Each participant is normally required to complete an organisational monograph prior to the start of the programme.

The monograph will contain the following:

The role and purpose of their departments.

Identification of the individual’s own role in their organisation, the nature and significance of their work, the problems they face personally and how their performance is measured.

The structure of the organisation and how their department fits in.

The nature and processes of the business in which they work and the problems their departments are facing, with particular reference to inter-departmental problems.

The issues that are perceived as most likely to influence the future managerial success of each participant and their organisations.

In particular, the monograph will address the participants learning experiences in the context of their work and will contain:

Views of the norms and values of the organisation and how these contribute to individual learning.

The individual’s view of their contribution to their organisation, their areas of strength and skill and a statement of their own learning needs refined via the self-assessment background material.

The purpose of the monograph is threefold:

The central theme of Action Learning is to relate the programme and the learning that will take place to each individual’s daily reality in the workplace.  Accordingly, that reality must be identified at the beginning of the programme.

Each individual will work in an Action Learning “set” with others on the programme who, in order to help each other, must be aware of each others working situation.

The Programme Director, in offering resources and support to the Set needs to understand the organisational context each member of the programme works in.

In addition to preparing the above, participants will be given background reading in the form of articles and papers tailored to the needs of the organisation, distance learning material and selected texts.