Development of ARL began in the late 1970s through the effort of a group of professors at the University of Lund, Sweden, friends in management positions, and colleagues who were consultants and HR professionals. What brought them together was common frustration with the way managers were acting—and with how training programs were addressing the professional development of executives. This avant-garde group came up with this different way of training—one that focuses on learning rather than on teaching.

Their ambition was in the first place to focus on developing leadership competencies  — instead of management competencies, such as finance, marketing or strategy. For that, they analyzed the contents of what was being taught to managers and questioned whether the syllabi actually served to develop leadership. They realized that developing the skills of enlightened leadership depended less on memorizing facts and theories, and more on learning new behaviors and attitudes.

Behaviors are the visible expressions of attitudes, beliefs and values. Scandinavia has a history of strongly participative and democratic movements. The professors and consultants gathered at Lund saw contradictions between Scandinavian values and beliefs and the way corporations managed employees. Are managers supposed to use authority or advocacy? Are supervision and control their only responsibility or is it more about empowerment and delegation? How does expertise and the power that comes with it interface with consensus? These questions showed the Lund group that developing new behaviors was closely connected with reviewing the values and assumptions underlying the current leadership practices as well as uncovering contradictions and paradoxes.

Next, they explored what would be the most appropriate process or method for the new developmental goals. It was clear that the answer went beyond teaching and lecturing, which were inadequate for current leadership requirements. They realized that they had to find what would enhance learning for the individuals. 

They posited that education for this type of leadership had to be based on, and contain, an experiential component. It also had to be relevant and connected in a pragmatic way to the challenges individuals were facing in their organizations.  Managers had to develop new answers to new questions that were arising from their daily work. Enough of indoctrination in the theories of others; learning was about developing theories of their own while solving current dilemmas, and gaining new perspectives and mindsets to approach strategic issues in their leadership roles. It was about what managers had to know as well as how they had to act and be, with themselves and with others in daily organizational contexts. If what mattered was learning how to behave differently and to think differently, then the classical teaching model was not suited to this purpose.

This avant-garde group came up with a different way of training that focused on learning rather than on teaching. And they developed their new way of training by asking themselves a number of questions:
How can we leverage our own, collective experience?
How do we solve this educational challenge?
How do we find a pragmatic solution?
How do we, as educators, change the way we think, review our assumptions and belief systems, uncover our values and address the paradoxes of our educator’s role?

Over 18 months they developed concepts upon which the new learning approach would be based. They conceived programs that would be based on three key principles:

1) develop leaders who could thrive on change, and were comfortable living with ambiguity and uncertainty;
2) build trusting relationships;
3) develop learning based on action and reflection, using real-time interventions on current challenges.

This was just the beginning. The model continued to evolve organically, shaped by organizational needs, restrictions and special requests, and driven by the participants’ context and expectations.  The practitioners within and outside of Scandinavia used their creativity and best professional judgment to stay loyal to the grounding principles of using real challenges, alternating action with reflection as a way to develop new mindsets, attitudes and behaviors appropriate for times of uncertainty. Applying the experiential and reflective learning mode to themselves, the practitioners experimented by altering the number of sessions, the duration of the sessions, the type of projects selected, the role of the Learning Coach and the style of his/her interventions. The approach evolved and developed characteristics that no longer fit the original Action Learning settings and specifications, and the practitioners named it Action Reflection Learning.

It is no surprise that Action Reflection Learning emerged from the business arena. The reason is that organizational training involves a client-vendor relationship. In a consumer-oriented Western society, this relationship created a setting in which the buyers (and later the participants in the training activities) were progressively seen as customers whose needs determined the added value of the program. While in the beginning the approach was most similar to Action Learning, over time the training activities began to be more sensitive and adjusted to the needs, interests and reality of the buyer and/or the participants. For example, practitioners have adapted the length of the programs to the busy agenda of the participants, trying to cover more in a shorter time. Increasingly, corporate clients ask for facilitators with experience in the industrial area of the client, ensuring that the training will be customized with the language and examples of the industry. And solving actual business problems remains a key characteristic of ARL programs.

Over the years, ARL has evolved into a learning methodology, applied in a diversity of settings. It has been used for a number of purposes that had one thing in common—something had to be learned. For example, it has been used to address a wide array of learning challenges:

• To help individuals learn to work together in post-merger integration;
• To help teams learn how to handle conflicts or  crisis;
• To prepare young talent for their next challenges;
• To help learn how to implement performance appraisal processes;
• To develop synergy in regional teams.
• To design conferences, courses, meetings.

  
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