Two Projects, One Direction: Dual-Project Action Learning and the Architecture of Hope Alignment

Action learning programs, in the tradition established by Reginald Revans, are designed to couple real organizational work with structured reflection so that individual development and organizational contribution can unfold together. Learning emerges through the process of trying to solve genuine problems, and organizations benefit from solutions that might not have emerged through traditional problem-solving alone.

Action learning programs ideally pursue both personal development and organizational problem-solving at the same time. What varies is the format. Single-project action learning brings a team together to work on one shared organizational challenge. Multiple-project action learning brings individual participants to a set, each working through their own distinct leadership issue, with the group focusing on each member's problem in turn. Both formats serve both aims. The Dual-Project Action Learning Program, developed by Dr. Hyung Joon Yoon, takes a different structural approach: it runs both formats simultaneously. Each participant is both a team member solving the organizational challenge and a problem-holder working through their own individual leadership issue, in the same team, in the same program cycle. Personal growth and organizational contribution are not sequential or coincidental. They are intentional, parallel, and mutually reinforcing.

Read alongside Hope-Action Theory for Organizations and Bandura's human agency framework, this dual structure may help explain how genuine alignment between individual direction and shared organizational purpose can emerge, a persistent challenge in more traditional sequential approaches.

How It Works

Standard action learning places participants in real organizational challenges worked on in learning sets, with structured reflection. Individual development is usually embedded in the shared problem-solving process rather than carried as a separate, concurrent personal-development track.

The dual-project model makes that second track explicit. Participants work on a team-based project addressing a genuine organizational challenge while simultaneously pursuing an individual project focused on their own development: their self-clarity, their sense of direction, and the conditions that allow them to contribute with genuine agency. Both tracks run together, in the same organizational context, in real time.

To make this concrete: a participant might spend part of a session working with their team on a live business challenge, conducting stakeholder interviews, analyzing data, and testing their thinking with peers. In the same program cycle, they are also working through structured reflection on their own strengths, values, and the future they are building toward. Those two activities are not kept separate. Insights from the individual work inform how the participant shows up on the team project. Progress on the team project reshapes what the individual sees as possible.

In a 2012 case study of one large South Korean IT manufacturer, Yoon, Cho, and Bong found that this format was associated with gains in leadership competencies, deeper business awareness, and strong projected return on investment, averaging over 1,300 percent across twelve team projects. The authors note that further research is needed to validate these effects in other settings, and that some ROI projections were based on forecasts rather than fully realized outcomes. What the study does offer is a grounded illustration of what this architecture can produce when both tracks are genuinely integrated.

Human Agency at Two Levels at Once

The theoretical foundation for why this architecture is worth taking seriously comes from Bandura's human agency theory, as translated for organizational and HRD practice by Dr. Yoon in the HABIT model (Human Agency-Based Individual Transformation). Bandura identified that human agency operates in three modes: personally, through proxy relationships, and collectively through coordinated group effort. All three are always in play. The organizational conditions surrounding a person either activate or suppress their capacity to exercise agency in each mode.

The HABIT model resequences Bandura's four core properties of human agency (self-reflectiveness, forethought, intentionality, and self-reactiveness) to align with how development actually unfolds in organizational practice. It begins with self-reflection, moves through clarity and envisioned direction, and arrives at deliberate action that is monitored and adjusted through ongoing feedback. HABIT was developed as an individual-transformation model. Dr. Yoon's Hope-Action Theory for Organizations extends this framework to the collective level, drawing on the Hope-Action Theory developed by Niles, Amundson, and colleagues, though he notes that the organizational principles and steps it proposes have not yet been empirically tested. What the two frameworks together suggest is that the dual-project model gives both individual and organizational development a shared structure to move through in parallel, which is what makes integration possible rather than coincidental.

Private Hope, Collective Hope, and the Alignment Problem

Peter Drahos, writing from a political science perspective, distinguishes three categories of hope that have direct relevance to organizational life. Private hope is what an individual holds for their own future. Collective hope is the hope that group members genuinely share, built from real common ground rather than declared from above. Public hope is what leaders or institutional actors articulate as the direction of the whole, which may or may not reflect what members actually hold.

Drawing on Drahos' framework, Hope-Action Theory for Organizations names a central challenge in organization development: when public hope and collective hope diverge, when the stated direction does not reflect what members genuinely share, engagement can drop and trust can erode. And when private hope is disconnected from collective hope, individual effort fragments even when intent is strong. The goal of effective organization development, in this framing, is not simply to deliver development content. It is to align private hope, collective hope, and public hope so that individual direction and organizational direction are building each other rather than pulling apart.

The dual-project model is one practical architecture for doing that work. The individual track creates space for participants to surface their own private hope: what they value, what they are working toward, where they want their contribution to land. That process does not ask participants to be relentlessly positive. Hope-Action Theory explicitly acknowledges that self-reflection involves both strengths and challenges, and that sustained hope is built through honest engagement with both, not through positivity alone. The organizational track surfaces and tests collective hope: what the team genuinely shares, where they are building toward together, what a meaningful organizational future looks like from where they actually stand. When both tracks are oriented by inquiry that is generative rather than purely diagnostic, the energy produced in one tends to feed the other. Private hope finds a place to go. Collective hope finds people who believe in it. Public hope becomes something more than a stated direction.

Bandura and Drahos developed their frameworks for different purposes and from different disciplines. Hope-Action Theory was developed in career development work by Niles, Amundson, Yoon, Neault, and colleagues, and Dr. Yoon later extended that logic to organizations. Canopy Inclusive draws on this lineage to describe a practical condition we work toward with organizations: hope alignment is not a fixed destination. It is an ongoing condition that organizations build and maintain through the quality of their development architecture, the questions they ask, and the degree to which both individuals and the organization are developing together rather than separately. That interpretation is ours, and we offer it as an extension of their theoretical work, not a claim about what their research proves.

What This Means in Practice

For senior leaders thinking about development investments, the question worth asking is not only what program to run. It is whether the program is designed to develop private hope and collective hope in relationship. Research on training transfer has long established that what people learn in one context often fails to carry into another when those contexts are structurally separated (Baldwin & Ford, 1988). Programs that focus entirely on individual development without an organizational anchor produce capable people who lack shared direction. Programs that focus entirely on organizational challenges without individual development produce better solutions from people who feel unrecognized. The dual-project model addresses both, in the same process, without treating either as secondary.

That is the difference between a development program and a development architecture. And it is the kind of alignment that, in our experience, makes the work stick.

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References

Baldwin, T. T., & Ford, J. K. (1988). Transfer of training: A review and directions for future research.Personnel Psychology,41(1), 1–63.

Bandura, A. (2001). Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective.Annual Review of Psychology,52, 1–26.https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.52.1.1

Drahos, P. (2004). Trading in public hope.Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,592, 18–38.https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716203261614

Niles, S., Amundson, N., Neault, R. A., & Yoon, H. J. (2020).Career recovery: Creating hopeful careers in difficult times. Cognella Academic Publishing.

Yoon, H. J. (2019). Toward agentic HRD: A translational model of Albert Bandura’s human agency theory.Advances in Developing Human Resources,21(3), 335–351.https://doi.org/10.1177/1523422319851437

Yoon, H. J. (2020). Hope-Action Theory for organizations.Organization Development Review,52(4), 28–34.

Yoon, H. J., Cho, Y., & Bong, H. C. (2012). The impact of a dual-project action learning program: A case of a large IT manufacturing company in South Korea.Action Learning: Research and Practice,9(3), 225–246.https://doi.org/10.1080/14767333.2012.711237