What is more possible now? #1
Note 1 of 5 in a mini series of findings from a shared enquiry: Revisiting our Why & from What if to What next?
But firstly some context …
During the Spring and Summer of 2022 the CoLab Dudley team and a constellation of Time Rebels have engaged in a shared enquiry through a range of joyful and searching collective reflection and sensemaking moments. In June 2022 we will reach the end of four years of Reaching Communities National Lottery investment in lab work on Dudley High Street, and we wanted to mark this milestone in our journey so far by asking ‘What is more possible now?’
Not only was this process co-designed with the intention of surfacing, weaving together and celebrating ‘What is more possible now?’ insights, critically, it was also designed to create spaces for Time Rebel collaboration and collective dreaming about the practical next steps for their What If experiments. The whole shared enquiry period has been intentionally framed in active hope.
The shared enquiry process has included:
- group drawing and mapping deep timelines, ripple lakes and possibility points;
- quiet reflection time guided by the Zones of Possibility canvas to enable Time Rebels to dig into what is more possible at a range of levels including self, experiment and place;
- dedicated time with Time Rebel peers exploring reflections to help articulate practical What Next? steps;
- finally, on the 9th June we will all come back together in the lab on Dudley High Street to share insights, express challenges faced, and weave together dreams for the future by further integrating the stories of our individual What Ifs. Part of the purpose of the lab infrastructure is to ensure What If experiments don’t exist in isolation, rather they co-evolve and spark off each other in place.
In this brief series of lab notes we will share summaries drawn from this collective sensemaking process grouped around the following themes:
- Revisiting our Why and What Next? (below)
- Revealing potential
- Network vital signs
- Learning and doing ripples
- Navigating challenges
The main messages and wisdom captured during this sensemaking and shared learning process will be available at the 9th June celebration in the form of our very own ‘What is more possible now?’ zine. Let us know if you would prefer getting to know the insights shared here in zine form and we will pop one in the post to you. Or if you are around Dudley High street and want to visit the magical displays and visual creations that bring these insights to life in full colour then you are most welcome to visit our What Is More Possible Now exhibition at the lab and chat with us over a brew. Pop along between 12pm and 2pm on Thursday 16 June or Thursday 30 June, or get in touch to arrange another time: colabdudley@gmail.com — we’d love to spend time with you.
Lab Note 1 of 5 — Revisiting our why
Through network wide experimenting, reflection, and sensemaking loops over the last four years we have been revisiting our purpose, or, our WHY as a lab.
This process is a critical part of being a living lab on the High Street. The place based context we are nested in is dynamic and uncertain, and so we need to pay close attention to that context in our evolving purpose.
At the beginning of our Reaching Communities investment we were co-designing a participatory platform on the High Street to support more creative thinking and doing in Dudley.
Through our shared learning and experimenting in place with local people, we have learnt that the complex issues facing Dudley are often rooted in deep imbalances of opportunity to realise potential, at a personal, community and place based level.
For example, access to the conditions for imagination in the town are deeply uneven with consequences for who gets to imagine the future of the town. Ultimately, these imbalances of opportunity are owing to unjust systems shaped by mechanistic, colonial and extractive worldviews. How we relate to each other, how we relate to nature, how our economy works, and our ability and agency in imagining and creating alternatives, are ALL shaped by these limiting worldviews. An equitable and healthy future for the town requires its public to imagine that future into being — if they can not imagine it, it will not happen, and so ultimately, a destructive ‘business as usual’ will prevail. It is clear that instead …
new forms of social infrastructure are required that nurture the conditions for new narratives and worldviews based upon interdependency and regenerative relationships with all peoples and beings.
So in Spring 2022, we are focussed upon engaging in the systemic challenges on the High Street through creating the conditions for cultural action rooted in long term thinking, collective imagination, and regenerative design. The last two years especially have seen us testing and supporting new forms of social infrastructure that enable these capabilities across Dudley. At the heart of our infrastructuring is an understanding of the critical relationship between the continued co-creation of our culture as a community, and the possibility of regenerative futures in Dudley.
A focus upon culture means paying attention in our work to everything from creative activity and cultural ecologies, to the design of the physical fabric of our towns, to the invisible cultural inheritance of worldviews and narratives we use everyday in orientating, dreaming and sensemaking.
In practice the evolution of our work in this recent phase has involved working with local people to:
- Grow collective imagination capacity for alternative futures
- Convene a constellation of Time Rebels to spark experiments around their What If questions
- Steward cultural ecologies that support cultural democracy and cultural activism
- Build shared learning and discovery capabilities across the network
- Reveal, care for, and design with place based knowledge and stories
Collective imagination capacity for alternative futures — creating conditions for greater collective imagination and long term thinking capacity. The conditions for building this collective imagination capacity, as well as nurturing practices that animate those dreams, requires that together we evolve a form of social infrastructure called imagination infrastructuring.
Convening a constellation of Dudley Time Rebels to spark experiments around their What If questions — as part of the conditions for collective imagination and long term thinking we are intentionally developing capacity within communities to ask What If questions and co-create experiments around the futures those questions provoke. These experiments are in turn helping reveal more possibilities at an individual, group /experiment, organisational, community, and place based level.
Steward cultural ecologies that support cultural democracy and cultural activism — through engaged research, cultural animation and stewarding cultural ecologies we continue to advocate for the critical role of the cultural sector/ creatives, the potential of cultural democracy and healthy local cultural ecologies in the emergence of a more regenerative future for the borough.
Shared learning and discovery across the network — adopting a more expansive sensing/ sensemaking practice, as well as a seasonally focussed rhythm in our approach to shared learning, has enabled a richer understanding of the emerging practices and new possibilities across the network. We feel this is building a form of social learning capability within the network which is central to systems change.
Place based knowledge and stories — the collective imagining led by local Time Rebels and the related shared learning/discovery across the network has shown a pattern of surfacing place based knowledge and stories. The hugely diverse range of manifestations of this knowledge, perspectives it opens up, connections it makes possible, and previously obscured or erased knowledge and stories it reveals invites new relationships to Dudley and the seeds of new pathways to stewardship.
From What if to What next?
CoLab Dudley is the home of Dudley’s Time Rebels. Our next phase will continue to involve nurturing conditions for asking great ‘What If’ questions about Dudley’s future and potential. We will continue to test out and openly share regenerative design approaches, tools and practices that help Time Rebels bring to life their ‘What If’ imaginings through collective dreaming, co-design, collaboration and convening with care.
The Time Rebels warmly invite you to be part of their What If inspired collective imagining and experimenting. These experiments reveal new and old stories of place that open up different relationships to place, and creative pathways to stewarding into being the future potential of Dudley.
Our work in 2022 and beyond will bring an urgency and energy to the role of Dudley culture and creatives in responding to global climate and ecological emergencies that are rooted in colonial, mechanistic and extractive ways of relating to the world. We will be rolling out the Dudley Neighbourhood Doughnut, supporting and convening a growing constellation of Time Rebels across a wide range of sectors, and stewarding cultural ecologies that ask in lots of different ways:
‘What if … Dudley was a safe, healthy and thriving place for all beings?”
If you want to bring your cultural superpower, curiosity, inner (time) rebel or passion for the potential of Dudley to this work then come and join in! We will be asking …
What is the future potential of this place we call home?
How will we be part of revealing that potential?
What action will we take for that future?
What will we all create together?
