A practice is:

• a course of actions based on the utilisation of approaches, methods and tools that has become familiar to knowledge, behaviour and capacities of the concerned persons and social communities
• produced by a continuously open learning process among persons and social community
• the result of a combination between different temporal and spatial dimensions that form the framework of knowledge, experience, feeling, thinking and acting
• the result and symbolic expression of social interaction as a nested process between several actors (persons and groups) that reciprocally orient their ways of thinking and acting while mutually influencing their own motivations and behaviours
• an individual framework of reference as far as it is socially determined and shared by persons, groups and/or the society as a whole

A practice is not good by itself as a whole, for ever and for any local context, but it depends on specific local contexts, purposes and situations.
A practise is good as far as it stimulates innovation and change in the local context where the practice has been determined as well as in other local contexts and other purposes and situations.

A (good) practice can be learnt if it combines at least three effects:

• demonstration, that is the perception of concreteness by which a practice that works well in a specific local context (or for a specific purpose or situation) can be implemented in other local context (or for other purpose or situation)
• involvement, that is the perception of possible dissemination by which a practice performed by specific actors (persons and groups) can be implemented also by other actors
• novelty, that is the perception of dissonance by which a practice emerging from a specific local context (or a specific purpose, or situation) can open new options and perspectives with respect to practices currently performed in another local context (or for another purpose or situation)

For the above reasons, a practice must be carefully fragmented into its relevant ingredients (approaches, methods and tools) to learn its lessons. In so doing, ingredients and lessons can be easily transferred. Attention must be focused anyhow on some conditional attitudes and behaviours that act generally as facilitating or impeding factors both on individuals and communities, both in alternate and erratic ways:

• falling in love that consists in considering beautiful, interesting and exciting everything coming from other experiences or, on the contrary, what is currently experienced by one’s own community
• standing back that consists in disregarding other experiences or considering them already tested or present in one’s own community
• resisting that consists in considering not applicable to one’s own community experiences stemming from outside but only those endogenously (internally) determined
• blocking that consists in believing experiences cannot be imported or exported because of too different cultures and situations existing in one’s own and other communities