The Nokia story of using action learning

Nokia is the world leader in mobility, driving the transformation and growth of the converging Internet and communications industries. A truly global business, Nokia makes a wide range of mobile devices and provides people with experiences in music, navigation, video, television, imaging, games and business mobility through these devices. Nokia also provides equipment, solutions and services for communications networks. We have been using action learning for over 15 years, with varying degrees of impact and success. Now, as we need to increase our agility and capacity for change in a fast moving and highly competitive world, we are seeking to improve our capacity to learn fast and act on the challenges that face us. To improve and expand our approach we have been using an inquiry process to understand what has worked well with action learning in the past and how we can make better connections between business strategy and learning and organisation development. We clarified our ‘Nokia Action Learning’ approach to make it more consistent when implenting it more widely in the organisation. This paper tells the story of the journey we are making, in a fast moving high-tech business, what we are learning about what works, and also seeks ideas -- and challenges -- as we shape our next steps.