ABSTRACT
Action learning always involves anxiety – as does any real learning. Anxiety contributes to both the success and failure of action learning sets. Set members may feel paralysed by anxiety over how they will be viewed or judged if they engage openly and from their feelings, derived from fear and avoidance. Such anxiety can have destructive or self-limiting effects. Some set members will face the issue of their anxiety as members of the set – doubts over their ability to cope and low levels of self-esteem. This is so because sets work with the feelings and not just the content of an individual's learning and this can manifest itself in a variety of ways. R. Revans himself, in a major 1960s study, saw the hospital as an 'institution cradled in anxiety' and the existence of defence mechanisms used by clinical professionals to cope with that anxiety have also been well-documented.
