Exploring the processes of action learning in the National Health Service : dilemmas and paradoxes of evaluation

Action Learning has become one of the most importantprocesses for accelerating change and development toemerge in the National Health Service within the lastfew years.This thesis is concerned with an exploration of actionlearning through a piece of evaluative research whichfocuses on three management development programmes.The study can be seen as having three anchors. Firstly,the three programmes with their stated aims, sponsoredand located within the North Western Regional HealthAuthority, between 1987-1990. Secondly, the use ofaction learning as the principal framework ofevaluation. Thirdly, the movement towards aself-reflexive study as the evaluation progressed.This means that as the methodology became moresophisticated it became entirely committed to theprinciples of action learning and required a fullcollaborative approach. But as the three programmescontinued to develop, considerable problems arose in thedisentanglement of various levels and forms of learningin order to do justice to its complexity.The study was able to reveal and explore the tensionswhich existed between these 'established' programmes andthe adaptations made by the participants working on andevaluating their own learning.The findings offer important insights into thecomplexities of a human learning process which iscritical and aware of its own changes, thus refuting thenotion that action learning is merely a novel way oflearning-by-doing.In the context and parameters of this piece of research,action learning is seen as a powerful, but often slowand painful process, which changes the barriers todevelopment by questioning that which has establisheditself within the processual inner-world ofparticipant-managers and the mainly proceduralouter-world of their organisations, in this case theNHS