Günther M. Szogs

Secretary of International Advisory Board, Leonardo European Corporate Learning Award

Transformative Mindshift vs Societal KM Dementia

My contribution to the agenda in 2017 referenced the great European and chairman of the UNESCO commission for “Education for the 21st century“, the late Jacques Delors, the first laureate of the Leonardo European Corporate Learning Award. The message of his report “Treasures Within“ with its four pillars of learning: “learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together, learning to be“ is knowledge empowerment alive, carrying judgment and wisdom. So much so that in his laudation for Delors the former German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher urged us to use it as compulsory reading for decision-makers in the fight against ignorance and for an understanding of knowledge as indispensable for liberating people by means of mutual understanding and for navigation of societal improvement.

Unfortunately, societies often opt for little attention to this strong message. If in almost all obituaries for Delors this passionate engagement for learning and knowing beyond “qualification“, which is adequate to meet the intellectual challenges of the 21st century, is not even mentioned it mirrors a current societal dementia towards those issues. This observation does not deny astonishing progress in many initiatives like the ones of K4DP itself. It addresses the reluctance of many decision-makers in governments and companies to take responsibility and leadership to secure conditions for global transformative knowledge and learning companionships. Succeeding with SDG´s is impossible without consequently leveraging the human intellectual potential and monitoring its impact: that is the essence of an UN advocacy campaign!

Keywords: transformative mind-shift, UNESCO Delors Report, KM-dementia, IC-monitor