In December Steve and Angie travelled to the Vision 2021 conference to represent u.labScot on behalf of the u.labscot holding team to share Scotland’s u.lab story so far.

Being welcomed with such a warm heart made the landing into Vision 2021’s conference a wonderful start to the morning. Vision 2021 are a French association who make it their mission to explore and disseminate collaborative practices, they see this as a way to create real social development for society through collective intelligence.  They host an annual conference in France that explores and spreads collaborative practices in collective intelligence. A space for managers, public servants, heads of business and others to come together with their energy and intent to connect with those around them and be curious to learn from each other. The conference was shaped with a mix of workshops, talks and Roundtables that helped participants understand different themes, explore and build on perspectives to help us create a world beyond our own image.
We were there to present u.lab Scotland’s journey over the past few years, something the attendees were very much excited about hearing. We provided Scotland’s current context, how u.lab Scotland grew as a movement and provided concrete examples of how u.lab techniques have impacted Scotland. These examples included the impact in local communities, national strategies and individual leadership. We finished with sharing the intention for u.lab in Scotland for 2018., which was shared in the ulabscot blog, focusing on building support through social infrastructure.  Such as raising awareness of u.lab throughout 2018, creating more support for hub hosts and begin to look at prototyping support and innovation labs.
It was a pleasure to sense and share our collective story, and it was gratefully received, with conversations continuing over the whole day of the conference around what is happening here in Scotland.

Later in the day we were part of a round table, to discuss “transformation societale” – social transformation.

In this we shared in small groups each of our challenges in this field and then we shared with the whole room to help gain collective understanding of stories.  This was then repeated to try to encourage us all to think about what would help transform the stories for the future.

The round table, presentation and conversations through the day helped a lot of themes and questions to emerge, which we would love to hear your thoughts on:
Themes that emerged:

Supporting and encouraging people to participate.

The importance of providing psychologically safe spaces.

How to harness energy to really change things.

How to keep momentum and clarify intentions.

Practice is the theory.

Solidarity with international citizens.

Gratitude and wellbeing.

The knowledge of the young.

Questions that we left with to explore more and we’d love to hear your thoughts on:

How can we work better and learn better collaboratively?

How do we get beyond “Collaboration Zero”?

How do we encourage people to take responsibility once we have collectively sensed?

How can we help people experience the pleasure of doing things together?

How do we encourage citizens to get involved?

How can we share solutions and practices better?

How can we overcome the fear of the label “politics” from sincere local leaders or self-organising groups?

How do we turn excitement into deep practices for change?

How can governments facilitate change without leading?

What do you think? What’s next?