April 3-7 2011, Oxford, United Kingdom, LEAD International delivered a climate and development event, Action Lab, on behalf of the UKAid (DFID) funded Climate and Development Knowledge Network in conjunction with Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Future Considerations, Reos Partners and the UKERC Meeting Place, ECI Oxford. The brainchild ofAlex Hannant, this event brought together over 150 sustainability professionals from multiple sectors and different nations with a focus on action and specific outputs, determined by the participants themselves.
The Action Lab produced amazing energy and some excellent instant results – not least the 25 prototype projects that were developed through the incubation process, and which represent a diverse collection of innovative responses to climate change and development challenges across both sectors and issues.
However, the programme also provoked some important questions about the nature of leadership development and leadership networks in the 21st century. What made the Action Lab different from a typical conference or workshop was the focus on the participants setting the agenda themselves, and deliberately enabling the group to identify both the problems and solutions that they, as a professional network and community, felt were most critical to respond to. The design was enquiry-based and action focused, and was built on the principles of collection purpose and self-organisation.
As a network organisation that seeks to facilitate leadership for a sustainable world, LEAD has an opportunity evolve and promote a new model of leadership. Leadership development is not just about training individuals, it is about providing the spaces and convening talented and committed people to establish networks that build on social capital, remove barriers to self-organisations, scale-up effective practice, and to reframe the challenges we face to enable room for innovation, collective action and systemic change. We can sharpen the focus and evolve the design of the Action Lab but conceptually it was an important step – watch this space!
Release date: Friday, April 15, 2011
FOLLOW US
GET OUR LATEST NEWS
