Reg Revans
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Professor Reginald William Revans (May 14, 1907 - January 8, 2003) was an academic, administrator and management consultant who pioneered the use of Action learning. He was also a former long-jumper who represented Britain at the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam and won two silver medals (for long jump and triple jump) at the first British Empire Games in 1930.
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[edit] Early Life
He was born at Portsmouth, where his father was a marine surveyor. As a boy he saw his father receive a visit from seaman’s representatives after the wreck of the RMS Titanic. He recollected attending the funeral of Florence Nightingale with his mother.
In the late 1920s he was a doctoral student in astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. A Commonwealth Scholarship in 1930 took him to study astrophysics and astronomy at Michigan, and on his return to Cambridge as a fellow to Emmanuel he worked at the Cavendish Laboratories under Lord Rutherford and Sir J. J. Thomson. There were five Nobel prizewinners in the department, but Revans found them humble enough to share their puzzlements and to listen, rather than claiming to know and be able to instruct. Revans always remembered Albert Einstein saying to him: "If you think you understand a problem, make sure you are not deceiving yourself."[1] It was here that Revans began to develop his thinking on the role of 'non-expert' in problem solving, distinguishing between knowledge and wisdom in so doing.
He moved into education to become assistant education officer for Essex (1935-1945) and then director of education for the National Coal Board from 1945 to 1950.
[edit] Action Learning
- Main article - Action learning
It was at the Coal Board that Revans did much of the early work on developing action learning, working alongside E. F. Schumacher (author of Small is Beautiful) and Eric Trist, whose theories about socio-technical systems have also had an important influence on organisation development. Revans then became the first professor of industrial management at the University of Manchester (1955-1965) but left to develop the inter-university action learning programme in Belgium.
Revans strongly held that the key to improving performance lay not with 'experts' but with practitioners themselves. Hence he devised Action Learning as a process whereby the participant studies his own actions and experience in conjunction with others in small groups called action learning sets.
On his return to the UK at the age of 68, he continued his global mission to spread the word of action learning. During the 1970s and 1980s he travelled round the world several times and wrote his most famous books: Developing Effective Managers (1971); The Origins and Growth of Action Learning (1982) and ABC of Action Learning (1983).
[edit] Later Life
Revans made furniture as a hobby, played the trumpet and painted — even illustrating small books for his children. He was knighted by the King of Belgium, and in 1997 he was awarded the freedom of the City of London. Revans died in Wem, Shropshire on 8 January 2003.
[edit] Legacy
Revans is not remembered as one of the best known gurus of management education or organisational development, not least because of his scorn for experts and his championing of ordinary people. However The Revans Centre for Learning and Research at Salford University and management schools around the world now teach his ideas, and they are applied in many organisations. His techniques have been applied by many management consultants and academics including Mike Pedler and Alan Mumford in the UK and Michael Marquardt and Joe Raelin in the USA.
