The Antigua Forum promotes market-liberal reform by serving as a “place of learning” for those who are both committed and in a position to make it happen. The heart of the project is an annual gathering that promotes learning about how to make such reform a reality. Success depends on getting the right mix of people in the right learning process.
Our initial participant mix and concept of an ideal learning environment left room for improvement. We now know that the process can be much more effective and that participants can use entrepreneurial tools to address reform. A new challenge emerges: How do we retool the Antigua Forum into the best learning environment possible? And how do we create a business model that allows it to endure?
The project initially broke ground by focusing on highly leveraged political reformers and placing them in a nontraditional meeting format. Along the way we learned that outside-the-system disrupters can be change agents as well. When we mix them with reformers in the right environment, the results can be magic. It taps into their sense of mission, leverages their knowledge, and encourages experimentation.
The Antigua Forum has drawn on Socratic practice to create an effective learning environment. At the second gathering, we added entrepreneurial tools to define problems, choose options, overcome challenges, and achieve goals. Participants were amazed at how quickly they came up with workable solutions.
We now plan to fundamentally change the learning process to approach reform with an entrepreneurial mindset. This proposal addresses the need for a redesign as well as the need to build a business plan to ensure the project is financially viable. If successful, the enduring impact will be real learning about how to improve the human condition by those who are most in a position to make it happen, followed by innovative projects that do precisely that.
