Why Change / Transformation Effort Keep Failing & An Invitation To Help Fix The Problem
An invitation
The Enlightened Enterprise Academy is launching the first Participatory Learning Network (PLN) devoted to developing the PLN concept itself. Its aim is simple but urgent: to co-design a new architecture for change that can finally succeed where countless transformation efforts in business, government, and civil society have failed.
This article introduces the concept and concludes with the invitation.
For decades, “transformation” has been the watchword of policymakers and executives. Yet the results are depressingly familiar. Britain’s new Industrial Strategy looks suspiciously like the one published in 2017, which was quietly abandoned soon after. The NHS 10-Year Plan ignores chronic workforce shortages that have scuppered every previous reform. Welfare changes promise savings while deepening poverty. At Davos, executives proclaim their commitment to sustainability, but emissions continue to rise. Corporate pledges to “stakeholders” fade as quickly as the PowerPoint slides that launched them.
All the stopping and starting makes progress slow. This is not a failure of effort. It is a failure of design.
Why Change & Transformation Efforts Fail
The illusion persists that the people and institutions that created our problems are best placed to solve them. That illusion has left us stuck in a cycle of bold words, poor delivery, and eroded trust.
Repeatedly, reformers mistake a published strategy for real change. Central offices craft blueprints, announce them with fanfare, then abandon them when delivery falters. Governments reshuffle departments, rename agencies, or commission expensive reviews, yet the structures remain the same: siloed, hierarchical, risk-averse.
Corporations behave no differently. New chief executives arrive with consultants in tow, rebrand strategies, and promise purpose alongside profit. Yet quarterly earnings still dominate and governance remains untouched. International summits, meanwhile, bring together those who shaped the status quo, not those who live with its failures.
The Missing Ingredient: Learning
Real change begins not with declarations but with new ways of learning. Transformation fails because institutions treat learning as a preparatory stage, not as the ongoing activity of adaptation. Knowledge is handed down from experts rather than co-created with those on the ground. Evaluation is retrospective, not reflexive. That is what Participatory Learning Networks (PLNs) are designed to change.
What PLNs Offer
PLNs are not committees, consultations, or stakeholder forums. They are living infrastructures for collaborative intelligence, designed to bring together policymakers, businesses, professionals, and communities as equal contributors.
Their principles are simple but radical:
Radical inclusion. Everyone has something valuable to contribute.
Distributed authority. Leadership is shared and rotated, not hoarded.
Contextual intelligence. Solutions are rooted in local realities, not abstract models.
Moral anchoring. Ethical guardians keep work tied to purpose, not branding.
Reflexive evaluation. Success is judged by adaptation and trust, not tick-box metrics.
Where bureaucracies resemble pyramids, PLNs operate more like mycelium—organic, adaptive, interconnected. They scale not by decree but by resonance and replication.
Why Everyone Must Be Involved
The greatest challenges of our time - climate instability, pandemics, inequality, AI governance - do not fit neatly into the jurisdiction of any single ministry, corporation, or profession. They cut across public health, economics, technology, culture, and ecology all at once. The same is true of the greatest opportunities: harnessing biotechnology responsibly, redesigning energy systems, building inclusive digital infrastructure.
That is why PLNs are deliberately cross-sector and transdisciplinary. They recognise that no government can deliver on its own, no business can innovate sustainably in isolation, and no civil society organisation can shift the system without allies. Academics and professionals bring rigour, but without the lived experience of communities their insights remain abstract. Policymakers bring authority, but without business and civic partners they cannot implement at scale.
Transformation fails when these perspectives remain siloed. It succeeds only when they are woven together into shared learning and joint action. PLNs create the architecture for precisely this weaving: permanent spaces where diverse actors collaborate not episodically, but continuously, building collective intelligence capable of tackling complexity.
The Invitation
The Enlightened Enterprise Academy now invites directors, executives, civic leaders, academics, policymakers and professionals to join the Founding Participatory Learning Network. Its purpose is to refine the PLN model itself, pilot applications in health, welfare, industry, and finance, and share lessons globally.
This is not another report, summit, or panel. It is an opportunity to build the calm infrastructure of transformation networks that learn, adapt, and are inclusive.
If you are interested in joining the initial PLN focused on developing this model, email me.
Conclusion
The crises of the 21st century - climate instability, inequality, fractured trust - cannot be met by the institutions of the 20th. Their repeated failure to transform is evidence enough.
PLNs are not glamorous. They will not dominate headlines. But they may do something more important: provide the architecture of genuine change.
I would love to hear your thoughts. Please leave them in the comments or email me.