When the Titanic sank in 1912, action learning was discovered. The investigators into the disaster soon found out that there was no open feedback culture in the company that built the ship and among those who sailed on her. People said that they had suspected that not everything would work out as planned, but they had assumed that others had taken these risk factors into consideration; they didn’t feel responsible for taking any action.

The important thing about action learning is that it is precisely what it claims to be. It is about action and learning. Mike Pedler in his book Action Learning for Managers (Gower, 2008) has defined action learning as "an approach toindividual and organizational development. Working in small groups, people tackle important organizational issues or problems and learn from their attempt to change things."

I’m currently being trained to be an "action-learning facilitator" and am experiencing the extraordinary power of this relatively simple idea. Far from being merely a chance to chat about one’s problems, it has the potential to be, when professionally facilitated, a powerful method for creating sustainable change in individuals, teams and organizations.

Strangely enough, action learning, while enormously popular in countries like the UK, has not really taken off in Germany; almost all of the literature about it is in English. I’m currently trying to think about why this is the case and what the cultural restraints are to implementing action-learning programmes in some countries. I’m asking myself questions like: "How far can we use action learning in high power-distance cultures (ones where there is a steep hierarchy) like Russia or Saudi Arabia?"

As always, your thoughts on this would be most welcome.