Action Learning Day (2016)
Action Learning Day is CCL South Africa's full-day design that runs live action-learning sets alongside short input sessions, closing with individual commitments and a scheduled follow-up review.
A single day's timeline stretches across the page, running from live challenges through input sessions to a scheduled follow-up review.
Reach for this when…
- You need a single day that turns action learning into more than one good conversation.
- Leadership development keeps happening in one-off sessions that don't compound.
- You want live challenges worked in the room, not hypothetical case studies.
How to run it
- Participants bring real, live challenges to the set.
- Run the action learning process with facilitators guiding the set.
- Weave in short input sessions on relevant leadership topics.
- Close the day with individual commitments.
- Schedule a follow-up review to check what happened to those commitments.
A worked example
Situation. Mehdi Chaabane ran leadership development at a mining services firm in Tunis, Tunisia, and his one-off workshops kept fading within weeks of delivery.
Applied. He adapted the CCL SA day design: live-challenge sets in the morning, two short input sessions on delegation in the afternoon, and a personal commitment from every participant before they left.
Result. The difference was the fifth step: he put a follow-up review on next quarter's calendar. People showed up to it having actually done what they said.
The catch
It's a bespoke CCL SA design, so 'action learning day' elsewhere may mean something looser. Cramming live problem-solving and input sessions into one day risks doing both shallowly. And the follow-up review is where it actually pays off - skip that and the day fades like any other workshop.
The value sits in the follow-up meeting, not the day itself.
Origin: Center for Creative Leadership South Africa