Over the years, the authors have asked their readers and colleagues to join them in creative and flexible thinking exercises to help reinvent or re-energize the work that needs to be done in school libraries. Their work to conceptualize a school library responsive to client needs and global changes erupted from this exercise nearly six years ago. They started not with the space or program but with the users' needs, and then tried to figure out what the organization had to do to get the desired results. The end product was the "learning commons." In this brief article, the authors define a "Learning Commons" and reflect on directions for the future.