Finding the questions that work
My first action learning session was facilitated by the inimitable Jo Taylor (now my PRISM co-founder) at our Corelab office (a loft in Williamsburg, of course) around 2014. It was a gathering of women from Internationalistas – a network and community of women involved in global justice that I’d started with Chloe Safier and was holding meet ups all around the world, in our pre-pandemic bliss.
I remember the quiet concentration of the room, the attentiveness to what was being said and what wasn’t. I remember the insight and relief of the person in the “hot seat” - understanding what they were facing and seeing new paths forward. I remember recognising the power of this kind of gathering for real insight borne of the combination of vulnerability and curiosity.
Three members of an Action Learning Set practising active listening and curious questions
Soon after I started integrating action learning into my work – running sessions within organisations including with my own team when I was leading the Governance and Transparency Initiative at The B Team in New York. We would do action learning in our quarterly in person catch ups, organised alongside various events that we were involved in. As a distributed and remote team, it helped us go deeper, not needing to pretend to know what we were doing when the work was complex and also a bit of a gamble – were these leaders we were working with serious? How would we know? Practising action learning gave us permission and space to ask better questions of ourselves all the time – not to focus only on what we were doing but whether it was the best possible thing to be doing. It helped us take our own doubts and integrity seriously.
Moving back to the southern hemisphere and starting to work for myself, I took action learning with me – into the Yuwaya Ngarra-li partnership between the Dharriwaa Elders’ Group, into a long-term embedded evaluation of groups working on natural resource governance globally.
And then, the pandemic.
It was during the first couple of years of the pandemic that I stumbled upon a different dimension and power to action learning (which many others had already clocked in other places). As part of Paul Ramsay Foundation’s Sustaining our Partners Taskforce (again led by Jo Taylor!), we piloted some Action Learning Sets which were open to leaders of groups the Foundation funded. From there, people started proposing the groups in other spaces.
I find myself now facilitating eight-nine groups at a time. Currently, for example, I’m working with a group of for purpose executives of organisations across different fields in Aotearoa and Australia, a separate group of work-integration social enterprise leaders in Australia, on of local leaders in one place in Aotearoa working to increase the wellbeing of young people, and a group of advocates for greater accountability in land use and mining based across five continents (scheduling that one can be a challenge!).
May facilitating an Action Learning Set in 2024
One of the great joys of the groups I run now is that they provide what I’ve come to think of as a kind of infrastructure to support more reflective, systemic and collaborative leadership - by providing a regular, confidential space with peers who are not in your organisation to bring your trickiest and stickiest challenges and opportunities to examine.
There are a few things which seem to bring out the magic of action learning for groups. Diversity and some common interest or context is important. Consistency and a focus on presence over preparation as well. But the heart of it is open and curious questioning.
Starting out in action learning involves the discomfort of learning a new skill. Open and curious questioning is not the norm in our workplaces or homes. We often default to long preambles that share back our experiences or questions that are actually suggestions, like the classic “have you thought about doing ….?”
Over time though, you see people really embrace the power of a short and sharp, open and curious question: “what does this mean to you?”, “what is this situation telling you about the system you are operating in?”
Through many groups and over many sessions, I’ve started to see categories of questions that work because they help us see from perspectives that matter:
Systemic questioning invites the person to step back and identify or analyse some of the broader dynamics that may be at play or to identify their or their organisation’s role and influence in the broader system.
Strategic questioning helps the person to unpack and get underneath the challenge, why it matters and its component parts and some of the potential scenarios that emerge from it.
Catalytic questioning (taught to me by Hildy Gottlieb) helps the person identify what is possible and for whom from their action on the challenge.
Empathetic questioning invites the person to occupy the position of others involved and consider their perspectives and positions.
Reflexive questioning helps the person consider what they are bringing to this challenge and how it is impacting them. It might bring in questions of personal power, position and privilege as well as their personal histories that may be coming into how they are approaching the challenge.
Here’s a short resource about these kinds of questions with examples. For anyone looking to get curious and draw new insight in their work (and personal) lives, I encourage you to think about these modes of questioning and to reflect yourself on the questions that are working for you and what you might try out in your next important conversation.
And if your network, movement, field or organisation is ripe for strengthening relationships and growing capability to understand systems and take considered action, you can get in touch about an action learning set for 2025.