Historical Insights for Faculty MembersIMCA's Faculty today is drawn from management consultants, training staffs and practising academics and teachers around the world. What we all have in common is a commitment to using action learning as our learning paradigm; and IMCA insists that shall always be the case. But we facilitate and tutor Associates ( IMCA's term for what others would call 'students' ) in whatever language they might wish and at venues that we and the Associates find convenient. Sometimes that venue may be on the Internet in an asynchronous Meeting Place with little or no face to face contact with fellow Associates or Faculty. Sometimes it will be in a corporate board room or training centre. Very seldom will it be in Buckingham England at IMCA's foundation centre on Castle Street in the Revans Action Learning Workshop.Of course it was not always thus. At the beginning of IMCA's 'membership programmes' as they have always been called since 1982, a small core of some dozen or so Faculty did much of the work with just a few Adjunct Faculty to assist. But come the global reach of the 80s and 90s, and come the Internet in 1994/ 1995, that pattern changed radically to the position we have today. With that spin out around the globe came a great enrichment of the Faculty provided we could meet together to share and compare, which has been accomplished by the rotation around the globe of biannual four day workshops at Graduation Congregation and the IMCA Annual Professional Congress since the late 1980s. It also brought deep local understanding of the Questions posed by the Associates on the membership programmes which was essential for action learning to flourish. It also brought a very obvious challenge, well summarised by The British Accreditation Council for Independent Further & Higher Education (BAC) when making one of its regular visits: How can you be certain that the ongoing delivery and outcomes assessments of action learning around the globe are of a consistent standard? And the honest answer of course, which we gave, is that at any given moment we cannot know that. But there are ways in which on a moments of truth basis we have learned to do what seems necessary to seek to ensure it.
Faculty Members at large have another equally vital role to play. We constitute the continuing network of committed action learners that must sustain IMCA economically. The way that particular strand of our drama has played out over the last 20+ years has been an action learning education of a very high order. Throughout its entire existence IMCA has never been in receipt of any capital grants. It collects fees for its action learning services to Associates, their employers and the profession and on occasion funding to develop particular action learning or research initiatives. This means that, although IMCA is strictly not-for-profit, it must at all times pay very close attention to its Income and Expenditure Accounts or it will be unable to remain in action. Core overheads have to be met, marketing and sales activities have to be funded, and of course facilitation and tuition have to be very well executed. Faculty Members ignore these absolute imperatives at their peril as will be discerned below. When major capital expenditure is required the challenge to meet them is spectacularly difficult. Getting IMCA on to the Internet in pole position around the globe with international US accreditations and our own University institution were perhaps the grandest of those challenges to be funded. But the beginnings of IMCA preceded the Internet Revolution by several decades. The Founding Faculty IMCA had conducted its affairs as a professional association from 1964 until 1982. In that year a whole range of circumstances combined to lead the core team to launch IMCA's 'own' programmes for degrees of membership as Bachelor, Master and Doctor. It was action learning from the very outset. They were and remain designed for professional practitioners of management or administration in post with issues and challenges facing them that can constitute the Questions to be asked so that learning from action can occur. The six Founding Faculty came from Business Schools in four universities: Bradford and Hull in Yorkshire, Cranfield in Bedfordshire, and Queensland in Australia. What they all had in common commercially was their involvement with MCB University Press - the academic publishing enterprise that had spun out from IMCA's house journal, Management Decision; and academically they had learnt so much in building and leading and managing that enterprise that they had come to realise that there was a superior way in action learning for practising managers to learn to that they were then engaged with i.e. teaching a normative curriculum and/ or using dead case studies. They were Judith Atherton (Financial & Information Management), Dr. Keith Howard (Operations Management), Dr Barrie Pettman (Social Economics and Strategy), Dr Sherril Kennedy (Marketing Communications), Dr Gordon Wills now Prestoungrange (Customer Policy and Logistics) and Dr Charles Margerison (Human Resources Management). They were rapidly joined from industry and commerce by Dr Alan Mumford (Human Resource Management), Dr Roger Bennett (Training & Development) from Oxford Brookes University then Polytechnic, Robin Gourlay (Health Care Management) from ICI, Dr Joanna Kozubska (Leadership and Career Development) from JobSeekers, Margaret Reid (Human Resources Management) from Leeds University, Peter Cooke (Marketing and Transportation) from consultancy