Reflections

During late 2020 and throughout 2021, I facilitated a number of online action learning sets in my role as programme director of a business support programme funded by the EU and delivered via a university business school. Pre-COVID, the programme had initially featured a variety of interventions from masterclass-type sessions through to hands-on workshops. The common theme throughout was an emphasis on reflection, peer-topeer learning, community building and developing relationships that would hopefully lead to mutual assistance and potentially collaborative working. This theme of social learning and reflection has underpinned almost all the business support programmes I have been involved in designing and delivering for the small to medium-sized enterprise sector. During the early phases of the programme, I did not include action earning sets, per se, but used coaching and action learning-style small group sessions. When the pandemic hit in early 2020, all our activity was moved online and, initially, took the form of webinartype sessions which were inevitably quite didactive and had only limited space and time for ‘networking’ and peer-to-peer conversations. Action learning sets held online via Microsoft Teams or Zoom were an obvious way of bringing participants together in a much more interactive and dynamic way. These sets provided me with a look into one potential future for action learning. The participants on this programme were all owner-managers of creative and digital SMEs, recruited to join action learning sets as a way of developing their own problem-solving skills, gaining new perspectives, resolving work problems, improving their own confidence as business owners and leaders, and hopefully growing their businesses. I had previously facilitated many sets both online and face-to-face so this was not a new experience for me but it was for all of the set members. I used my experience of online action learning as well as online learning in general to tweak the format of the sets to meet the varying needs of participants. I have found trying to simply replicate a face-to-face session leads to the experience being compromised so tried to design the sessions to be user-friendly and beneficial to participants who were not only new to action learning but also new to spending their lives online (not to mention the global pandemic and associated pressures that had necessitated us meeting online in the first place). Changes to the format included: