The South African organizational development facilitator James Taylor has had a peculiar dream for many years: “We need to create a master’s degree for organizations.” It’s a strange thing to picture, entire organizations running off to school to study together. But this idea, or something like it, might be the most important thing we can do to accelerate social innovation.

Social innovation is a classroom. We are learning our way into the future. And since no one from the future is here to guide us, the social innovation movement has had to teach itself as it goes along. It has done so with great energy—hence the thousands of labs, workshops, summits, institutes, retreats, incubators, and fellowships that continue to shape it.

Despite this apparent variety, a single approach to learning has been dominant. Call it Leadership School. It has been generative, sparking frequent bursts of light. Yet many of us working in this space have a nagging sense it might be reaching its limits. The world’s destructive old systems keep reasserting themselves with troubling ease. And we wonder if there is something inherent in Leadership School making it good at brief illumination but less fit for sustained transformation.

Leadership School places its hope in individual changemakers, bringing them together to learn new ways of navigating complex systems. I have helped convene several such programs, and they can be revelatory. Join one and you find yourself among a cohort of passionate and gifted activists, social entrepreneurs, network builders, and executives. Your sense of the possible expands. You see your work through new eyes. You return to that work refreshed and hopeful.

But the longer journey turns out to be more complicated. Back home, the principles and “tools” you were taught prove slippery in real life. Few of your colleagues seem able to relate to what you have learned. And you find it extremely difficult to figure out just where to begin pushing, pulling, or coaxing the system into a new state. While you might make an inspired dent in the world from time to time, your overall experience can be frustrating and ultimately wearying. You may end up feeling lonelier than ever, forced to find support from your cohort mates or other scattered travelers rather than from the people you work with every day.

Read the full article about teaching and learning social innovation by Warren Nilsson at Stanford Social Innovation Review.