Open-Ended Manifesto on Research and Learning

2. To live is to learn and to learn is to live.

3. The competent person is a person who can transform information through judgment into knowledge.

4. What we know, we know together.

5. Most organisations will become knowledge organisations.

6. Unintended consequences are a fact of life.

7. The unintended consequences of the knowledge society are still not addressed.

8. Entering into a form of life is different from changing a form of life.

9. The distinction between having knowledge and using knowledge will break down.

10. The relation between humans and artefacts are changing.

11. A new understanding of the relation between cognition and the body could lead to new forms of artefacts.

12. We have to move from creativity to creating, from an individual to an organisational capability.

13. We need to refocus on the manual and bodily forms of learning and their social organisation and conceptualization as we see it in the history of crafts and arts.

14. Knowledge creation has to be understood as a social activity that make new actions possible by making new representations.

15. Knowledge sharing is not a zerosum game.

16. We need much better tools of reflection to be able to organise and manage in a society where knowledge and symbolic work are central.

17. We can make important and meaningful investigations of learning through a better understanding of biological phenomena.

18. The field of organisational learning has to reflect critically on its position in relation to the tenson between inspiration from systems theory – based on feedback and ‘loops’ – and from the theory of self-organising systems.

19. The business system of the future is not a representation of the research lab but rather a representation of the type of system we already find in the areas of creative businesses. Examples to look out for are the music or the film industry.

20. In the future we will not view business organisations as discrete islands in the markets.

21. We will see a tendency towards educational systems built upon the ideas of lifelong learning, which involves much more radical changes than we tend to think.

22. The socially acceptable transformation of informal to formal competencies is a central problem that has to be solved.

23. To be meaningful, research today has to take place in networks.

24. A laboratory today should not only be a focus in a social network bathed in communication, but also instrumental in the creation and interpretation of social experiments.

25. A socially meaningful and practically relevant form of human and social science today has to build on a renewal of the tradition of action research.

26. We need a post-Cartesian theory of learning.

27. Research and learning are converging.

28. It is possible to do experiments in social science through working with decentralised labs as social spaces where experiments can take place.

29. Research work and theorising should always make a practical difference, so that one solution can be differentiated from another.

30. A contemporary research institution has to meld together doing research, trying new forms of organising and communicating.

31. Currently there is a challenge in finding new forms of organising knowledge, away from disciplines and towards a form of transdisciplinarity.

32. A contemporary research institution has to be imbedded in the social context in which it functions in a deeper and more responsible way.

33. A project-organised research institution addresses some of the natural challenges of the knowledge society.

34. In the knowledge society, research institutions need to create an identity at several levels, which combines into an overall identity for the whole.

35. We should try to be a research organization that integrates opposites in the sense of working with important dichotomies, distinctions and paradoxes.