Richard Hale Associates

Welcome

Welcome to my website.  You get to a stage in life when you think your deserve your own personal website, so here is mine!  I want it to be interactive, so if you share my beliefs in work based action learning and in helping people to achieve their potential then browse round and join in.

There are some giveaways in the Gifts section where I make my articles available and if you are interested in my books, workbooks and training materials see http://bit.ly/4IIBBc

Join in with the Learning Blog where I want to encourage debate and exchange of ideas on work based learning.

I consider myself fortunate to work in areas that stimulate me.  It is hard to say what my job is and if people ask me I usually confuse them. You can see on this site though that there are certain threads running through my work and life; a passion for learning, a desire to help others learn, a need to demystify academia and a concern to inspire people and support for the underdog.

I am not radical in my approach, but I do believe in challenging the status quo and some of the behaviours and thinking I come across in my business and educational roles.  I like to see other people challenging and pushing boundaries. I hate complacency and arrogance and I am just uncomfortable seeing people coasting through life.  It hurts me to see people in dependency relationships or feeling they are entrapped by other people or their employer or some other institution.  I mention all this so you have a flavour of what you will get if we choose to work together.

I have been influenced by some of the original thinking of Professor Reg Revans, founding father of action learning; he was ahead of his time.  He said ‘judge the person by the questions they ask not simply the knowledge they display’.  He wasn’t the first to recognise this of course; Socrates had a similar idea some 2,300 years before.  In this post modern, high touch, socially networked, information based world I think there is a lot in this.  You will see the theme of asking insightful questions runs through my personal coaching, mentoring, training and academic work.  I also recognise that people often learn best from each other, in groups.  I believe that achievement of learning at the knowledge, skills and motivation levels is of little use unless there is action taken and a conscious effort made to learn from that action as shown in my model of action learning below.

I am pleased to say I have taken the Action Learning and Leadership Questions approach to certain universities in the UK and Australia and it is now accepted as an innovative method for developing people, that can lead to accreditation and qualifications at Postgraduate Certificate or Masters degree level.