Our World as a Learning System - a Communities of Practice Approach

Attachment

SnyderOurWorld.pdf

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Description

There is an emerging, global zeitgeist about community and learning. These issues have become commonplace in multinational organizations—private, public, and nonprofit. Still, when one looks at the learning requirements of the world, the complexity of the required learning system may seem so overwhelming as to discourage action. But the advantage of a community-of-practice approach is that it can be evolutionary—starting small and building up progressively, one community at a time. It is not necessary to have broad alignment of the kind required for designing or changing formal structures. We can start wherever there is opportunity, energy, existing connections and willingness of dialogue. We can build on what already exists. Indeed, we have found successful examples of initiatives to cultivate learning systems: within cities, across cities at a national level, and across cities internationally. Taken together, these early examples paint a picture of what a mature world learning system may look like, and they give some indication of what it will take to cultivate such a system.

We now need to develop frameworks for describing the organizational nature of civil society as a community-based action-learning system—and tools and methods for cultivating such systems. This essay is thus not only a call to action and a proposal for what is possible. It also calls for a new discipline. A discipline that expands the field of organization design and applies analogous principles at the world level. A discipline that promotes the development of strategic social learning systems to steward civic practices at local, national, and global levels. A discipline whose scope is the world and whose focus is our ability to design the world as a learning system—a discipline of world design.

This essay is only a beginning. There are many established and emerging disciplines— political science, economic sociology, social network analysis—that can inform the work in this domain. A community-based approach to world design is not a silver bullet for
solving the problems of the world. While the emphasis here has been on community, a complete discipline of world design would address how the power of communities can be most fully realized by aligning community activities within a broader ecology of formal
and informal structures—institutions, cultural groups, laws, and social networks.

Author

William M. Snyder and Etienne Wenger