How Large-Scale Change Really Happens - Working With Emergence

Summary

Writing for school leaders after No Child Left Behind, Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze argue that “the world doesn’t change one person at a time”. Large-scale change emerges as local efforts connect, through networks and communities of practice, into a “System of Influence” that sets what feels normal. So “it’s not critical mass we have to achieve. It’s critical connections.”

Rationale

Long before our portfolio idea, they made its case: many local experiments, deliberately connected, rather than one programme imposed from the top.