Whether inside or across organisations, within and across cultures, introducing innovative solutions and creating behavioural shifts is a complex and challenging endeavour.
Providing seminars, talking and reading about complex issues and new concepts makes sense. However, it is not enough to actually change your practice.
Make space for action-learning
To succeed, open-minded leaders – managers, government officials and policy-makers - need to make space for testing, failing and prototyping. Committed employees and glocal citizens long for practical, neutral space in which they can try out new ideas and strategies. They want to be able to “fail safely” when trying out new ideas. Once management appreciates the unexpected outcomes from action-based learning and integrates them into their strategic processes, a large and diverse network of practitioners - disrupters, betapreneurs and makers - can evolve and add value to an organisation and to society as a whole.
Communities of practice can provide a fruitful communicative framework for workshops, events and peer exchange that support such an experimental approach. Some key factors of success are the transfer of knowledge and new insights across sectors; professionally moderated engagement and communication on various levels; open and unintimidated conversations, face to face and online.