Francis Laleman

I started with travelling, researching, writing, storytelling and teaching Sanskrit, quickly shifting my interests from India Studies and anthropology proper to social work, community development and non-formal education - in India, in the Arab world and in Europe.

Ever since, picking up inspiration from a variety of sources (from Tagore to Freire and Boal), I have been looking for novel methods and new meaning in the fields of education and adult learning, always preferring cooperative models over teacher/student duality - and practical implementation over theory and documentation.

This has brought me to communities and organisations in a wide array of sectors: education, performing arts, charities, public services, utilities, software development, telecom, finance, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing - each time nurturing learning as a key component of organisational community life, creating learning organisations, transforming 'training' into 'learning' and 'L&D' into the organisation's 'natural state'.

I felt privileged to be around when Scrum and Agile conquered the world of software development, for with agility came a mindset of continuous improvement and perpetual learning, while Scrum has proved to be ideally suited as a framework for iterative, incremental and cooperative learning. Taking the Agile train, then, came by itself.

Today, I mainly work as a designer of cooperative learning processes and learning cultures. I am a gentle facilitator of (Agile) transformation processes, a train-the-trainer, a cooperative learning facilitator and an Agile coach.

Having spent so much time in the Middle East and in the Indian subcontinent, I have now been turning my attention to Japan - studying TPS, Lean and Kata, but also the less obvious, such as ikigai, Taoism and Zen Buddhism, or the shuhari learning process in traditional Japanese craftsmanship.

Most probably, however, you will find me in the garden.