Besselink passes on the tools to replicate his One Day a Dream School project around the world
Whether you’re trying to change the shape of our cities or of our economic system, on a global scale, good ideas are not enough.
Anyone who has read Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point is familiar with the conundrum—the critical mass necessary to tip an idea, product, or even a disease into a mainstream event is a complex phenomenon to engineer.
Marketing teams have known it for eons, as have politicians, corporations, and inventors.
But when it comes to finding solutions to contemporary problems, would-be change makers often struggle with the necessary legwork to getting initiatives truly off the ground; with the creative action that must follow creative thought.
I had a conversation about just this with Thieu Besselink close to the BMW Guggenheim Lab’s opening in New York. We had been talking about the role the Lab might play in bringing new ideas into reality on both a local and an international scale.
But the conversation stuck with me as I watched the progression of other movements big and small that managed to find a foothold around the world.
From the Arab Spring to the victorious end of the eight-year battle for legalized drug injection sites that started in Vancouver and are now spreading across Canada, somewhere along the way somebody, or somebodies, took the necessary steps to bring an idea into reality.
“I don’t think that we have a problem coming up with solutions,” Besselink told me. “There are enough ideas. The problem is getting those ideas done or shared, and then committed to, so that people are actually going to realize them.”

A Learning Lab student calls citizens to arms to clean up Amsterdam during a garbage strike
Founder of the Learning Lab, professor at the University of Amsterdam and creative director of the River Institute, Besselink specializes in helping people learn to navigate the complexity and chaos of the relatively new global society in which we live.
Where problems occur on a global scale but are felt first on a community or personal level, he looks at how those levels interconnect and how to take initiative within them to make change.
At the Learning Lab, a “think tank for social change” which will expand next year to work with MIT on a new institute in Berlin, Besselink designs learning environments that necessarily involve creation. This means the creation of meaning for the individual, the creation of relationships with others who are invested in similar passions, and the creation of actual outcomes. He is also taking this a step further with the Urban College Project—a university designed, built, and run entirely by the students. (See some fantastic videos on Learning Lab projects, including a full-scale documentary on the Pioneer Lab, on his website, or watch his TEDx talk.)
“I see a lot of movements trying to convince people that they should care. There’s a massive amount of people campaigning and shouting at people that they should care,” he said.
“But it is not enough to just have discussions. It is not enough to just hear a lot of people’s opinions or have lectures about things. You actually have to have a process by which people can start getting committed to it, form relationships, and make real decisions and real alliances with one another and the resources to get it happening.”

Armed only with coordinates, Learning Lab students found their own way to their first class—in another country
In a way it’s a humble lesson.
In a time where we are overwhelmed by ideas, and truly amazing projects dedicated to discussing them—from the TED Talks to Pecha Kucha nights, from GOOD Ideas for Cities to the Lab itself—it’s important to remember that while there is a certain glory in producing sexy ideas, it is the follow-through and facilitation of those ideas that will make real change come about. (Side note: it’s this exact crux that has recently spurred journalism colleagues of mine to leave the industry in favor of constructing actual solutions to the problems they have been writing about for years.)
Of course no one expects one person, or even one organization, to do all this themselves, which is perhaps why Besselink sees the role of connecting people equally as important as the role of producing ideas.
“The main problems of the next 100 years are going to be those between organizations, between fields, between disciplines… the complexity is so high that we can never find solutions in one organization. It will have to be between levels: government, business, and civil society, but also between the different disciplines of art, science, and so on,” he said.
“Rather than looking at the projects and the ideas, look at how they are related. How are the people and the organizations related? How can we create better and stronger relationships, and ones across different countries? Whenever you have anything change on whatever level, it’s all about the relationships.”

Students prototype systemic intervention projects
When I asked him how the Lab can best facilitate real, decisive change in the world of urban problem solving, he was both hopeful and challenging about its future.
“The Lab with its position has a very powerful platform and a strong visibility,” he said. “It can use that to influence the way that people think about urban development, but also it can show what works or what doesn’t work, and how things work, and who works. By offering this platform and showing these examples it can be very powerful.”
The key, he said, will be for the Lab to pursue the creative action to follow the creative thought—to set out to fuse connections and alliances between fields, and between the pioneers working on similar issues across the globe, rather than simply hoping the ideas that are incubated in the Lab will settle and germinate.
“I think we really live in a time where we cannot understand the world in which we live by looking at it. We have to go into it, try to create something, and, as we change the world in which we live, we start to understand it by the way it reacts to us. The only way you can do that is by creating environments of experiment, which is what the Lab is really supposed to be,” Besselink said.
“I hope it will really continue to do that; that it will not give that up and become some kind of talking place, or exchanging-of-ideas place, or presentations place—we have a lot of those already—but that it will really become a place where people come to work.”

This september we embark with a new group of students on a creative enquiry. Follow their adventures and learnings on the Life Stream or come to the public events follow us on @learninglabNL

This is the invitation we did:


The Learning Lab is a laboratory, an experimental space of development, in which we go on an expedition to understand how we “become who we are”, as Nietzsche would have it, and how we learn to not only study but also design our world with creativity, sincerity, and sharpness.

In a combination of science, creativity, and leadership learning the Lab challenges you to explore and act upon the how, what and why of our unique impact in the world.  

In this Lab you are no longer a student, but are asked to become a pioneer both in your own life, interests, and in the world. You will be looking for the source of your creativity and use it. You are asked to find what matters to you and what matters to your surroundings, and to create whatever it is that connects the two. In the process we discover what drives us, what our talents are, and what we want to take leadership in.

We live in a time where leading a valuable initiative to a meaningful end (whether that is scientific, artistic, entrepreneurial, or social) is rarely something that can be done within one discipline or alone. The challenges in every scientific discipline, in our personal lives, and society at large are so new that they cannot be met with the same ways we have been working with. Instead, that knowledge and those initiatives that are going to make the difference in our not yet sustainable world will exist between people and across fields and disciplines. The overvalued idea of leadership, so often associated with an outdated self-centeredness, is now required to convene people and perspectives around a common quest from which a collective intelligence can come forth.

What this requires is a deeper self-knowledge, fine tuned observation skills, creativity, and stronger sense of personal initiative, but above all the capacity to navigate the chaos, complexity, and uncertainty that come with a deep learning and development process of which the outcome is uncertain.