We’re about to dive into my four strategies to reach an Omni-Win future.
First, a quick recap about the Omni-Win Project: My hypothesis is that pretty much everyone agrees that things aren't working. But nothing seems to be changing. Some people know how to help us communicate. Others have thought out what the future could look like in a transpartisan way. Still, we're not using this wisdom.
Perhaps these transformational tools need promoting. Maybe the revolutionaries haven’t realized they're part of a united movement, so they're not actually talking to each other.
One of the Omni-Win Project goals is to amplify the voices of everyone trying to improve our democracy. I want to get them talking to each other by creating spaces for them to converse and share ideas. I want to share them with you as well.
I made this huge mind map of the different folks that might be interested in this work. They range across many categories: Artists, journalists, authors, podcasters, philosophers, and moviemakers.
There are so many approaches to this. There’s neuroscience, the Game B folks, the sensemakers, integral post-progressives, and people trying to understand polarity. Even politicians are working on this.
While thinking about how to organize this, I remembered a workshop at the National Conference on Dialogue and Deliberation in Austin, Texas, that I attended around a decade ago. In this workshop, they divided the whole room into four categories with some masking tape, pointing out that there are four strategies for making a change:
Educate people: Change peoples’ minds.
Change behaviors: Make new rules or ways for people to do things.
Change systems: Enact new laws and change system structures.
Change culture: A huge change to our rivalrous culture.
They asked us to stand in the one that we thought might be the most strategic. Then we had conversations about why we thought ours was the one to focus on. It turns out that they’re all important. They affect each other. This quadrant influenced my thinking around the Omni-Win Project, so I created four overarching themes:
The Omni-Win Individual
The question: How can we better accept and understand our inter-relatedness and adopt it as a value to guide our actions?
This work focuses on:
Authentic self and self-awareness so we can build better relationships.
Omnipartiality (a bias in favor of everyone)
Neuroscience, research into our tribalism, politics, being part of human evolution, and our tribal survival needs.
Mindfulness
How we can develop the capacity for love, mercy, justice, and forgiveness
Improving our interpersonal skills
Sensemaking
Omni-Win Relationships
The question: How do we have conversations that include all perspectives?
This includes:
Collaborative communication tools
Tools to improve interpersonal relationships
Effective integration of diverse perspectives in decision-making
Conflict transformation: Peacebuilding, mediation
Omni-Win Political and Democratic Systems
The question: How can we change and improve our democratic systems?
These people are:
Experts at dialogue, group facilitation, and deliberative processes.
Working on healing the divide, creating circle processes.
Coming up with systems for better democracy and democratic participation
In two big categories:
Those designing participatory democracy systems like citizen assemblies and large-scale collaborative tools
Those working on legislation and laws to change our world, whether as politicians or activists.
Omni-Win Culture
The question: What would it look like to have an anti-rivalrous, transpartisan, meta-ideological culture?
This area includes:
Philosophy
Frameworks to help us transcend polarization, acknowledge our interdependence, and develop approaches to meet everyone’s needs
Game B: The new rules for the future civilization, including anti-rivalry.
Sensemaking
Integral theory: Post-progressives, meta-ideological thinking, and meta-politics.
Polarity thinking: How to manage polarities
Non-violence
How to integrate past lessons, present experiences, and future goals
I want to put these groups of people into conversation with each other. Do you know anyone that fits these categories? I would love it if you put me in touch with them.
As I'm building my website, I'm going to be making sure there's a resource library so you can access all of these folks, their books, websites, and the work they're doing.
I’m really looking forward to creating a space to help these folks recognize that they're all part of one big movement. You’ll also be able to interact with us.
I will be rotating through these four themes as I'm making videos and as podcasts are coming out. Sometimes I’ll touch on them, and sometimes I’ll dig deep into them.
Want to learn more about our Omni-Win future? Come join us and subscribe! It's great to have you here, and I am so excited to share these worlds with you.
If you prefer to watch your content, here’s a video on this essay:
You can find more information about the work I do in conflict transformation on my website: http://www.omni-win.com
You can schedule a call with me here: https://calendly.com/duncanautrey
Don’t forget to check out the rest of my posts as I discuss how we can work together to ensure we all win.
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