The practice goes like this: everyone at a meeting belongs to a leadership group – and each group stewards one part of the learning process of the whole group. In this way leadership of the community meeting is distributed over the entire event.

Leadership here is seen as an act of service, that is, not leadership in terms of telling others what to do, but helping the group develop itself as a learning partnership. We’ve seen these groups lead to some transformational turn-arounds in group dynamics and the learning potential. (Notwithstanding the times they flopped – which led us to learn a great deal!)

We gave playful names to the groups in the spirit of making it a fun and inventive way of leading the process: agenda activists, community keepers, critical friends, social reporters, external messengers, value detectives.

Over the years we’ve come to see that these groups can work well in lots of different contexts including group meetings, conferences, and long-term community development. Anywhere, that is, where there is an intention for collective learning.

We’re now preparing to study the practice as it is being used on a course for owner-managers at Lancaster University Management School. Our inquiry is to find out if and how they develop the social learning capability of the cohort over this coming academic year. We’ll keep you posted.

Let us know if you use or develop the leadership groups. This chapter for download is going to be one chapter in a handbook we are producing for facilitators, conveners and coordinators of social learning. We’ll publish each chapter as we get it done and integrate feedback in the final version.
 

Contents

Download

You can download the full text in PDF format here:

See also

This year we are running four different BEtreat workshops.

And it is the second year we are running a one-year certificate professional development program.

BEtreat workshops in 2013

You can see all the BEtreat programs outlined on this page.

Again we are running BEtreats for professionals and for academics. While we are keeping two BEtreats for professionals, the difference this year is that we have also split the academic BEtreat into “state-of-the-art” and “cutting-edge” so that we can cater both for people who want to make sure they are up-to-date with the theory and research for their academic practice and those who want to look into the dilemmas of social learning theory and develop it.

But in short, here are the dates:

Certificate program – July 2013-July 2014:

This will be the second year of running our professional program which includes participation in two BEtreats and orientation throughout the year with a specific project – starting July 2013.

Sign up before March 31 to get the early-bird discount.

Integrating social media

There is increasing familiarity with social media. Fully integrating the use of a wiki into our activities and interactions was still quite a novelty when we started. Today it seems unremarkable, almost expected.

Our goal is to achieve seamless face-to-face and online participation with commonly available community resources. Something we’ve noticed is that people who thrive in face-to-face/online integration tend to be playful and inventive and curious about connecting in multiple ways. And online participation seems to work well for people who enjoy reflective modes of communication.

We are still wondering what the ideal mix of online and face-to-face is. The three BEtreats this year were very different. In the state-of-the-art BEtreat, we had a small group and one online person. She became the darling of the workshop and felt very integrated, but she did not have online company.

The cutting-edge BEtreat had a large group and four online participants. Sometimes we worried we were neglecting onliners, but they had developed enough confidence as a group to tell us to stop talking to them as face-to-facers with a disability and get on with things until they told us it wasn’t working for them.

In the academic BEtreat, we had eight online participants and eight face-to-face. This pushed the limits of the technology too far in the beginning – to the extent that we offered them their money back. However, they all wanted to continue and, as the technology improved, we saw an interesting whole-group dynamic where onliners were not a minority.

Breadth, depth, and sector focus

Balancing depth and breadth of focus is still a challenge for us. Four days seems like a long time, but it shoots by. Which conversations should we cut out to stick to the agenda? Streamlining the number and diversity of topics that come up while not missing out on anyone’s concerns requires some fine-tuning that we need to get better at.

We spent more time in sector groups this year. It allowed people to focus on shared issues within sectors and help each other address them. We will certainly push this further next year, especially for exploring emerging issues. But it will also get us thinking of how to balance the time we spend on sector-oriented learning, cross-sector boundary encounters, and general topics and issues.

Broader focus

We have seen a broadening of the focus of BEtreats over the years. Three years ago, the main concern was in building robust communities of practice. While this is still important, there is also an increasing interest in social learning theory and its application more broadly. The discussion of our current research direction focusing on social learning capability in landscapes of practice generated a lot of interest. We doubt this would have got as much interest three years ago.

In whole group discussions “online folk” are projected onto a big screen at the front. We use Adobe Connect for the video-conferencing and Skype for sound. The sound quality on Adobe Connect is not nearly so good as Skype. However, as we discovered at the Academic BEtreat, Skype sound with more than four people quite often drops.

It’s tiring for onliners to be listening and participating for such long periods so we have invested in good microphones to give them better quality sound. We use music stands to prop up a computer or i-pad when they join in small group discussions with “face-to-facers”.

We don’t claim that this is the ideal set-up – it is simply what we have found, mostly through googling and our trusted friends. Next BEtreat we’ll invest in more good microphones for the small group conversations instead of using internal computer mics. Up until now we’ve been using some perfectly good speakers we’ve had for a while to bring online voices into the room, although we ended up simply using our internal Mac Book Pro speakers in the Academic BEtreat.

In addition we bought 2 x 100 feet (30 meter) internet cables and many – many – extension chords.

