Action learning for organizational and systemic development: towards a ‘both-and’ understanding of ‘I’ and ‘we’

In public services delivery, action learning is increasingly employed in the hope of improving capacity to address complex, multi-casual and ‘wicked’ social issues to improve the lives of citizens. Yet the understanding of how and why action learning might have potential for enhancing organizational or systemic capability rarely goes beyond the notion of peers in adversity tackling problems. Making sense of the impacts of action learning has more commonly focused on explaining individual learning. This paper aims to address that gap. It explores the relationship between individual and organisational in action learning, a connection that is under-explored and insufficiently problematised in the literature. The purpose for using action learning is often presented as a dichotomous choice between benefit for the collective ‘we’ or the individual ‘I’ -- either it can be used to enhance organisation capacity and further organisation performance or its purpose is for the benefit of the individual participants. Reflecting on experience of action learning with public service organisations in England, this paper draws on social constructionist notions of organising as patterns of interaction to explore the potential of action learning to impact on organisational development and on psychodynamic and identity ideas to make sense of what is argued is a tension between the ‘we’ and the ‘I’.