, financial management, administration of personnel, and plant operations, but lacked a meaningful syllabus preparing students for successful leadership. Graduate programs were preparing managers, not leaders.¹ In a constructivist mode, they put together elements that seemed to work, independently of the theories behind them, and designed the first leadership program. It was a program for corporate managers who came together for a week at a time, over a period of several months, with the task of solving a real organizational challenge, one in which they had no expertise at all. A “project team advisor” accompanied the group as they worked together, providing just-in-time support through tools, questions, or resources to help the group make progress on the task and to learn at the same time. The program was designed using elements of action learning, modified by the active role of the project team advisor (coach).

After running several programs, in 1981, a group selected the most innovative leadership development institutions in the United States, and visited them to discover new ways of developing leaders. They visited top management educational institutions in Boston (Boston Consulting Group, Harvard, MIT), New York (American Management Association, Aspen Institute, New York University, Tarrytown Executive Conference Center), Tucson (Motorola Institute, University of Arizona), Northern California (Esalen Institute, Hewlett-Packard, Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley), and Los Angeles (UCLA, University of Southern California).² It soon became a two-way learning experience, where they shared their new approach with a very interested audience. After this trip, they distilled their findings, and concluded that indeed a vastly different approach to development was needed—one that would not be centered on the lectures of experts, but which developed leaders who could thrive on change, learn to be comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty, and who could build trusting relationships and learn by action and reflection. This approach would acknowledge the existence of the past experience and of the tacit knowledge of the participants, accepting that they were no tabula rasa; the classroom would be used as a meeting place for surfacing diversity of experience and input, and a point would be made to challenge the mental models and beliefs of the participants. They considered it essential to go beyond the traditional focus on logic and rational thinking; they invited the inclusion of feelings, of intuition and right brain hemisphere inputs, as a way of engaging not only the intellect but also the whole person.³ The arena for learning would be real-life challenges instead of case studies and theories, and the participants would be made actors of their own learning.

Since this approach centered on taking action to address a real challenge, on the importance of extracting learning by reflecting on the experience, and on the power of individuals owning their learning, the U.S.-based sister organization LIM suggested calling this approach “Action Reflection Learning.”⁴

What characterized this group of pioneering practitioners was that they felt free of academic constraints. Their main focus was on how managers could learn best, not on the institutional or theoretical boundaries prescribing how learning had to be designed and implemented. Corporate facilitators, Organizational Development professionals, and trainers from the United States and other countries, even some university professors with an exploratory spirit, joined the movement, adding their experiences with participants of different ethnicities, nationalities, language, and cultures. Over the following decades, practitioners around the globe experimented with new Action Reflection Learning (ARL)-based designs tailored to a variety of adult learning needs, such as developing leaders, cross-functional teams, innovation teams, crisis teams, high-performance teams, or developing HR as business partners. Today, it is also used for individual coaching, to design meetings or stand-alone workshops, conference presentations, and university courses, combining different elements and interventions that can bring about profound learning.⁵ A common trait among ARL practitioners is their pragmatism: They value what works, rather than what theories suggest, which gives the conceptual freedom to use behaviorist and humanist approaches at the same time, although the scholarly frameworks are different and even contradict each other. This experimental approach could have been called trial and learning (as opposed to the classic trial and error), as each new situation becomes an opportunity to learn what worked and what could be done differently for a better outcome.

Unintentionally, the ARL practitioners shaped a learning methodology based on various bodies of research: cybernetics, social learning, systems thinking, action learning, transformational learning, behaviorism, humanistic psychology, philosophy, andragogy, and experiential learning. It must be noted that the practitioners were not seeking to put theories in practice; they were in many cases averse to theories, or at best, interested in developing their own theories, but, at the same time, they accepted that different conceptual frameworks could be equally valid, and could coexist. Many also considered that when a theory becomes the accepted explanation of something, the growth of knowledge stagnates, freezing pieces of reality into conceptual boxes, and conditioning behaviors to remain within the accepted boundaries, and therefore becomes an obstacle to innovation and creative experimentation.

This was the reason that the ARL approach remained somehow underresearched and little known for several decades, despite its documented powerful impact on learning. The DNA of the approach was that it shouldn’t be cast in bronze, and there was a shared understanding that ARL was what a practitioner could make out of it, without an authoritative definition of what ARL is and what it is not.

At the same time, this fluid condition made the transfer and evolution of knowledge extremely challenging, and limited the development of new practitioners who wanted to “learn ARL.” In 2005, an initiative was launched to code the methodology,⁶ comparing the existing practices of ARL and identifying the commonalities among the approaches. As a result of this research, a number of common elements were found and 10 underlying learning principles were identified, to which the power of the ARL approach can be attributed.

The urgency of our planetary challenges demands innovative action, entrepreneurship, and proactive individuals who can work with a new paradigm of leadership—one that is inclusive, and collaborative, that fosters creativity, and that operates by keeping the welfare of this and the future generations. We need empowered individuals across the globe, who can act with compassion and intelligence and with cognitive, emotional, and spiritual intelligence. We need a multitude of young minds inspired by their highest values, by their passion and conviction that they can shape a better world for all. Fortunately, isolated experiments⁷ have shown that we have these new leaders sitting in our classrooms, just bored and waiting for the invitation to be part of something greater. In the following chapters, we will introduce the 10 learning principles⁸ of ARL, an eclectic methodology to facilitate their learning as they emerge as responsible managers.