Partly out of a sense of drama and partly to make a point I sometimes find myself being dismissive of “collaboration” and “sharing knowledge”.

This is why.

First, social learning is first and foremost about – well – learning. Learning as a social enterprise. Say, write, or even think a word that you assume makes sense to someone else and you are engaging in something social. Coming to a shared understanding of what that word represents (or not) has been a process of social learning. That process hasn’t necessarily been smooth. The word has been contested, hijacked, distorted, re-interpreted, adapted, agreed, and disagreed on. Its shared meaning right now is simply a snapshot of its unfinished journey through social learning.

That’s the same with all artifacts, reifications, and processes that make up social learning in communities of practice. The ride to where they are today has not necessarily been smooth. There may have been some collaboration along the way, but it’s unlikely to be the full story.

What’s more, collaboration can be a euphemism for papering over disagreements and politics. It can be a way to silence voices or disregard issues of power. But disagreements, contestability, and awareness of power are all opportunities to enrich and maximize a community’s learning capability. It’s not necessarily collaboration you want, it’s the maximizing of your learning potential. And doing that requires an artful mix of engaging diverse voices, stimulating people’s imagination to what’s possible, and creating horizontal alignment among them.

What about sharing knowledge, the favorite child of collaboration? Forget it. What happens if you’re in a room (or a discussion forum) and are told to share your knowledge? Nada. But what if you are in a room with someone you can relate to who shares a problem they face? The chances are you will jump in to help – with stories of what you did in similar circumstances, what worked, and what didn’t.

We meet lots of community organizers losing sleep over the question of how to get people to share knowledge. If it’s going to keep you up at night, a more fruitful question is how to help frame an inquiry about what is not known. What is an issue facing a member that most people will relate to? How do you get them to tell a story about it in a way that invites a response? What kind of activity will deepen the inquiry – a debate? case clinic? role play? And how will you track and share how this leads that person to change how they “do business” and what happens as a result?

Framing the inquiry means tuning into the learning imperative (i.e. what we don’t yet know), doing ground work (who else shares this problem and what are the different perspectives that would be useful to bear on this?), designing a meaningful activity (one that will help push the inquiry), and keeping a record of the learning as it flows into practice and has an effect on the world (and feeding this back to the community).

So if you hear someone ask me about collaboration and knowledge sharing, be warned. I might just say boo!

Is this one more description of leadership? Or are we onto something here? Is there a new type of leadership for the 21st century?

Where are the people with the imagination to deal with the unknown, able to engage people across historic and often immutable boundaries, and with the savvy to align existing structures with new and emerging ones? Who are the people who can make a difference by fostering social learning in today’s increasingly complex and uncertain environment?

At this year’s BEtreat workshops we focused more than usual on this kind of leadership. It seemed to resonate.

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.

A lot of our work in the last few years has been focused on developing the capability of various types of social learning leaders, including community and network leaders, systems conveners, sponsors, and enablers at various levels of scale.

A strand of our current writing is to articulate the central disciplines of social learning leadership. A social learning leader is someone who is paying attention to these disciplines.

A discipline is not a recipe, a process, or a best practice. We are not sure these exist for this kind of work. Rather a discipline is a way to bring rigor to an art. It includes the kinds of questions you need to ask yourself if you’re responsible for a social learning space, the perspectives you can take, the methods and tools you can apply, the pitfalls you should avoid, and the ways you can assess the quality of your work.

The figure lists the current disciplines we have identify and are working on. The list is still somewhat in flux, but it will give you a good idea of what we are trying to do.

Our aim is to publish these disciplines as a handbook that will be useful to people who take social learning leadership in their contexts.

And here is the text on the visual, if you can’t see it:

Meaning

• Relevance: what is our learning partnership about?
• Accountability: how is accountability negotiated?
• Value creation: what difference are we making for whom?

Participation

• Voices: who needs to be involved?
• Power: how can learning trump power?
• Leadership: how to foster distributed leadership?

Modes

• Engagement: how to work together on issues of practice?
• Imagination: what images inform and orient learning?
• Alignment: how to achieve effectiveness at scale?

Time/space

• Continuity: how to enable ongoing learning loops?
• Boundaries: how to make boundaries into learning assets?
• Scale: how to maintain a multi-scale perspective?

• State-of-the-art for principles and practice – July 7 – 10
• Cutting-edge to explore emerging issues – July 14 – 17
• Academic for theory and research – July 21 – 24

We keep the numbers small so we can work on each workshop member’s case together. And we keep the ratio of face-to-face:online at 2:1. So register for a place soon if you are sure you are coming!

And if you don’t want to commit yet, but want to stay in the loop, then just register your interest here.