Breaking through the “Concrete Wall”: with the Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership Master's cohort

What happens when you go back into your organisation or network after a transformative learning or convening experience, where no one else knows what you've learnt - and what can behavioural science do to help?

The “Concrete Wall” is a concept we coined a few years ago, in our initial co-creation work for the Curiosity Incubator | Accelerator for Good with colleagues across the world, including key discussions with the Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership team and this week we took the Curiosity Incubator | Accelerator for Good into a co-created session on this topic in a very festive and effervescent CISL workshop.

Our venue at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, and its appropriately metalurgically-themed holiday décor

Essentially, the “Concrete Wall” is the moment where someone who has been in a transformative learning or convening space, done all the great work to shift their perspectives, learn new things, and unlock a different kind of thinking and solutions creation, meets the end of that learning and creating road - and goes back into work.

And then they slam straight into a very specifically human kind of Concrete Wall: not only have their colleagues and networks (and even families and friends) not had the same learning journey, but by and large they usually don’t have the time, bandwidth or even the inclination to hear about or take on all this amazing new stuff their colleague has been learning.

So that learning and work goes straight into a Concrete Wall – and it’s a huge cliff of learning and momentum loss, not just individually for the person involved, but for the potential application and impact of this work and all the potential, time, effort, and resource that has gone into its creation and the individual's learning.

Those of us who create learning spaces, tools, programmes, and, we hope eventually, genuinely transformational learning ecosystems to help co-create the kinds of changes we so desperately need – we all have to grapple with this secret of our profession: we know this wall exists and it’s usually the single biggest barrier to the success of our collective work, yet we rarely design programmes and learning in a way that grapples with it.

So we at the Curiosity Incubator | Accelerator for Good are doing something about it:

1. Design for it - sounds simple but it's rarely done

2. Reveal it explicitly as an upcoming challenge to the learners and participants in the programme

3. Collectively co-create potential solutions (and myth bust together the traditional go-to approaches that don’t have evidence of working, but are usually generally used)

4. Iterate and test out these ideas together in the co-learning space

5. Help form strong bonds of support and collective intelligence to help broaden and deepen the solutions

6. Graduate with an adaptive and agile plan from the space and place of learning

7. Keep our “how humans work” tools front of mind as they are taken forward

These are all simple things to say, but rarely done. We incorporated these elements in our session this week with CISL, building on the behavioural science teaching in the session, and it led to really fantastic learning, feedback and outcomes.

The Concrete Wall challenge to the cohort: hot tip - don't start with mass comms campaigns!

One reflection is that when there is the right group in the room, blending the knowledge (here, behavioural science and applied psychology approaches to change, policymaking, and for Good solutions) with the know-how (being explicit about the barriers and challenges their work out of the programme might face, and how similar approaches can be broken down and taken apart to help inform their own), great and real change can happen.

Can’t wait to see how further work on this plays out in our upcoming Curiosity Incubator | Accelerator for Good session Feb-April 2026 – more on this here!