Leadership in Action 10 years in action

10 years
This autumn is the tenth year for arranging the Leadership in Action program, a final special leadership and organization program in the Bachelor of Management executive education of BI Norwegian School of Management. On 18 august 2009, most of the teachers and administrative supporters involved were meeting up for a FAGSEMINAR at BI. Kari-Mette Mørdre made the very good WHITE LADY cake herself. I think the photos suggest lots of good spirit in LiA.

BRIEF BACKGROUND. It originates in an initiative Spring 1998, when a program proposal was developed by two associate professors, Agneta Karlsson and myself with encouraging support from a few BI administrators (incl. Dag Aadne Sandbakken).
Back then, Agneta and I were both newly recruited to BI. A suggestion from our head of Dep Rolv P. Amdam put the two of us together on the task.
Accidently, it turned out that we had ideas, backgrounds and hope for approaches, which were not difficult to tune. Complimentary competences and many a good laugh together probably also helped make the proposal real quickly, we were both eager to start something new & somewhat different from conventional, mainly one-way classroom teaching, although we kept, and tried to strengthen, the theoretical inquiry - by good scholars as well as students themselves.

In brief, we wanted the student to go on an active learning journey with other adult learners - from the initial grounding when formulating own challenges, to learning to find own literature to respond to own themes of interest, and grounding this in both theoretical reflections and own good examples and experiences. Leadership in Action allows to explore all this further in own term paper project - doing small studies in own organizations. The latter is not unique for this course, but some other ingredients were perhaps more unique such as finding your own literature, writing a synopsis and engaging further via a special synopsis exam. Or doing ARL tasks and reflective dialogues as part of the learning trying to weave the various aspects together in an experience. Of course everything was not so clear by then, but these aspects emerged soon in our development and experimental work with the course.
We also tried to respond to the adult and diverse learner by having a blend of good ingredients and ways of learning in each learning module - theory lectures preferably with some research frontier critical reflections, student group exercises in the form of action reflection learning, insights from selfreflective practitioners as guest lectures and lots of dialogues. In the process, when becoming the first teachers of the course, we learned to really appreciate the many spontaneous and emergent possibilities for learning among experienced adults from many parts of business and the society.

The program became approved already in 1998, yet it turned out that it was too late to launch it that same year. So first course realization was Autumn 1999, that is, ten years ago. It started with one class offered by BI's Net studies, teachers were both Agneta and myself, as said, and Kjersti Hatlevold and Boas became excellent adm supporters. We had great fun doing this together!

Later on, another class started in Oslo and one in Bergen and eventually 6 classes were up and running, i.e., from 2007/2008 (And some time before that, Agneta had stepped down and also moved back to Åland, but even before that, or later on, many other good persons were recruited as local responsible teachers such as Stein Lavik, Roald Nomme, Tonje Haalien, Randi Skare, Elisabeth Seim, Ragnhild Wiik, Frode Solberg, Leif-Runar Forsth, Jennifer Teague and Benedicte Brøgger and also several administrators became key and have contributed recurrently to the program).
This autumn it is 8 classes: 1 Net studies, 2 in Oslo, 1 Bergen, 1 Stavanger, 1 Drammen (new) and 1-2 Stavanger coarranging with and for Kristiansand.

This brief story is summarized after memory for this blog and is only one initial personal part of the background, of course. It is way much more to say about the further development of content, and the students' manifold practice backgrounds, searching abilities and course activities. What we have encountered and what we try to bring about in this course, may be another posting.
Just like to add that the name Leadership in Action, (or sometimes called just LiA) came later (an idea/initiative from me, to help signify its identity and orientation with a short name).