It was my meeting with Charlie Bray at Wingspread in November of 1994 that consolidated my thinking that the issues that I was attempting to deal with – and which were obviously still giving me trouble – were issues that knew no national boundaries. “What has happened in your country, could so easily happen here in our country. There is so much muddled thinking about how learning actually happens; so little apparent connection between research in one subject area and another. There is no thought-through common agenda into which all these things could be fitted. You ought to build up a transnational team…get the best specialists you possibly can, from whatever disciplines are necessary, and from any country. Collect your examples of best practice, again from any country you like. You might even shame the US in doing something that was already working, say in Egypt! You might find that eventually the English will take more notice of you, because people in countries which the British admire are already putting such ideas into practice. Making people envious is always a good idea! We Americans should try and do the same thing.”

Over the next few months others from different countries said the same sort of things. “Find a way of pulling us together. Don’t commit yourself to any one country, or to one discipline, or to one university. Build-up a team that everyone can respect for the clarity of what it says, and the leadership that they can depend upon.”

In May 1995, my Trustees in Education 2000 effectively approved my release from my duties in the UK for two years, from January 1996, to set up the 21st Century Learning Initiative. I had little clear understanding of how to do this, and the next few months operating out of the UK, and holding on to my British agenda as well, was very hard indeed. However, I was able to start “networking” with others of similar kinds of experiences to myself, and during June and July located 20 people in the US and Canada to invite to a first planning conference to be held at Wingspread in November of 1995.

To many people in the US that was when the Initiative started, but in my mind it had all started long before. At an early stage many people also saw the Initiative as being obsessively concerned with research into the nature of learning, even being primarily concerned with brain science. Others saw it as a possible organization “to go out and do something, somewhere.” Some saw it as an extension of their present work from which their organizations could benefit. Some saw it as a way of developing a new way of process for ourselves as a learning organization. From the start I had found it difficult to get the right balance between all these interests. The nearest analogy I can come up with as to what we are about, and it is not a particularly good one, was that of the Suffering Servant from Isaiah in the Old Testament; doing something for other people with no prospect of any immediate acknowledgment.

“The test of the value of what we are doing,” I have tried to explain, “will be the value that our work has for people we may well never meet. It is not so much for the intellectual excitement that has come out of the writing, and revision, of the Synthesis that matters; it is what use all this will be to other people.” We are not doing this for ourselves. We are trying to make information available to others who can’t easily draw all these ideas together within their own experience. We want to open up opportunities for practitioners to share ideas across borders. Critically we want to get such innovation accepted at the highest level as being highly relevant to the well-being of people everywhere. That means key people – often those in charge of whole systems – who have to be given every possible support in coming to grips with these issues themselves, so that they can literally “create the conditions that enable innovation to flourish.”

Graphically someone developed the following metaphor. “We are trying to assist in the delivery of a very difficult birth of a creature we don’t fully understand and – interestingly – we are all, in some ways, the parents!”

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