Coalescing and starting a journey towards collective action.
‘Here’s to collective consciousness-raising!’
Dame Alison Peacock DL, DLitt
As we approach the final weeks of 2024, at Leading for Creative Thinking we’re reflecting on the year and making intriguing plans for the year ahead.
Intriguing because we began the year with a vision of our work as a platform, a resource and a community. However, despite all the advantages and convenience of online meetings, we recognised it wouldn’t necessarily be the place to nurture deep and transformative relationships. So, with that in mind, we decided to host an in-person gathering – without fully knowing what might emerge.
In October, we invited guests from across the education system including schools, early years, higher education, government, leadership and teaching bodies to an event in London and asked everyone to consider one question:
‘If Leading for Creative Thinking was more than just a website – if it was a big idea intended to create change in the system that enabled leaders to feel supported, teachers to feel joy and children to adopt their full capabilities of thinking and being creative – how might we build it together?’
The invitation took us and our guests in a myriad of directions including a discussion on the need for better coordination and communication around the importance of creative thinking. Yet, the real spark we observed was between the people representing different parts of the system, and the opportunities and ideas these connections opened up.
‘Suddenly, there it was. Individual leaders of creative thinking (whether doing so implicitly or explicitly) bringing their imagination to the fore and seeing the possibilities, driven by connectivity and the desire to pool knowledge and understanding, and problem-solve together!’
- Nia Richards, CCE Director
The experience has encouraged us to think about and explore how we can use our professional learning facilitation skills and relationship-building experience to support the profession and foster enabling conditions for systemic change.
As Bill Bannear observes:
“Value is created, and breakthroughs are made through the strength, number and quality of relationships in these systems. Exactly what these relationships will produce isn’t determined — but they create new affordances in the system, allowing for the emergence of value naturally over time.”
At Leading for Creative Thinking/CCE, we believe that building quality relationships - inside and outside education- and across the ecosystem, is a vital step for us to grow our community, identify the opportunities we can leverage collectively, and the barriers we need to overcome, or avoid, in order to create sustainable change.
Image: London Roundtable, October 2024. A map of UK and Belgium-based connections within the education ecosystem, an activity facilitated by Leading for Creative Thinking@CCE to make our inter-connectedness visible.
In the coming months, we’re going to continue exploring the possibilities of relationship building both offline and online, bringing leaders of creative thinking together and putting everyone in the shoes of system leaders to inquire, imagine, collaborate, persist – and formulate actions.
‘People are like bees and society a beehive: our intelligence resides not in individual brains but in the collective mind. Human thought is a product of a community, not of any individual alone. The contributions we make as individuals depend more on our ability to work with others.
Sloman and Fernbach (2017)
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