Will Allen
@willallennz.bsky.social
Sustainable development & co-design practitioner. Supports multi-stakeholder processes and constructive change. Sharing insights on systems thinking, adaptive management, evaluation, facilitation. More at https://learningforsustainability.net/
Having plans, monitoring frameworks and evaluations in place doesn't necessarily mean they're informing decisions and action. Keeping the work connected explores how to make those connections work in practice, with a six-step approach to PMEL. 🧪 learningforsustainability.net/keeping-the-...
Keeping the work connected
This guide offers a practical approach to connecting planning, monitoring, evaluation and learning in collaborative, multi-actor settings.
learningforsustainability.net
How can we support better decisions and adaptation in collaborative initiatives?🧪 A new guide - Keeping the work connected - offers a six-step approach to linking planning, monitoring, evaluation and learning with action and decisions as work develops. learningforsustainability.net/keeping-the-...
Keeping the work connected
This guide offers a practical approach to connecting planning, monitoring, evaluation and learning in collaborative, multi-actor settings.
learningforsustainability.net
Collaborative design processes still involve choices about purpose, fairness and wider consequences. A new LfS post looks at six principles for examining those choices, using a hospital menu redesign as an example. 🧪 learningforsustainability.net/post/good-de...
What should guide good design in complex settings
Six broad principles for good design in complex settings, exploring worthwhile purposes, human agency, fairness, ecological limits and wider consequences.
learningforsustainability.net
What changes when AI starts doing parts of the work where judgement, participation and interpretation used to sit? I’ve brought together 11 essays exploring that question across professional and collaborative practice. 🧪 learningforsustainability.net/working-well...
Working well in the age of AI
Eleven essays on working well with AI, connecting professional practice and organisational choices with wider ethical and structural concerns.
learningforsustainability.net
#FF International #Cooperation & #Development Starter Pack by @ecdpm.org bsky.app/starter-pack...
Indicators are only useful if we are clear what change they are meant to show. A new LfS post uses climate adaptation to explore how national goals can be grounded in evidence, learning and decisions in particular places. 🧪 learningforsustainability.net/post/assessi...
How will we know if climate adaptation is working
How can we tell if climate adaptation is really working? This post looks at why clear outcomes need to come before indicators, and how monitoring can connect national goals with evidence, learning and...
learningforsustainability.net
What happens when AI starts doing some of the work through which we learned to become good at our jobs? My new essay asks what education, training and professional learning need to look like as AI becomes part of professional practice.🧪 learningforsustainability.net/post/rethink...
Rethinking education and professional development for AI-supported work
How should education, training and professional learning change as AI becomes part of practice? A reflection on capability, judgement and learning through work.
learningforsustainability.net
A narrow frame makes a complex issue look manageable. Agreed scope, defensible budget, signed-off plan. Most pressures push that way. But what gets left out keeps acting on the situation anyway. 🧪 New post on problem framing: learningforsustainability.net/post/problem...
Problem framing: why how we define issues shapes action
Problem framing shapes what becomes visible, who is involved, and what kinds of action seem possible in complex, multi-actor work.
learningforsustainability.net
AI discussions often begin with the technology. I think a better starting point is the work itself. What are we trying to improve? For whom? What would people notice if the work became better? That's the starting point for my latest essay. 🧪 learningforsustainability.net/post/better-...
What would better work with AI look like?
How can AI contribute to better work? This post explores how practitioners can connect AI use with inquiry, participation, judgement and organisational learning.
learningforsustainability.net
Over the past few months I've brought together a series of essays and practical resources on using AI in professional practice, research and collaborative work. The central question isn't what AI can do. It's what better work with AI would look like. 🧪 learningforsustainability.net/generative-ai/
AI for reflective practice, research, and collaboration
Essays, practical guidance and curated resources on generative AI in research, evaluation, facilitation and collaborative work.
learningforsustainability.net
AI ethics debates often sound polarised because people talk at different levels. I find it useful to distinguish three: the conditions shaping AI, organisations introducing it, & everyday practices where judgement, participation and responsibility sit.🧪 learningforsustainability.net/post/ethical...
Ethics around AI use
An exploration of the wider ethical picture of AI, acknowledging both structural conditions and practice-level tensions.
learningforsustainability.net
Involving everyone in everything isn’t inclusion. It’s exhaustion. Good multi-actor engagement is clear about who needs to be involved in which decisions, when and with what influence, while helping others stay informed and join in when it matters. 🧪 learningforsustainability.net/post/good-en...
