The application of action learning at board level in a business emerging from distress

ABSTRACT The COVID- 19 pandemic changed familiar working practices overnight; Routine face to face meetings could not be held, accordingly, businesses were forced to replace routine meetings by digital technology to engage socially dispersed stakeholders in the task of maintaining business continuity. Radical sports cars are a motorsports business that has recently undergone turnaround and is beginning the transitional journey to recovery. Turnaround is a traumatic process for everyone involved. and generally, demands strong leadership, while on the other hand, the recovery phase requires the engagement of a diverse range of personalities and skills who are expected to form into a team with a shared vision and goals. This paper will report from an insider researcher's perspective including a short description of the business turnaround undertaken that contextualises the unexpected challenges that emerged, and, how adaptive action learning was utilised to augment other mechanisms that were able to continue through the Covid 19 crisis, thus, this work does not explore the meaning or the process of action learning, but rather provide a first-hand “lived experience” of adaptive action learning as applied to Radical sportscars. it is worth nothing here that the problems encountered, largely conform to the “wicked” descriptive.