CommunityIntelligence Ltd.

"Learning Expeditions" are an action-oriented inquiry conducted online and in-person workshops also known as "base camps". It is designed to achieve specific results for the organisation(s) sponsoring it, typically the enhancement of such strategic capabilities as innovation, collaboration or change management.
CLEs are driven by important challenges or opportunities strategically chosen by their sponsors. They are supported by a web-enabled learning architecture and professional facilitation.

1. Expeditions have three kinds of outcome:

Learning outcome
Breakthrough understanding and insights about critical factors; new capabilities, including enhanced individual and collective competence in collaborative learning.

Research outcome
New discoveries in domains of theory and action pertinent to the Expedition's purpose.

Development outcome
CLE also produces a tangible knowledge product; for instance, a product launch plan, a pattern library of successful practices, strategy recommendations in its domain of inquiry, etc. The knowledge product created by the Expedition is designed to rapidly convey its results to all those in the organization whose work can benefit from them.

2. Key Benefits

The "CLE" model is highly scalable both in time and space. The duration of an Expeditions can be anywhere between 3-months an one or multiple years, depending on the complexity of the challenges pursued.

Within an organisation, CLE can:
• Help dissolve barriers between levels and between functions and build collaborative bridges to stakeholders
• Serve both as a model an accelerator the organisation's generative-learning
• Invent means to build organisational change capabilities in informal and highly leveraged ways
• Infuse the current organising forms and practices with more possibilities for closing the gap between potential and performance

Between organisations, CLE can:
• Create opportunities to form learning partnerships
• Provide extraordinary economies of scale and scope for improving the work of large-scale system change
• Provide a crow bar for breaking out of the box of current best thinking

Within an Industry or Region, CLE can:
• Lead to the formation of value-adding networks of excellence
• Foster collaboration between business, education, government and citizen associations, on high-stake issues that impact the future of the industry or the region

3. The social architecture of CLE: a network of self-managed teams

CLEs scale well both up and down; they can be used for both very large-scale or small-scale action research. Of course, the scope of the corresponding social, business, knowledge and technology dimensions of the Community Design Architecture supporting them will be different too. For example, the social architecture presented below was designed to enable large multi-company CLE's such as the ones that we designed for the International Center for Organizational Design and the European Foundation for Management Development.

Scouting Parties
Special-focus learning teams, accountable to the Expedition community for charting unexplored frontiers (what we know we don't know) and unknown territories (what we don't know we don't know). Each scouting party is lead by a champion committed to its purpose, and resourced by a domain expert familiar with the trails leading to the frontier and beyond.

Council
The Expedition's Council is its governing body comprised of its sponsors. Its tasks include to set an energising context of high stakes, evaluation criteria, conditions of satisfaction, and to provide guidance and encouragement to its members.

Facilitation Team
The Facilitation Team's is a multi-disciplinary group of community professionals whose responsibilities include to:
• Maximise value to members, by designing and facilitating all infrastructures and activities for synergy and leverage
• Facilitate the co-evolution of the Expedition's social and knowledge architectures with their enabling technologies
• Organize the Expedition's knowledge system comprised of its resource base and network of conversations, ensure the right mix of public and private forums, and providing guidance to how to use them
• Publish a quarterly report on Expedition activities, with links to a compendium of new resources relevant to each member organisation's learning agenda

Weavers Team
A key ingredients of any CLE's success is its Weavers Team. With the help of the Facilitation Team, "weavers" scan, summarize and synthesize relevant knowledge nuggets into the knowledgebase of the Expedition. Weavers are skilled in identifying emerging patterns of meaning and possibilities for breakthroughs.

Technical Support Team
A team of technical professionals whose services include website-building, software support, audio and video-conferencing, etc.

4. Past Expeditions

Past Expeditions that we designed and facilitated include:

In 2000, we led an 'e-Learning' Expedition, organized by the European Foundation for Management Development, and sponsored by IBM and INSEAD. It lasted for 3 months and attracted 65 international managers of e-learning programs from 44 organisations. Locations in 18 countries were represented.
In 1998, a similar structure, our "knowledge fair" design, has attracted 400 knowledge managers and KM consultants from around the world to the month-long Knowledge Ecology Fair '98
In 1991, we co-designed a Learning Expedition on Collective Intelligence organized by the International Center for Organizational Design (California), that comprised participants from seven major oil companies, direct competitors who collaborated on exploring the leading edge of change management strategies.