Learning networks for working-life development programmes
Playing safe or thinking anew in working-life development programmes?
Good practices do not easily travel from one workplace to another. Slow diffusion of good practices has proven to be a thorny problem in programmes to reform working life so far even in the Nordic countries with a long history of such efforts. What if we throw overboard the view that the spread of an innovation should follow a staged process from “creation” in advanced and carefully selected piloting workplaces to “reception” in follower workplaces through a process of “transfer”?
What if we, from the very beginning in programmes, bring together several workplaces, researchers and other actors who have an interest in similar development issues and provide them forums of interaction for bringing about genuine co-creation processes with innovative thinking? That’s what the Finnish Workplace Development Programme TYKES did between 2004 and 2010 when it experimented with a learning network concept.
I have tried, in retrospect, to understand successes and failures of five such learning networks. Despite certain obvious shortcomings, I think that the basic idea to meet the problem of low level of innovation diffusion from one workplace to another through a network-based approach was sound, but the TYKES programme team lacked the means to direct operations of the networks in a desired direction.
For safe players, running development programmes in a traditional way is a sure bet. For those with higher hopes, using learning networks would be a worthwhile experiment.
Davydd Greenwood who led the review of this article writes: “This manuscript now serves as a good overview for anyone who is concerned with learning about developments in diffusion of working-life programs. Yet it also has plenty of interesting points for those working in this area already.”
Blog post by Tuomo Alasoini
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Columbia Embury
www.wright.edu
www.wright.edu
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