Delegation, letting people find their own way, is one of the key factors in productivity and innovation. Google allow their employees one day in five to do what they want – so long as they record the results. 50% of their new stuff comes from this day; not just ideas – products. Alistair Mant is fond of claiming that the East India Company had the biggest and most successful management development programme ever. They hired the bright sons of the British middle class and sent them off to India to rule over pieces of it the size of Wales. The only stipulation was that each 'deputy commissioner' had to send a monthly report back to London. Any advice that might have been offered would have been laughably irrelevant by the time ships and horses had delivered the mail. This organisation of DCs stayed in power for 100 years and – by the standards of the day – the commissioners were resoundingly successful at the job they'd been hired to do.

The East India Company's programme may have missed the getting-together aspect of Action Learning but it had the most difficult part of it – letting go and letting people learn from doing important things. The monthly report served as a fair replacement for the discussion of problems. We don't learn by just doing; we learn by reflecting on what we have done. However busy an executive you are, I always advocate keeping a daily journal, or giving yourself time for some other form of reflection.

 

We are now discovering that children below the age of five – long thought to be incapable of learning in an 'adult' way – have learning abilities that often surpass adults. Babies and young children are exquisitely designed by evolution to change and create, to learn and explore. Yet within a few years, with notable exceptions, they will be subjected to the formal input of the classroom. Why? Because formal sounds right, informal is difficult to defend. It's good to see that the UK's great love affair with university degrees is beginning to be tested. More young people are bypassing the system, failing as it is to guarantee them jobs. Whoever believed that it could or should?. And I wish I had a tenner for every high-ranking executive of the construction industry who has shamefacedly explained to me that he (construction is a male world) didn't go to university. They wanted to get out of the education system and 'do something'. (For followers of Myers Briggs we are talking sensors – half the population.) The shame rests with a society that allows itself to be ruled by what sounds right.

So here we are, back to Action Learning. The next time your children or your staff seem to you to be in need of education, or you are asked to design a development programme for young execs – find them something important to do and let them get on with it, preferably in the company of others, and under the eye of someone high-ranking who knows how to encourage without interference. And 'important' means something that you think only you know how to do, something you obviously need to tell them how to do, something that you can't afford to have fail. Easy isn't it? Far too simple really.

"Unless your ideas are ridiculed by experts, they are worth nothing." Reg Revans

Read pt 1 here