Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig was a disruptive figure in 19th-century Denmark. Regarded as the father of the Folk High School movement, Grundtvig fundamentally challenged the elite, traditional institutions by championing the education and enlightenment of the common people.

His idea was to create a ‘School for Life’ that prioritised personal development over rote academic learning. This philosophy, rooted in the power of the ‘living word’—dialogue, song, and shared human experience—was the catalyst for the unique, non-formal residential schools that helped unite Denmark.

The principles were radical, even by todays standards:

1. Education for Life, Not for a Living: The goal was not vocational training or academic degrees, but “life enlightenment” (folkeoplysning), focusing on character building and self-development to enable individuals to lead meaningful lives and be active citizens.
2. The Living Word: Learning should be based on oral communication, dialogue, and song, rather than the rote memorisation of text. Grundtvig believed that the “living word”—free-flowing conversation and speech between equals—was the most powerful tool for learning.
3. Adult & Residential Education: The schools were primarily for adults who have already gained some life experience, which Grundtvig considered essential for meaningful learning.
4. No Exams or Grades: The education was its own reward. The schools had no fixed curriculum, entrance requirements, or final examinations, allowing for freedom and student-driven learning.

Denmark’s global standing is characterised by exceptional performance in happiness and innovation, underpinned by a deeply ingrained collaborative culture. The modern Danish emphasis on a communal society, equality, and the welfare state is strongly attributed to the development of the folk high schools based on the philosophy of Grundtvig. His principles are seen as foundational to the modern cooperative and collaborative spirit.

I’m thinking about this whilst doing work around the transference of knowledge between place based teams across organisations (and into , and out of , communities.)

Bromford Flagship is pioneering a radical structure: 77 distinct ‘innovation labs’. This massive, decentralised model, centered on deep place-based working, maximises local speed and responsiveness to the highly specific and granular needs of a community.

When you empower 77 different teams to innovate locally, how do you ensure the best ideas—the breakthroughs in community engagement and efficiency—instantly spread across the entire ecosystem? Should they?

Traditional knowledge management (KM) treats successful habits like sterile data: a document, a process to be uploaded, trained, and audited. This approach is guaranteed to fail in complex systems because local solutions are inherently contextual. Stripping an innovation of its cultural and behavioural “why” renders the resulting learning useless to a team operating in a different place.

When centralised teams try to force adoption through documentation and process, they must increase control, auditing, and reporting. This organisational overhead silently recreates the very bureaucratic silos the decentralised structure was meant to eliminate.

I’m thinking out loud here, but I think the solution is simple in concept, but radical in execution: we must replace centralised control with a mechanism of cultural inheritance. We need to ensure that successful habits coalesce spontaneously across the entire network, bypassing conventional friction points.

In the past few weeks I’ve been working with a couple of our place based leads and I’m observing that knowledge and practice is spreading, without formal co-ordination. Simply put, innovative practice is moving from node to node.

Just like the “Schools for Life” in Denmark, colleagues are beginning to learn from one another – not because of a process, a structure or a knowledge management system – but precisely because of the lack of one.

Is Knowledge Contagious?

Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist known for the controversial concept of morphic resonance, which posits that all self-organising systems, from molecules to organisms and societies, are shaped by non-material morphic fields.

Morphic resonance is the mechanism by which these fields acquire a collective memory from past systems. Essentially, the more a pattern (a form, structure, or learned behaviour) occurs, the stronger its morphic field becomes, making it easier for subsequent, similar systems to adopt that same pattern.

This means that knowledge can become contagious. For instance, if rats in one part of the world learn to navigate a maze, Sheldrake suggests that it should subtly become easier for unrelated rats elsewhere to learn the same maze, as they are all tuning into the reinforced field of collective memory for that species.

Sheldrake applies this idea to human phenomena like the Flynn effect (the global rise in IQ scores), suggesting the tests become easier because millions of prior test-takers have collectively reinforced the pattern, allowing new people to unconsciously resonate with that past “knowledge.” The core idea is that memory isn’t just stored inside individual brains but exists externally in a universal, cumulative field.

If we look across our public services in the UK, there is evidence that we been catastrophic failures at making knowledge contagious.

We have failed to learn the lessons of the past, both good and bad. We not only fail to connect across sectors , we often simply do not know each other exist.

Despite unprecedented access to data and technology the number one self stated problem in organisations is always and only ever one thing: communication.

The system we need to rebuild must be founded on principles of collective intelligence and self organisation.

Knowledge IS contagious if the system supports it.

Photo by Josh Riemer on Unsplash