Brief thoughts on facilitating action learning

The accounts of practice in this editorial prompt some reflections on the business of facilitating action learning. The role of the facilitator is now considered to be highly significant, especially, though not exclusively, because of the developing practice of critical action learning, and most accounts have shown that practitioners make use of permanent or semi-permanent facilitators in their practice of action learning (Pedler, Burgoyne, and Brook 2005). Revans himself, however, was dismissive, if not overtly hostile to the facilitator role, which he saw as best confined to helping to get the process started: "It is vital that Action Learning takes advantage of our present disillusion with the academy to escape yet another round of dependence upon ambiguous facilitators." (Revans 1998, 12). Revans' antipathy to the idea of facilitators stemmed not only in part from his own disillusionment with the academy, but also because he wanted to ensure that action learning did not become dominated by 'experts'. Why, then, have facilitators now become so necessary to most action learning practice? And is this necessarily a bad thing?