Making Meaning of Our Worlds

Our Constructive Action cohort, this time through John Bazalgette, invites us to make meaning of our experience and begin to document our co-created processes.  What follows are an adaptation of his notes from the “Our Worlds” experience.  John outlines the steps that we used and offers a first glance hypothesis about what we may have sought to represent.  As always, your own comments and reflections are welcomed.

I'm with my notes now.  They're not very substantial but form a preliminary sketch of my analytic thinking as I surveyed the different 'worlds' that people created.   

For the record the proposal had the following steps:

·      Take time to let go as far as you can of all presuppositions, images, memories.

·      Go out into the town and be open to receiving the message that the world out there is wan ting to give you

·      Return and in self selected groups build a representation of the world that has been communicating with you

·      Reflect on what we have created of the message the world has  communicated to us.  

All this is rough and ready, but I feel there is something that might grow from this small seed.

I asked myself:  What is the message that has been collectively received from the world that it has been wanting to give the participants in the conversation?  I wondered whether each cluster of participants would unconsciously begin to assemble coherent but differing aspects of our collective sense of what the world of Leiden had said to us. looking at each of them and listening to the conversations that were taking place I tentatively formulated the following hypothesis.

·      The Red Group created something the expressed an underlying concern about the world's need for governance and structure

·      The Green Group created an expression of the world's need for spirituality 

·      The Blue Group expressed world's need for a sense of continuity, succession and family

·      The Yellow Group expressed the world's need for a sense of health and wellbeing.

I don't want to be held too closely to those categories.  However, what I realised was that we had designed the first steps of an exercise which, if given sufficient time (say a day and a half) could provide some stunning disclosures about collective consciousness.

With love,

John