Module 5: Co-creating a wellbeing economy vision
The journey of co-creation
Now that you've established your core team, understand your current landscape, and have mapped your stakeholders, you are ready to design the participatory process for creating a wellbeing economy vision. This can include a range of different methods: it often includes live workshop sessions, but may also comprise additional elements such as running a short survey on what is important for collective wellbeing or enabling people to express their thoughts on a dedicated website.
The German government, as part of its 2015 national dialogue on what matters for wellbeing in Germany (Gut leben in Deutschland), set-up a postcard campaign, inserting postcards into major newspapers and handing them out in public spaces, asking people “What is important to you personally in life?” and “What constitutes wellbeing in Germany for you?”
Live workshop sessions are often a key component of the participatory process as they offer a space for public deliberation and exchange of ideas. When designing live workshop sessions, reflect on what needs to be in place for each of the stakeholders to feel safe and able to express their thoughts. What power dynamics will need to be taken into account? What is needed to help rebalance existing power dynamics and come to a vision that can count on broad-based support from across the community? Process facilitation will play an important role here.
A good process facilitator will:
have the ability to be neutral and to balance power dynamics
bring positive energy into the process and help to energise others
have strong active listening and effective communication skills
be able to ask critical questions and to ‘hold a mirror up’ for the group
stay calm and patient when faced with tensions and be able to guide the group to deal with tensions in a constructive way
When organising workshop sessions, make sure that there is enough time for meaningful deliberation while at the same time being aware that long sessions may create barriers for people to participate. As a guideline, two-hour sessions can be a good middle ground. Depending on the size of your community, you may want to work with parallel sessions to increase the opportunity for specific stakeholder groups to provide their input. For example, when Wales organised it's national consultation process for 'The Wales We Want", Futures Champions were recruited who could take the national conversation into their specific areas, hosting dialogues on ‘The Wales Women Want’, ‘The Wales Carers Want’, ‘The Wales Young Farmers Want’, and so on. Over 200 organisations took the conversation forward as Futures Champions. Each Futures Conversation helped to feed into a joint wellbeing vision (more on this in Section 5.7).
Thinking ahead about the continuity of the participatory process
Now is also the time to think ahead about the continuity of the process after the vision has been developed.
What will subsequent steps be after the visioning process has been completed?
How can the visioning process become a starting point for new collective actions?
Who needs to be engaged as part of the wellbeing economy visioning process now in order to enable action towards that vision later? Who do you need buy-in from to enable long-lasting change?
Is there someone who can help establish a coalition of change makers to work towards the identified vision and can lead the coordination of activities following the visioning process?