Posts Tagged "social learning capability"

We may know what we need to know to deal with many of the world’s complex problems; what we don’t have as a system is the learning capability to deal with them. After a talk on the subject of social learning capability at the WHO, a doctor shared the following reaction: “You are onto something important here. We know everything we need to know to save 95% of children under five today. What we don’t know is how to increase the social learning capability of societies to make that happen.” If facing change, expanding our horizon, and dealing with complexity are all social learning challenges, we live in demanding times. In the context of rapid globalization and incerasing interdependence, we face a threatened environment, economic precariousness and...

We had an interesting visit to the Mandel Institute in Israel. The occasion was the annual conference with graduates of their two-year, intensive leadership program. The theme was “professional identity”. Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey opened the day with their work on “immunity to change” and we led the afternoon with our work on “learning citizenship”. It was exciting for us to introduce the concept of learning citizenship in this context for two reasons: it is a major theme of our joint work going forward, and it also happens to be critically relevant to both the theme of the conference and the work of the Mandel Institute with its graduates. Spearheading such an approach in a place in the world where political challenges (which we would view as...

We see it as our mission to develop a theory and practice of social learning – for individuals, communities, organizations, and society more generally. So this concept is fundamental for us. Etienne’s work on social learning theory places learning at the core of human existence and assumes that it is fundamentally a social phenomenon. Learning is the foundation of who we are (becoming). It is social because our human nature is social, not just because (or when) we interact with others or use certain tools. We are aware of the current trend to focus conversations about social learning on social media. We understand this trend because, indeed, emerging social media technologies are surprisingly aligned with the tenets of social learning theory. We...

Successful social learning spaces depend on acts of learning citizenship on the part of everyone. But some people have a knack for making it happen. They can create social spaces where meaningful learning can take place where people are inspired to learn together and to act as learning citizens. We have met a number of these wonderful people in our work and witnessed their art first hand. We call them “social artists.” We are not entirely sure how they do it, or even if there is a recipe for how it is done. But we know that what they do is important. Their work in key to the development of social learning capability at all levels, from small conversations and communities to large-scale social systems. It is definitely an art form – expressed in many...

We all have a unique trajectory through the landscape of practices that constitute the human world. All these practices have in some way contributed to shaping who we are. And the resulting identity is a unique perspective on the world. As we participate in different social learning spaces our actions affect those spaces. They also affect the people we interact with. And those people belong to other social spaces. So our own learning behavior can affect the learning capability of a whole landscape of learning spaces. Taking responsibility for managing this participation in and across different learning spaces is what we call “learning citizenship”. It comes in different forms. Learning citizenship might simply be the quality of our engagement in a given...

Hopefully we all know them… those contexts where you feel like you are able to have really meaningful conversations with people about your experience of and involvement in practice. You feel that you can be who you are as a learner. Communities, workshops, events, co-authoring… they can all give rise to those kinds of interactions where you feel like you are engaged with learning partners in pushing the envelope. That’s what we mean by social learning spaces: …social containers that enable genuine interactions among participants, who can bring to the learning table both their experience of practice and their experience of themselves in that practice. Not all attempts to bring people together to learn create social learning spaces! They involve a social...