Not everyone needs to be in every meeting
A post on why good engagement does not mean involving everyone in everything, and how varied participation supports trust, influence and accountability.
learningforsustainability.net
French President Emmanuel Macron said France was "facing a completely unprecedented fire," describing the situation as France's worst fire-related crisis since World War II. n.pr/4bjlRNn
With wildfires raging in France and Spain, fire crews race against next heat wave
French President Emmanuel Macron said France was "facing a completely unprecedented fire," describing the situation as France's worst fire-related crisis since World War II.
n.pr
Batteries based on sodium ions are entering mass production. Nature reports how some researchers say they could ultimately be a cheaper, safer alternative to lithium in electric cars and other energy applications. 🌎🧪
Beyond lithium: how sodium-ion batteries could change the world
Batteries based on sodium ions are entering mass production. Some researchers say they could ultimately be a cheaper, safer alternative to lithium in electric cars and other energy applications.
go.nature.com
AI can now produce much of the visible record of participation: transcripts, themes, summaries and reports. But that record cannot show whether people shaped the framing, interpretation or judgement behind it. 🧪 More in the full post: learningforsustainability.net/post/ai-and-...
AI can produce the record of participation without the participation
AI can produce the record of participation without preserving the collaborative work behind it. What this means for engagement, evaluation and AI policy.
learningforsustainability.net
A long-term collaborative process can look tidy on paper, then drift if the work around it is not connected. New post on a wider runsheet for distributed collaborative planning. 🧪 learningforsustainability.net/post/distrib...
A runsheet for distributed collaborative planning
Practical ideas for designing a process for place-based and multi-actor initiatives, connecting learning, engagement, governance and implementation.
learningforsustainability.net
Involving everyone in everything isn’t inclusion. It’s exhaustion. Good multi-actor engagement is clear about who needs to be involved in which decisions, when and with what influence, while helping others stay informed and join in when it matters. 🧪 learningforsustainability.net/post/good-en...
Not everyone needs to be in every meeting
A post on why good engagement does not mean involving everyone in everything, and how varied participation supports trust, influence and accountability.
learningforsustainability.net
Practice change isn’t just about individual behaviour – it’s how teams and orgs learn, adapt and shift routines over time. I’ve refreshed the practice change resources page with social practice theory and implementation support practitioner links. 🧪 learningforsustainability.net/practice-cha...
Practice change
Resources and research on practice change in complex settings, including organisational learning, and approaches to change.
learningforsustainability.net
Ridge in Fog - Te Mata Peak, Hawke's Bay, NZ. The fog was thick enough that morning to swallow the valley entirely, but the ridge held its shape above it, catching the first warm light before anything below had a chance to. #photography #landscape #nz
A long-term collaborative process can look tidy on paper, then drift if the work around it is not connected. New post on a wider runsheet for distributed collaborative planning. 🧪 learningforsustainability.net/post/distrib...
learningforsustainability.net
The first AI-assisted draft is not just a draft. It can become the frame a group starts from. AI can turn scattered material into something to discuss. But that first synthesis can shape what a group notices, asks and treats as ready to work from. 🧪 learningforsustainability.net/post/ai-firs...
AI and the authority of the first synthesis
AI-assisted drafts can help groups think together, but early syntheses still need to stay open to collective judgement.
learningforsustainability.net
Long-term, place-based initiatives rarely fit neatly within programme cycles. I’ve pulled together a synthesis on evaluation, design and facilitation as continuity work: helping people and organisations learn, remember and adapt across transitions. 🧪 learningforsustainability.net/evaluation-d...
Evaluation, design and continuity in long-term collaborative work
A reflective overview of how evaluation, systemic design and facilitation work together to sustain long-term, multi-actor collaborations.
learningforsustainability.net
Reflective practice often gets flattened to "thinking about your work". In complex settings it's more deliberate than that – noticing what you're assuming, and adjusting as you go. Some resources and reflections I've gathered: learningforsustainability.net/reflective-p...
Reflective and reflexive practice
An introduction to these practices and how they support professional learning, sustainability, and complex systems work.
learningforsustainability.net
I keep a curated set of Theory of Change resources and guidance here, built up over years of practice. Frameworks, examples, and guidance on diagramming and using one well: learningforsustainability.net/toc-resources/
Theory of Change resources and guidance
Curated and annotated links to open-access Theory of Change guides, papers and examples, including work on assumptions, contribution analysis, logic models, sustainability science and learning.
learningforsustainability.net
A theory of change isn't a diagram you make once and file away. It's a shared, revisable account of how change might happen, and why. The value is less in the artefact than in the conversations it forces – about assumptions, and about what you'd need to be true.
The Global Justice Report offers one possible picture of a fairer and more sustainable future. A useful question is not only whether that future will arrive exactly as written, but what it helps us ask now. One future can still invite many pathways. learningforsustainability.net/post/one-fut...
One future - many pathways
How ambitious futures such as the Global Justice Report can help us move beyond blueprint thinking and explore many pathways for change.
learningforsustainability.net
