Our intention in this article is to add to the different ways of looking at and working with change in organizations. We suggest a set of working propositions that move away from problem-solving or planning-based approaches to change, towards a method which focuses primarily on organizational members' emotions and relations, and on forces of uncertainty and defensiveness. We attempt both to highlight the dynamic nature of change, and to point towards some key issues, often avoided, for engaging with aspects of change. We then describe a participative research process we have employed to access and act on organizational members' emotional responses to change. In this instance, drawings were used with managers in six public service organizations as the catalyst to enable managers to bring out often paradoxical emotions, and to work with these as part of the process of the management of change. While our research is set in the context of enormous changes in U.K. public services, we feel that our methodology is applicable to any organizational setting which is characterized by uncertainty and defensiveness.

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This paper addresses an aspect of organizational learning that has not been extensively developed -the impact of emotion on organizational learning. The study of emotion in organizations is seen as an important part of the development of organizational learning. The paper argues that attention to the emotional dynamics of organizing, and to the links between emotion and organizational politics, will increase the possibilities for understanding organizational learning. Awareness of the impact of emotion on organizational learning can be developed through an investigation of two areas. First, organizational learning is more than a product of organizational responses to individual learning. Emotion contributes to a broader understanding of systemic learning. Second, emotion is important to strategic aspects of organizational learning. There is a link between the emotional and the political within organizations. The paper contains a discussion of these themes using brief case examples to illustrate and develop the issues.

The author discusses Kolb's learning cycle and the propositions that give rise to it. The author considers the importance of the cycle within mainstream management education and development and then takes a more critical view, looking both behind and beyond the learning cycle at issues that can be developed out of its current conceptualization. The author argues that a more comprehensive picture of experiential learning in management education might be based on developments around emotional and political aspects of Kolb's model. These developments are intended to acknowledge additional, often omitted, aspects of learning from experience within management education and development. The author offers three particular areas for the development of skill and knowledge in the practice of management education.