Formation Agile

guide des pratiques présentielles et digitales pour les individus et les organisations

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!)

In our work we have observed many people taking up social learning leadership. One key observation is that they display seemingly contradictory characteristics. To engage BEtreaters in reflections on their leadership, we have put our observations on this diagram. Its axes represent what looks like paradoxes. We’ve noticed that good social learning leaders (or leadership teams) embody both ends of each axis. They manage to live with the tension; they embody the paradox. By rating themselves on each axis, participants were able to see the shape of their profile as social learning leaders, and even to think about who else should be on their team.

For us this is a work in progress, so don’t be surprised if it looks different when we next see you. And whether it resonates or you have suggestions or a different experience, we’d be glad to hear from you.