Reg Revans

Reginald William Revans was a British academic and management consultant, born in Portsmouth in 1907 and died in Shropshire in 2003, who is credited with founding the educational method known as action learning. Rather than relying on lectures from acknowledged experts, Revans argued that people learn best by working through real problems together in small groups, called action learning sets, where questioning and shared reflection matter as much as prior knowledge. He summarized this view in a formula stating that learning equals programmed knowledge plus questioning insight, meaning that structured study alone is not enough without the capacity to ask searching questions about a genuine, unresolved problem. His approach positioned learners as active participants who improve performance by working on real organizational challenges rather than as passive recipients of expert instruction, and it became widely adopted in business schools and management training programs internationally.