Action learning is consistent with the principles of positive psychology (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000) and appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider and Whitney, 2001) by encouraging team/set members to build on strengths and learn from life's challenges. In action learning, there is no need to unlearn or forget what has worked in the past. Reflecting on what has not worked helps team/set members unlearn or forget what doesn't work and invent/learn better ways of acting and moving forward. This way, team/set members are able to keep what has worked in the past, while also finding new and improved ways to increase productivity, in areas that may need improvement. Unlike other writers in the field of action learning, Kramer applies the theory of art, creativity and "unlearning" of the psychologist Otto Rank to his practice of action learning. Rank was the first to see therapy as a learning and unlearning experience. The therapeutic relationship allows the patient to: (1) learn more creative ways of thinking, feeling and being in the here-and-now; and (2) unlearn self-destructive ways of thinking, feeling and being in the here-and-now. Patterns of self-destruction ("neurosis") represent a failure of creativity, not, as Freud assumed, a retreat from sexuality. In action learning questions allow group members to "step out of the frame of the prevailing ideology", as Otto Rank wrote in "Art and Artist" (1932/1989, p. 70), reflect on their assumptions and beliefs, and reframe their choices. The process of "stepping out" of a frame, out of a form of knowing—a prevailing ideology—is analogous to the work of artists as they struggle to give birth to fresh ways of seeing the world, perspectives that allow them to see aspects of the world that no artists, including themselves, have ever seen before. The most creative artists, such as Rembrandt, Michelangelo and Leonardo, know how to separate even from their own greatest public successes, from earlier artistic incarnations of themselves. Their "greatness consists precisely in this reaching out beyond themselves, beyond the ideology which they have themselves fostered", according to "Art and Artist" (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 368). Through the lens of Otto Rank's work on understanding art and artists, action learning can be seen as the never-completed process of learning how to "step out of the frame" of the ruling mindset, whether one's own or the culture's—in other words, of learning how to unlearn.