Organizing the External Business Perspective: The Role of the Country Coordinator in Action Learning Programmes

THE continuum of the action learning experience is vast and diverse. Within this, the role of the country coordinator in an action learning programme is many-tiered and complex. The country coordinator is in essence the facilitator who must bring together all the diverse pieces of the project in order to actualize a specific programme in a selected country for the company’s participants. To this end, the coordinator must be a person able to work on many different levels in different capacities all at the same time. The views in this chapter are based on my experiences over the years as a country coordinator for action learning programmes in Europe and in Canada with some major corporate leaders in the field of action learning. While significant differences will arise in the approach to action learning within every company due to differences in corporate cultures and the needs and objectives of the company, I will try to extract some basic tenets which I believe may be useful in application to most corporate action learning scenarios.