Social Dreaming
In March 2020 I presented at the Service Design in Government conference with Adam. My last in-person event before the pandemic hit. The conference was rich and inspired my thinking and practice in different ways. Fast forward to last week.
The Children’s Society (TCS) held our first face to face leadership away days for a long time. I put my hand up to co-curate a session to engage and inspire our leadership team to think collaboratively on a shared new project, or expedition (as we now call our collaborative endeavors). Aiming to encourage colleagues to take time, together to get their heads out of the weeds, to pause thinking about the here and now for a moment and engage with the future — and what we can create together.
Entirely inspired by the #socialdreaming exercise that Cassie Robinson held at SDinGov 2020 as part of her keynote, I referred back to Cassie’s blog setting out how she engaged this huge room, with 350 attendees into a collective, creative, dream making space. I wanted to try out the experiment, on a smaller scale with colleagues.
I gathered some allies to create the session with me, and this blog sets out what we did, the dreams we inspired and some reflections on the approach.
The dream
What follows is word for word the social dreaming dialogue we used.
‘Social Dreaming’ is a practice of sharing and working with dreams within a social space.
To help us get into the right mindset please indulge us for a few minutes whilst we lead you through some social dreaming.
I’d like to invite you to close your eyes and listen. If closing your eyes is not your thing, then look down, look out — embrace a 1000-yard stare. Get comfortable with immersing yourself in the words that are coming and where your mind takes you.
We are going to travel in our imaginations to 2030.
This 2030 is a really positive place.
It’s not the 2030 we might anticipate, our 2030 is a place of high hopes and dreams a reality. A place of positivity, where change has happened. We’ve made an impact.
We would like you to think about the years between now and 2030 and what we’ve achieved as individuals and as an organisation. The Children’s Society.
The scale of transformation that we’ve enabled, that was beyond our dreams and ambitions in 2021.
Imagine for a moment.
What Society is like for children now, can you believe the scale of change that has taken place?
The scale of change that has taken place.
How long are those waiting lists for mental health support? Do waiting lists exist?
Led by charities like ours, and by colleagues in national government, local government, wider organisations, private companies, community groups, schools, universities, hospitals, leisure centres.
The change that has been initiated by children and young people themselves.
The campaigns that young people have led and won.
The changes in perceptions and attitudes to young people. Prosperity all around us.
The movement that we have grown, the network of activists we have inspired, we have tripled our income thanks to our amazing supporters.
The private firms investing funds, using their weight and influence for the benefit of young people; building shared purpose partnerships in a way we might not even imagine right now.
The schools, the police, the social care staff aligned and committed to tangible change locally.
The different and new government policy and legislation that has passed through parliament.
The multitude of people, working together, with young people’s futures at their heart.
Our shops are hives of activity — with employment opportunities, revenue generation and more — much more.
The aftermath of Covid bringing people together, sparking action, making collaboration the norm. Liberated by online working, yet freed from the shackles of home working and inspired to collaborate face to face again — change is ignited
We are surrounded by people who don’t look like us. Where diversity of thought, experience, skill, and heritage is the norm.
The work of The Children’s Society has been reimagined. The way we work locally, regionally, and nationally — are we operating in new geographies / countries.
We have new relationships everywhere — internally and externally. Connections where there were none.
It’s been 9 years of transformational change. That future generations will talk about for years to come. They will share stories about the people that progressed monumental change, that took the lead and made big things happen. People that were humble, that celebrated diversity and championed inclusion. That worked hard, often in the sidelines and let others shine. People who worked relentlessly for young people’s futures.
2030 is a time where we are confident we have done everything we could have done.
Now — take your imaginations.
Keep your eyes closed or keeping looking out — thinking ahead.
Go for a walk in this future TCS.
Be it… in the community, in an office, in someone’s house, in a school, in a shop, in a park, on public transport, on your street at home, in a health centre or a new place, a new looking building, or pop-up or yurt, tent, tuk-tuk.
What’s it like?
Who is around?
What are they doing? What are they talking about?
Who is connecting with who?
Use all your senses — what does this future world, future TCS look, feel, taste, smell, touch like for young people, for supporters?
Please open your eyes, bring your attention back to here and now.
We’d like to invite you to draw or write, or both something from what you have imagined. It can be a sketch, some images, some words, a single word.
Whatever and wherever your imagination has taken you.
It’s all relevant and there are no wrong responses / thought here.
Share the essence of what you have been thinking about — some of it, all of it.
Think about our future TCS.
What is that collective expedition we’ve all worked to contribute to?
What does this look like?
What have we created together?
