Crowdsourcing the Commonwealth

On Monday this week, I spent the afternoon at St. James’s Palace in London at a reception to celebrate CSCLeaders 2016. CSCLeaders is a global leadership program for 100 exceptional senior leaders selected each year from applicants from within governments, businesses and NGOs across the 53 countries of the Commonwealth.

The program is delivered in partnership between HRH Duke of Edinburgh’s Commonwealth Study Conference (of which HRH Princess Anne is president) and the international leadership development organization Common Purpose (of which I’m the Global Chair). Crowdicity is also proud to be a sponsor of the program alongside Prudential, PWC, Weir, Glencore, Anglo-American, Power Corporation of Canada and The Queen’s Young Leaders.Each year CSCLeaders sets a globally relevant challenge for the participating group of leaders to address. This year’s challenge is ‘What would produce a step change in how the public sectors work together?’

Each year CSCLeaders sets a globally relevant challenge for the participating group of leaders to address. This year’s challenge is ‘What would produce a step change in how the public sectors work together?’

Such challenges facing society today don’t respect boundaries, whether they are cultural, geographic or sector-based. Yet there is natural tendency to work in silos. If we’re going to successfully tackle the challenges facing the whole of humanity and survive and thrive in the future we must bridge the divide between these boundaries; we need to learn from and try to understand each other’s perspective to leverage the skills and resources we have. However, this isn’t easy considering the constraints of regulatory, policy and legal frameworks, not to mention cultural and political differences. Bringing together such a diverse group of global leaders is a good start in exploring what it takes to overcome these barriers. And even just the act of exploration makes a positive impact on participants and helps them to think differently and heightens their cultural intelligence. When they then get back to their respective countries, cities and jobs, they help others to see thing differently too.

At different stages of the CSCLeaders programme, participants are mixed together in interdisciplinary groups and they travel to different countries and cities around the Commonwealth to visit organisations they might not normally engage with. They take it all in and discuss and frame what they learned in the context of the challenge for that year. Preconceptions are challenged and changed, and new perspectives opened up. At the reception I talked with a Clergyman from Scotland about his work with those at risk of homelessness and alcohol abuse; a representative of NATO from Canada about the changing threats - perceived and real - in the world today; the CEO of the Seychelles National Youth Council about how leadership qualities should be nurtured in children from a young age; and a Journalist from Uganda about how advances in news gathering and dissemination are changing the country. I left with a broader perspective after just one afternoon in their company.

HRH Princess Anne spoke at the event and some of her words reflected our core mission at Crowdicity. The Princess Royal talked about how participants were here to convert information to knowledge and this really resonated with me as this was the theme of my TEDx talk at TEDxKraków last year. And this is where crowdsourcing really plays an instrumental role. Throughout the whole programme, participants are gathering up information as they learn from each other and the organizations they visit. Together they process this information and turn it into group knowledge – a common understanding which becomes a common purpose; to work together, to lead across boundaries and help to change the world for the better.

But it all begins much earlier that that. Even before participants start on the programme they’re invited to join an online innovation community to share their initial insights and ideas around the set challenge for the year. During the programme they regularly dip back into the community to update their thinking and discuss the challenge in further depth. And it doesn’t stop there. On completion of the programme all alumni are invited to join the Common Purpose Massive Online Innovation Community (MOIC) where they are given the opportunity to continue to address a continuous stream of challenges on an ongoing basis. They address these challenges with their thoughts and ideas and share them with their networks, colleagues, and friends who then join in too, expanding the possibilities of driving real transformational change. Though even just the act of sharing and developing ideas together to stimulate broader discovery is a wonderful thing in itself.

You can learn more about CSCLeaders here.