Aim: To participate in your first Action Learning Set meeting

Duration: 6 hours

You will be now have commenced your research, and will be starting to discover some of the practical challenges related to your project. In an earlier activity, you will have established how you are going to conduct your Action Learning Set meeting and we would now like you to engage in this discussion with your set.

As we have stated before, how you communicate and coordinate this process is to be decided by your set, but your tutor will be available to support you all in this endeavour. If you have any concerns about the action learning approach please contact your tutor in the Tutorial area.

Before beginning, it can be helpful to establish for yourself what you wish to gain from the Action Learning Set meeting, and we recommend that after the set is complete you reflect on your goals to assess the effectiveness of your approach to the meeting.

As a set you will have previously discussed the format of the discussion, so you will already know what you are expected to bring to the meeting and in what form. You should arrive at the Action Learning Set meeting with a number of predetermined issues that you want to discuss.

The Action Learning Set meeting provides a sounding board for your own ideas and opens up the possibility for new insights to be revealed through open questioning and discussion. We would therefore advise you to identify the areas that you are struggling with, and bring these to the meeting for the input of your peers.

By the end of this activity, you should have completed in your first Action Learning Set meeting, the outcome of which should have provided you with new insights into your business solutions project and a fresh perspective on how to progress. You may even have solved one or more outstanding problems that you had previously been facing.

At the end of the meeting you should, as a set, agree the arrangements for the next Action Learning Set meeting. This may involve a different process to your first meeting, depending on how effective you felt the meeting was.

The meeting should end with each member of the set formally collating their learning and identifying a number of actions to be completed prior to the next Action Learning Set meeting. We would like you to write no more than 200 words summarising this information and share it in the Tutorial area for discussion with your tutor.