Simulation-Based Training

General Guidelines

1. Keep the number of participants low. There is likely to be an optimum size depending on the objective the group is intended to work on. Usually four is the minimum number of participants, while six is the maximum size.
2. Consider carefully how to establish the membership. When the membership decision is made by the Action Learning Set itself it will have strengths related to identity. However free choices may be dangerous when used as a unique strategy.
3. Give the group part of the objectives, letting them the freedom of discussing the remaining ones. It can be useful to give the group the possibility to decide how they will demonstrate they reached the expected results, helping them to balance between over-ambition and under-achievement.
4. Suggest the leadership in the set to be rotated. This means that different members can take the lead for different tasks and contribute to the overall result.
5. Suggest the group to consider both positive and negative experiences. Since Action Learning Sets are about learning from experiences, episodes where some errors were encoutered and did not gave positive results are as useful as the ones where everything worked fine.
6. Help the Action Learning Set to track its work. The members should keep records of what has been discussed during the meetings. This can be useful for an assessment of the results obtained.