This invitation to give a public lecture was related to an initiative that the University of Hong Kong has launched as part of a curriculum reform project. Under the leadership of Professor Amy Tsui (the book she and her colleagues published on
university-school partnerships is a good example of a social-learning perspective applied to action research), this initiative is placing what they call “experiential learning” at the heart of the university’s pedagogy.

Under this initiative, students conduct concrete projects in their area of study, run by the school for their pedagogical and social value – for instance, building a school in a rural area. Students become involved in all aspects of the projects, from planning to realization. They face the full complexity of an actual project including its practical, social, technical, and ethical dimensions. The initiative organizes learning, not merely as the transmission of a formal curriculum, but as the transformative growth of full human beings as they enter a field.

The University is not just seeking to give students a bit of practical experience as is often done with internships. The central use of actual, meaningful projects aims to make experiential learning an integral part of the core curriculum. The initiative has started in professional schools, such as engineering, architecture, and business (see a short video that describes these projects). Eventually the vision is to adopt the approach across the university and adapt it to every discipline.

The initiative still faces important challenges, with difficult questions about evaluation and full integration into degree programs. Yet it is exciting and inspiring to see a well-respected university embrace the social and experiential nature of meaningful learning and take on the challenge of giving this perspective an institutional realization.

We are eager to remain part of this promising experiment and we hope that other institutions around the world will join this ongoing exploration of higher education and the place of the university in the 21st century. There is an embryonic community here, and this is one we would love to help convene.

After the session, Debbie Jennsen, who is leading the ABSugar initiative, asked me if I could connect her with people at Deutsche Bank, also based in London. She had seen the blog post we had written about them “Social learning at Deutsche Bank” and that story made Debbie want to talk with them directly.

This made us reflect on the role of stories in our practice and the ways they reflect our roles as consultants and what we do to:

We are realizing that in deepening our own practice we are developing ourselves as a certain kind of story-teller and as a connector of people across the landscape. This is probably why one of our favorite assignments is to research and write up cases….

And perhaps the reason we get so excited about our BEtreat workshops is that they combine all these roles into one event.

It’s a massive conference (around 3000 people) and the dinner was a big affair. In that environment it made sense to have a speaker. Jane Fonda was scheduled to give the dinner speech, but news came that she wasn’t going to show up.

On learning that she couldn’t make it the organizers created what we thought was a great social learning activity – and that turned out to be much better than a keynote. Two of the big names in the Psychotherapy network played some video snippets – from the Soprano series, the film Analyze This, and In Treatment (HBO series). After each snippet we were invited to discuss at our dinner table the following questions:

• what’s happening?
• what boundaries are being crossed?
• did the psychotherapist do the right thing?

Feedback from a couple of tables after each snippet was followed by comments from the two big names, playing the role of facilitator.

Certainly the dinner discussions at our table moved beyond polite chit-chat and networking. We’d bet that more meaningful conversations happened than what would have done with an after- dinner speech. It also surfaced some whole room consensus that the profession is not very well-represented in the media.

Lesson learned for creating conversations about practice?

Invite big names to talk at your event – and then hope they cancel!

Four years ago, I became involved as an advisor with the KM group at the Center for Organizational Development in the Singapore Civil Service College (CSC) as they started to support the cultivation of communities of practice across the entire Public Service. My role also includes workshops and courses for practitioners, speaking at government-wide events, and participation in managerial meetings, including a private conversation with the Head of Civil Service. During last year’s visit, Bev and I even had a review session with the design team of “Cube,” a social networking platform being deployed across the Public Service with great potential for supporting communities of practice.

At this year’s open event, there was participation from 45 different Public Service agencies. Today the questions of these agencies no longer concern “why” they should foster the formation of communities of practice; the questions have now moved to “how.”

As in past visits, we met with community leaders to talk about their challenges and opportunities. These conversations always give rise to good insights. For example we had a meeting with the leaders of a new community of practice on International Relations. It is an important community at a time when all agencies, even domestic ones like transportation, become involved in international contexts. We noted three broad types of activities through which such a community can serve people in various roles across agencies:

• Practice-oriented exploration of basic approaches, principles, and techniques involved in international relations
• Opportunities to learn together when people are going on an international trip or are returning from a mission abroad and can offer the community a debrief
• Discussions of current events that influence international relations, such as the debt crisis in Europe or changing prospects in China.

So far, the initiative has achieved a good foundation of concrete cases, both within and across agencies. From communities of school principals at the Ministry of Education to IP managers across the Public Service, we have solid evidence that this mode of learning can function productively in the Singapore context. There is growing awareness of the potential of social learning and communities of practice, both among practitioners and among managers. The initiative is at a turning point. It can reach critical mass with some strategic attention and capability development.

We see the potential for Singapore to demonstrate what a national government can achieve when it becomes systematic about leveraging the potential of social learning and are looking forward to our own learning in this ground-breaking initiative.

Recently, clients have remarked how buzzy it is when the two of us are working together – more than the sum of two people. Let’s see if we can do that in our writing….

At the foot of the Sierra Mountains, the heart of the Gold country, the scenery is spectacular and the two local towns – Grass Valley and Nevada City – are quaint and full of life. There are some flickr pics of the nearby Yuba River here. Make sure you leave some time to see the area if you make it to the face-to-face part of the workshop.