Change Lab
Co-Creating New Social Realities
With Lenneke Aalbers & Adam Kahane
Learn how to engage diverse coalitions of stakeholders in working together to make progress on their most important and complex challenges. Build your capacity to work with others to co-create new solutions. Get hands-on experience with this new, systemic approach to effecting social change, and apply it to a specific social challenge that you and your allies want to address.
If we always do what we’ve always done, then we’ll always get what we always got. So if we want to solve our toughest problems—if we want to be able to make progress, peacefully and sustainably, on our most complex social challenges—then we will have to learn a new approach. This new approach must be systemic rather than piecemeal; it must involve stakeholders rather than rely only on authorities; and it must be creative and emergent rather than merely replicating existing best practice.
Lenneke Albers and Adam Kahane and their colleagues in Reos Partners are pioneering such a new approach: the Change Lab. This approach has grown out of 20 years of work, by Reos and others, in supporting diverse teams of leaders working on complex challenges related to finance, health, education, food, justice, environment and development, across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australasia.
A Change Lab is a multi-stakeholder effort to address a complex social challenge. In a Change Lab, a committed alliance of influential government, business and civil society leaders engage in a rhythmic “U-Process” of co-sensing, co-presencing, and co-creating. These teams produce new insights about their system (including their own role in it) and new high-leverage options to shift it; new and stronger relationships within their team and with other stakeholders; strengthened capacities to work together and to lead and effect change; and a sustained stream of new actions through which they co-create a new social reality.
This track will use one or more case studies brought by participants. The selected case studies will be represented by teams of 3-4 or more people working on same project. If you are interested in bringing a team and working your project in this track, please contact us at info@aliainstitute.org.
“Our current institutions and systems are at a breaking point, and traditional change methodologies are insufficient to address these complex challenges. The Change Lab takes stakeholders on a journey that has the potential to unleash creativity, innovation, and real solutions. I would recommend this module to leaders dealing with complex problems within organizations or with large-systems problems within regions and beyond.” —Georgina Veldhorst, Vice President, North York General Hospital (ret.), Canada
Lenneke Aalbers
Lenneke is a partner in the Reos Partners The Hague office.
Lenneke’s focus is on social and business innovation and learning. She is always fascinated to support people and organisations to connect with their deeper wisdom, talents, vision and actions. Her aim is to create awareness of the fact that a richness of opinions, perspectives and wisdom is available to help people, as they work through complex systemic and social issues.
She is currently involved in the development of a platform for social & business innovation around sustainability in the Netherlands and Belgium. She is co-designing and co-facilitating change labs in which stakeholders work and learn together in creative and action-oriented ways to address complex challenges within and across their systems. She’s involved in several national and international programs and networks – both within and across organisations – which support the development of leadership and innovation.
Lenneke’s background is in pedagogic and business studies (Bachelor and Msc), and she has completed post-graduate programs and courses at Haagse Hogeschool, Radboud University Nijmegen, MIT Boston and elsewhere. After different management and consulting roles in organisational contexts, she became an independent consultant and interim manager. For over twenty years her activities have included leading strategy and organisational change processes, learning and development programs and complex collaboration and co-creation challenges. She has worked in and across many different sectors, networks and organisations, including international food companies, technical engineering and power companies, health and governmental organisations and social building and housing organisations.
Her home base is the 2000 year old Dutch city of Nijmegen and Greenwich, London, where she shares her life with her partner, her son and her daughter.
Adam Kahane
Adam Kahane is a partner in Reos Partners, an international organisation dedicated to supporting and building capacity for innovative collective action in complex social systems, and also an Associate Fellow at the University of Oxford and the University of Waterloo.
Adam is a leading organizer, designer and facilitator of processes through which business, government, and civil society leaders can work together to solve their toughest, most complex problems. He has worked in more than fifty countries, in every part of the world, with executives and politicians, generals and guerillas, civil servants and trade unionists, community activists and United Nations officials, clergy and artists.
Adam is the author of Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2004), about which Nelson Mandela said: “This breakthrough book addresses the central challenge of our time: finding a way to work together to solve the problems we have created.” He is also the author of Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2010).