What does it look, feel, sound like for young people, for supporters, for staff, volunteers, for partners and other organisations who work with us?
What have we achieved together?
You have 10 minutes now to draw, write, sketch, cartoon what comes to your mind and then please stick it on the window.
Creating the dream collection
We took a break and collected themes from the dreams. We invited people to walk around and look at each other’s dreams.
Nikki created a word cloud of common words and I tried to do a live sketch note.
We then brought everyone back together to share what we’ve seen, and asked people to expand on their thinking.
Finally, we moved onto personal pledges. I asked:
What is your contribution to living this dream?
Can you help turn your dream into reality by writing a personal pledge?
We invite you all to commit to something special and unique to yourselves. You can share your pledge if you want or keep it personal to you. But we want you to remember it.
Thinking about your own dream, the dreams, and ideas you have heard from others our dream collection. What can you commit to?
We’ve asked you to think big, think ahead, think long term, think an exciting new expedition. But we know that everything must start small, change starts with action. It starts with you.
Be the change you want to see.
What will you take forward?
We invite you to please write a pledge to yourself on the cards coming round the room now. This will be taken and posted back to you.
Reflections on social dreaming
We encouraged tweeting of the session, but this didn’t work so well — on reflection we were asking too many things. Asking people to be in the present, in a room together and deeply think about the future, is not conducive to then asking them to tweet digitally about the here and now.
This social dreaming session was not as wide or expansive as the one Cassie Robinson led. It had some parameters written in, as we were looking for people to focus on our organisational goal, or organisation as a whole and maybe shared pieces of work we could work on together. I’m left reflecting on what the outcome would have looked like if we have encouraged people to dream so much more widely — without any boundaries.
Spending time imaging a future that’s almost 10 years away was fun and challenging. Dreaming is great, but it was hard to get my brain not to see obstacles. What really stood out to me was that so many of us dreamt of something (either TCS or our work, or even young people), being better connected. Being a small part of something bigger. For me, this really speaks to our ambition of rallying a community of people behind the cause to change society for young people.
We collected informal feedback. Overall people were positive about #socialdreaming. They enjoyed having the time to hear a shared journey and think about their own role in it and what we can do collectively to move closer to our dreams.
Some found the sketching part too pressured, and others wanted a longer session to take the dreams and make them into something more tangible. The feedback / sharing part of the session was not accessible for those with a sight impairment, as not everyone was able to see the detail of the sketches and words people had written. This created a barrier to the shared reflections at the end.
I LOVED being involved in the social dreaming exercise with the Leadership Team last Wednesday. Aside from the obvious benefits of helping us get our minds and aspirations out of the weeds the reflective nature of this meant that we each could connect very individually with our inner vision, whilst absorbing and appreciating different perspectives. It helped show the many connections and shared elements of our aspiration but equally spotlighted different ways of thinking and being together. It allowed for different styles of thinking and processing. I would have loved to take to the next stage collectively.
There is something really powerful about closing your eyes. It’s not just an act of trust, but a way of closing off the distractions around you in order to concentrate and focus your thoughts on what is going on in your mind. Receiving verbal prompts is a stimulating way to encourage your own thinking and dreaming about the future. But: dreams are great, but they are not necessarily structured, nor clearly translatable into a practical reality. Conceptualising was liberating, but it feels like we would have benefitted from more analysing and challenging of what we came up with, and distilling it down into its raw essence, as this may have created a strong link into the next session.
I really enjoyed it, it was a great (and quite simple) way to detach from the right now, and visualise what our 2030 goal would actually look like for young people, and what the key components to achieving that might be. The challenge was then getting that down on paper, without bouncing ideas off other people, and my drawing is really not very good! But the benefit of that is that we got a wide, undiluted range of contributions, that you might not get with group work.
Thematic dream collections
I took the dream collection and searched more deeply for common themes and created two sketch notes.
A dream collection from people’s ideas about specific solutions / provision for young people and places.
A dream collection from people’s ideas about The Children’s Society, our organisation and where we are going, the movement towards our organisational goal.
What next?
So much here for us to work from and take forward.
I’ll be part of the expedition to progress taking the dream collection forward into a new co-design project and we are looking forward to posting the pledges back in due course too.
I’m also excited that some of the team will be trying out #socialdreaming with a wider group of colleagues next week. Hopefully they will blog about it, and how they’ve taken this learning the next step.
Thanks to everyone in the leadership team at The Children’s Society that got involved in this, and specifically thank you to Nikki Pawsey for co-producing this session, and to Pippa Lock, Dara deBurca and Paul Maher for their amazing contributions on the day.
