According to Michael Marquardt in Leading with Questions: How Leaders Find the Right Solutions by Knowing What to Ask (Second Edition), asking the right questions is one of the most important — and yet most under-appreciated — skills that executives can develop. To master this skill, “one of the most valuable tools available to you and your team is action.”

What are the most essential elements of action learning?

1. A problem: Action learning focuses on a specific problem — as project, a challenge, issue, or task — the resolution which is of high importance to an individual, team, and/or organization.

COMMENT: Be sure to focus on the right problem. Peter Ducker was right: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”

2. An action-learning group: It can also be called a set or team and is ideally composed of 4-8 individuals who examine the given problem that has no obvious, easily identifiable solution.

COMMENT: Members of the group must have diverse perspectives, embrace challenges, tolerate ambiguity, welcome principled dissent, and think in terms of first-person plural pronouns.

3. A process that emphasizes insightful questioning and reflective listening: Action learning emphasizes questions and reflection over declarations and subjective opinions. By focusing on the right questions rather than on the right answers, action learn helps to reveal the unknown as well as what is known.

COMMENT: Group discussion is best view as a journey of discovery.

4. A requirement for action: Action learning requires that the group be able to take direct action on solving the problem it is working on. Members of the action learning team must be given authority as well as responsibility.

COMMENT: Long ago, Thomas Edison observed, “Vision without execution is hallucination.”

5. A commitment to learning: Solving an organizational problem provides immediate short-term benefits to the company. The greater longer-term multiplier benefit, however, is the learning gained by each group member as well as by the group as a whole, and how those insights are applied on a system-wide basis throughout the organization.

COMMENT: In this sense, action learners are explorers who — like Meriwether Lewis and James Clark — share valuable knowledge gained from their journeys of discovery.

6. An action learning coach: Coaching is necessary for the group to focus on the important (resolving the problem). The action learning coach helps the team members reflect on both what they are learning about identifying and then solving a problem, and, about doing so in collaboration with others.

COMMENT: It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of action learning to the development of effective supervisors at all levels and in all areas of the given enterprise.

Michael J. Marquand is Professor of Human Resource Development and International Affairs at the Elliott School of International Relations as well as Program Director of Overseas Programs at George Washington University. Mike also serves as President of the World Institute for Action Learning. He is the author of 20 books and over 100 professional articles in the fields of leadership, learning, globalization and organizational change including Action Learning for Developing Leaders and Organizations, Optimizing the Power of Action Learning, Leading with Questions, Building the Learning Organization, The Global Advantage, Action Learning in Action, Global Leaders for the 21st Century, Global Human Resource Development, Technology-Based Learning, and Global Teams. He received his doctorate in Human Resource Development from George Washington University and his Masters and Bachelor Degrees from Maryknoll College.