In today's organizations, the need to respond to discontinuous change greatly reduces the likelihood of organizational development activities being planned activities. In this environment, traditional training functions and programs either appear to be or are ineffective. Additionally, developing the staff that is responsible for developing others within the organization becomes extremely complex in the discontinuous change environment. One organizational solution, and a growing one at that, is to eliminate the internal training staff and outsource the needed organizational learning interventions to outside vendors. Action learning shares much in common with action research, a term first coined by Kurt Lewin in the 1940s.
Discontinuous change generates unexpected problems.
Solving those problems through action and learning for the purpose of preserving values provides discontinuous discoveries. These experiential discoveries then, that result from unplanned learning by doing by learning, can best be described as serendipitous action learning. So learning, during times of discontinuous change, takes place whether it is guided or not. This might explain why some organizations succeed in spite of themselves. Key then, is to guide the actions and learning of individuals and groups as a means of facilitating change.