title: Action Learning Sets to foster organizational learning and innovation
Creators: name: Venkat, Sowmya
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2023

description: Organizations strive to offer employee learning opportunities and instill innovation practices, yet few exercises are found to be deliberately embedded in everyday routines. Based in an educational institution, this study concerns a group of faculty and staff of a specific department in a Community College (in Ontario, Canada), and creates a structured opportunity to afford habitual organizational learning practices rooted in Action Research. This study implemented an Action Learning Set to investigate how learning occurs when employees willingly participate and consciously create collaborative conversations over time. Existing work in the realm of Action Learning are intentionally considered to make this qualitative study more meaningful. Action Research is used as a required methodology of my DBA endeavour and also becomes a foundational basis for the tool itself i.e. Action Learning Set, thus making it a unique arrangement from a scholar-practitioner perspective. Set exchanges focus on individual and group dialoguing using action research spirals and these interactions are carried into a virtual environment as well, to trace the lived experiences of the group. In assessing the synergy created via such action, the study goes a step further to connect tacit theoretical understanding of action-based learning with the notion of Hot Groups, known for its spontaneous, creative and determined sense of purpose. Journal notes, observational field notes, and a debrief survey involving post session sharing generated rich data and these information sources were coded, analysed and interpreted as common themes for discussion. The Action Learning Set is a shared space that becomes a vehicle for participant insight to learn more about themselves, their peer and their organization. With the confluence and commonalities of action-related notions, and certain unprompted movements that were observed, this study also throws light on participants who worked together, how or why they chose those paths, and what circumstances contributed to such decisions in working and learning as a team or independently. Therein, the research uses multiple cycles of Action Research to identify new knowledge, understand and explore findings, and cultivate stronger organizational learning and innovation practices. It is argued that unless a planned method to navigate and nurture exists, learning often remains disjointed or in silos. An intentional process can manoeuvre, and curate insight otherwise confined to cubicles. Actionable knowledge from this thesis points at organizational needs including structured, mindful learning engagements and creation of shared spaces, especially within the community college framework. It is also reflective of what emerged from using an Action Research-based methodology, i.e. having a disruptive mindset to embrace innovation, awareness of organizational politics and those who endorse such thinking, virtualization of Action Learning Sets and use of technology to nurture seamless dialogue. This thesis underscores the value of tangible processes in engaging stakeholders through mutually beneficial learning and innovation practices, in tapping into leaderful behavior of organizational members, and the ways in which this knowledge can contribute to future projects for scholar practitioners, as a model within the post-secondary landscape.