Co-Creation

week 3/52

It seems like everything I’ve been reading these days talks about “co-creation.” Which is a word I don’t remember seeing until recently.

Maybe I’m just noticing it because the need has become so clear? Or maybe I’m just finally reading the right things? Maybe I’m seeing it everywhere because it gets at the core question that I think a lot of us are asking ourselves these days: what can I do to help right now? It’s at the intersection of action and community.

Creating stories for a changing world.

One example from my recent reading is from “The Power of Bridging” by john a powell. In this excerpt he’s talking about the role of stories in our changing world, and fundamentally there are three basic storylines being told (sometimes in combination):

1) There is no real change happening. (This isn’t very credible)

2) We are heading for a future where things could get much worse. This is a “they are threatening us” story, what powell calls a “breaking” story. (I think we’re all hearing this one a lot.)

3) One of change, but the change is good — or at least potentially good. This is what powell calls a “bridging” story.

“Bridging is a story rooted in belonging, where the we is reconstituted, where everyone has the agency to shape the world we live in. Yes, the world will be different. Yes, we will be different. But we will find new ways to connect. Even though we may appear different to one another, we will recognize and live the fact that we have more in common than we do differences and can create new commonalities. And if we embrace this recognition, the we of the future will be not only larger but better. We will still have differences, but the boundaries between us will be more porous.

The bridging story is one of a cocreated future where bridges instead of walls are the norm. It is a story of shared faith — in each other and in our future.”

We’re all telling stories all the time. To ourselves. To each other. To our children. And those stories really matter. They are part of that co-creation. They shape and reinforce our imagination of what the world is like, and what the future could be.

From theory to practice.

This week I noticed lots of examples of co-creation in action. But one that stuck with me was a conversation with my eight-year-old. We shelter him from the news as much as we can. He’s a sensitive kid who takes things in deeply. We don’t want to scare him. We want him to be able to revel in his natural creativity, kindness, magic, and joy — so those skills are strong as he learns about the world.  

Of course, we’re never able to protect our kids as much as we think we can. At bedtime one evening he started writing down how he wanted the world to be different. He had been learning about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and his list started with not judging people based on the color of their skin. We talked about that and other ways that people shouldn’t be judged. Then he wrote down “stop the war.” He told me that sometimes he didn’t feel safe to be outside, because of the war.

I didn’t know exactly what he was talking about… Had he heard about what is happening in Minneapolis right now? Venezuela? Gaza? Ukraine? I wanted to understand what he had heard and what he was worried about, and to be as reassuring as I could. So I asked, “Which war?” He gave me a pained look and said, “You mean there’s more than one?”

I never did figure out exactly what he had heard. Sounds like it had been in snippets here and there: a minute of NPR as we got the kids’ stories ready to play in the car, seeing television news briefly when we go to visit my grandfather, seeing photos with news alerts that pop up on our phones. Maybe he hears about some news at school, I don’t know.

But he knows about Trump. He knows that he does things that hurt people. And my child wants to know why he does that. He also wants to know “why he thinks he gets to decide everything.” A lot of people want to know the answer to that.

So I found myself answering that question out loud. To an eight-year-old. I told him the truth. I don’t know. But I do know that it’s not true. He doesn’t get to decide everything. We all get to tell our stories too. And it’s important that we do that.

Basically, I found myself pitching co-creation to my eight-year-old. Because that gives him, and all of us, agency to help shape our world and our future. We talked about what stories he wants to tell, and how he can share them with people he loves. It was a long list — both the stories and the people to share them with. Unfortunately he doesn’t have the follow-through yet to publish his own weekly newsletter, so his stories won’t be widely available at this time. But he’s certainly telling them, and they are amazing.

Also, thanks to you — dear reader — for the co-creating that you are doing. Part of that is reading this, which encourages me to put into action what I’m telling my kids they should do.

Maybe the question isn’t how to co-create. We do that every day. But how to do it intentionally? And at a scale that most of us have never attempted before? And how to do that even when it seems daunting? I certainly don’t know the answers, but we’re working on figuring it out together. Maybe that's the point.