going on the journey
For a while I've been thinking about
- The importance of people "going on the journey", not just learning in a classroom-style abstract way of receiving knowledge;
- How unequal the opportunity is for people to do that; and
- How poor process/project design might be inadvertently increasing the "experience gap" between core actors and other "stakeholders"1
Going on the journey is an experience of change. You end up in a different place. Even if, borrowing from Eliot in "Little Gidding", we arrive "where we started / And know the place for the first time". As he says, it's not the same place when we have changed, when know something new and essential, when how and what we see has evolved through our journeying -- our learning.
So, going on the journey is also an experience of learning. An embodied, powerful learning. Whether a sudden Damascene moment or gradual change, it's part of you, rather than an object of abstract/factual knowledge you interact with.
But who gets to journey? Who gets to learn?
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There is more and more recognition of "procedural injustice" and the procedural power held by those with money and decision-making responsibility: the people funding and leading any work. I don't know if this has included recognition of their privilege as the ones who get to go on the journey.
If you're a researcher and you've spent time looking in to a social or ecological horror and felt the outrage and then the disbelief that other people don't see it too or feel the urgency: not only have people not got the facts you have, but they haven't lived a process of discovery and sense-making.2
If you've spent a lot of time talking to people with different views or different pieces of the puzzle, but not facilitating a process where those people are actually brought together themselves: you're hoarding the empathy and capacity to connect the dots.
And if making change happen is about bringing people on the journey or all of us needing to go on a journey together -- to a new society, new paradigms and norms and technologies and behaviours, beyond fossil fuels and billionaires and structures of domination -- it's critical that we think about whether or not our collaborative processes themselves form part of that journey.
For the change you're trying to make happen: who needs to be a part of that?3 And how can you design an experience -- not a product -- that is (part of) the journey?4
If you're not taking your community or audience or target on the journey with you, you're widening the experience gap between you. All the more reason for changemakers to think carefully about who's included in projects, and how they're involved.
I don't like the word "stakeholder" but haven't yet got a good alternative. Often I choose the term "actor" instead, but that can be vague or unfamiliar depending on readers' contexts.↩
Perhaps this can be usefully thought of in terms of "radicalisation"...↩
"Co-production" has become trendy in academia and civil society orgs and often watered down to the equivalent of participation via consultation. In contrast, we could say, the philosophy of true co-production includes the principle of "going on the journey".↩
"Experience Design is a design methodology in which the final product is the experience of the USER or the AUDIENCE rather than the thing that is created" (emphasis my own). See: https://www.odysseyworks.org/10-principles-of-experience-design↩