and Dr James Kable (Finance and Human Resources) from Queensland University of Technology. Together these Faculty Members had subscribed some £600,000 by 1987 to an enterprise known as Buckingham House Limited for the growth and development of IMCA marketing and sales around the globe, an investment they realised in theory with over a 100% return in 1990 when they sold out to a publicly listed UK company with sales in excess of £150m per annum called Doctus plc - for 50% cash and 50% equity. This was perceived at the time as yet one more major initiative for further growth. Phoenix IMCA after Doctus plc Alas Doctus plc did not deliver; in fact it collapsed after only two years rendering those earlier share swaps worthless. More profoundly however, the collapse of Doctus plc meant IMCA was bereft (except in Asia where leadership came from the Singapore Office of Doreen Lim, from Dr Fredrick Tao in Hong Kong and from Ben S'ng and Ramli Khamis in Malaysia) of any marketing and selling activities for its programmes under what was then and still is obscurely known as 'The Common Agreement with the Ordinance 11 Partner'. The situation necessitated quick and decisive thinking. Faculty and Graduate Members came to Buckingham, and to Brisbane the flourishing Australian HQ, not to recriminate but to answer the Question: What Next? And Who wants to be part of whatever is Next? The answer was that MCB University Press wished to assist in dealing with the defalcations arising from the collapse of Doctus plc; and so did a posse of Buckingham based administrative colleagues and a global spread Faculty Members. The Phoenix Faculty was born and their dedication and commitment over the period since 1992 is the only reason IMCA survived and flourishes around the globe. Faculty Members as Ordinance 13 Partners Ordinance 13 had been drafted in Singapore before the Doctus plc interregnum along with the early editions of once again the provocatively named Conspectus by Judith Atherton. As senior member of the Information Management Faculty Team she also created the first computer based Global Registry system. The significance of Ordinance 13 was that it invited all Faculty Members around the globe to consider whether they could be proactive in achieving marketing and sales, and more than that managing the delivery of the membership programmes themselves. With the disappearance of a centrally funded marketing and sales effort and no short term possibility for raising major new funds, it was perhaps the only way forward. And it worked. Ordinance 13 Partners have since flourished around the globe ever since that time creating inter alia the largest Business School in the Nederland, College BREM in Sarawak, acquiring the Canadian School of Management, initiating ventures in China, Finland, South Africa, Botswana, Vanuatu, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. But there were obviously fluctuations in annual sales around the globe that had to be 'ironed out' to enable a consistent but modest core overhead, known as the Global Academic Budget, to be underwritten and to resource Ordinance 13 Partners. This was achieved after 1991 initially by MCB University Press then by two hemisphere focussed Faculty teams - IMC Europe and IMC Asia Pacific - which finally merged in 1997 to become the single entity IMC (Internet Action Learning) Limited. It is this latter enterprise, owned by Faculty Members, that has raised the funding in excess of £1m to give IMCA its outstanding 21st Century web presence, its global DETC accreditation and Revans University's presence in the USA. Faculty Were Empowered to Act for Action Learning Wherever They Are There is no such thing in IMCA as a marketplace exclusive arrangement for the conduct of action learning programmes. Ordinance 13 authorises any Faculty Member ( indeed any Graduate Member ) to propose and take responsibility for creating an action learning Set to follow a pattern of studies at any time. Not everyone does of course, but the opportunity is available. Once identified IMCA's core resources naturally ensure it is properly administered and delivered and externally examined, but the initiating Faculty Members can be involved with as much or as little of that as they might wish and are competent so to do. The merit of this approach is that IMCA does not have or require a core function to establish what is required around the globe. It facilitates any and every culture where there are IMCA members to identify and articulate their needs. So in New Zealand IMCA offers Agricultural Produce Marketing, in Finland and in the UK it works with major European Social Fund initiatives for SMEs, in Canada it responds to major changes in health care provision and in the People's Republic of China it responds to their emergent needs as a rapidly developing economy and action learns in the Chinese language. There were occasions in the early 1980s when a core function seated in Buckingham thought it had the answers and the best solutions. But the lesson of Doctus plc was that Buckingham did not, and IMCA was indisputably saved from commercial extinction at that time by its Asian colleagues. It behoves us all on the Faculty never to forget that story, or its moral. None of us has the monopoly on the best way to conduct action learning. By being multinational, by operating globally and by listening to and sharing with one another everyone has the opportunity to learn by comparison. It is certainly a high level learning skill but evidence over 20+ years shows that it is well worth honing. |
