As things continue to move forward around accelerating and blooming Generative Journalism and the New Narrative Arts, a conversation amongst a core team yesterday ran into the prickly question of how much energy to put into engaging those with diverse worldviews.
As one member of the group put it, “What do we do about the fact that people are coming from different worldviews?” For example, someone with a generative, living-systems sort of take on the world versus someone with a more mechanistic view.
| Both a different kind of dialogue and different kind of media represent a promising set of tools to create the conditions for citizens to act on their own agency… | |
The conversation waded around in vague surmising and more questioning until author and consultant Peter Block peeled things down to the essence of the intention of this work.
“In my mind, you’re asking people whether they want to join in creating an alternative or different story, a new future,” he said.
“So my qualifying question is, ‘Are you interested in creating a different future, that’s distinct from the past?’ ”
Framing things this way, there’s really no need to get stuck in worldview clashes. The question should be big enough to hold all of them.
And if people say yes, they do want to join in co-creating a new future, then, Peter proposed, the response is to say that the future creation sales team is on sabbatical, so “it’s all up to us.”
Both a different kind of dialogue and different kind of media represent a promising set of tools to create the conditions for citizens to act on their own agency and co-create that alternative future themselves. That’s the belief of this core team.
The initiative that’s being created offers a way to bring those alternative dialogues and media to expression in more places.
It begins with a series of seven international dialogues beginning in early November.
“We’re finding people that want to find us,” says Axiom News founder and CEO Peter Pula. “This conversation series to me is the beginning of a community of people that are working on the new narrative together, collaborating together but also inviting more people in as we go.”
As Peter Block also said, there are enough people longing for a shift in the future.
- More to Come
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