Transition - A Co-Learning Commons

Transition leaders are recognised by their actions

They are the people working in their local communities, workplaces, professional networks, or action groups to create a viable future for human kind on this planet. They are the system re-designers, the out-of-the-box ideas people, the creative doers.

Because transition leaders are pioneers their work involves uncertainty, innovation, and continuous learning through action. They need encouragement, support, access to learning resources, and opportunities to test their ideas with peers. They need to share their stories of inspiration and learning -- their breakthroughs and their breakdowns.

They need to be part of a co-learning community of practice.

This is what the Transition Leadership Co-Learning Network offers.

What is transition leadership?

Transition leaders are not "leaders" in the conventional up-front-giving-directions sense. Nor are they charismatic hero types.

They can best be described as co-facilitators and co-learners -- people with a high level of creative engagement within their local communities, workplaces and professional networks, or their communities of purpose. They know that business-as-usual is no longer a realistic option and are striving to create viable alternatives. They do this by working to catalyse and enable systemic change at whatever scale is meaningful and available to them.

By supporting the development of the Transition Leadership Co-Learning Network, the Starfish Foundation is seeking to connect and empower such people by:

• Fostering peer support and mentoring
• Encouraging co-learning through the sharing of experience and resources
• Providing access to structured learning opportunities and resources, both face-to-face and on-line
• Facilitating the emergence of a shared theory-in-practice of systemic change in complex systems
• Enabling collaborative self-organised initiatives that aim to extend and accelerate the processes of systemic change

Our focus is on strengthening the distributed or embedded leadership capacity of communities and organisations in order to enable whole system transformation. Transition leadership is about building resilient adaptive communities and encouraging social system innovation and experimentation, particularly at a local level.