Purpose & Goals

Building on the success of our first Global Forum held in Helsinki in 2003, the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) will convene the 2nd SoL Global Forum, A Symphony of Innovation: Leveraging Complexity to Create Knowledge and Confidence, in Vienna, Austria, 13-16 September 2005. Innovative in its own right, the design of the Forum uses metaphors of music composition, rehearsal, and performance to guide our reflection on the creative opportunities and challenges we face in a complex and fast-moving world. Just as a symphony is a single work made up of a variety of movements and expressed via many instrumental voices, this Forum will embody the diversity of innovation at work across the globe and demonstrate the generative power of the SoL community as a whole.

    By convening with a focus on innovation we expect to:
  • Build our capacity for reflection and results by identifying and practicing groundbreaking methodologies.
  • Discover new ways to create knowledge and build personal confidence by exploring challenging questions together.
  • Create and build connections that strengthen active participation in local communities by developing global networks.

The Forum is designed for practitioners, leaders, consultants, researchers, and others for whom innovation is a critical component of organizational or community life. Approximately 400 participants representing a broad range of disciplines and over 35 countries are likely to attend. Each participant will be both a teacher and a learner, as we share the current issues facing us and our organizations.

The Forum will unfold in a variety of spaces, allowing for unstructured gathering time as well as focused exploration and collective learning. Parallel sessions will feature a range of delivery formats including presentations of research findings and ongoing investigations, case study clinics, simulations, workshops on new methodologies, and opportunities for dialogue. Conducted in four theme tracks — innovation, complexity, knowledge, and confidence — these sessions are designed to explore challenging questions together, co-creating potential solutions for the businesses, regions, communities, networks, and public sector organizations in which we work.