How might we co-create generative dialogues and facilitate civic discourses to design a fair, free, and flourishing future on a healthy planet for the benefit of all?

How might we cultivate the wisdom of equity governance and develop empowerment networks of distributive leadership to launch Equity Moonshot?

Equity is the sacred virtue of fairness

Equity governance is about co-creating fair rules, fair plays, fair games, fair opportunities, and fair rewards for the benefit of all, on a healthy planet. This aspiration calls for taking the time to pose complex questions about how to address our complex web of self-inflicted, wicked problems in the 21st century.

• How might we engage in slow thinking to inquire and self-reflect about the implications of complex questions about equity governance?

Deep contemplation is essential for comparing and contrasting how we interpret and understand the meaning of complex questions. This exploratory preparation sets the stage for engaging in meaningful generative dialogues and civil discourses.

How might we assure the safety, trust, and the integrity and transparent accountability of seek truth to:

• Negotiate with equanimity in developing shared understandings about what fairness and unfairness mean?

• Co-create shared understandings about the meaning of equity governance?

• Thrive toward a fair-free-flourishing-future on a healthy planet for the benefit of all? 

Equity Moonshot is about co-designing and building an equitable, regenerative, and sustainable future. This aspiration is a massive transformational purpose (MTP). This MTP calls for building networks of launching pads for Equity Moonshot.

How might we, as equity leaders, mentors, and muses, align together to:

• Catalyze and develop empowerment networks of distributive leadership to take on the ultimate quest for humanity and the health of the planet? 

• Cultivate collaborative and transformational learning about co-creating and implementing equity governance?

Generative dialogues and civic discourses have distinct purposes in terms of developing and implementing equity governance. They share first principles and simple rules to enable diverse, inclusive, and respectful communications.

These collaborative and transformational learning experiences involve gaining permission from participants to critique, edit, agree, and abide by these first principles and simple rules. This foundational groundwork is essential for co-creating generative dialogues and civil discourses.

To develop such learning communities, we need to discuss these first principles and simple rules as part of the group forming, norming, storming and performing process. Any time a group member hears what is perceived to be violating a simple “don’t” rule, anyone can call in a simple “do” rule.

For example, an individual may attack or speak out against a person present or absent in ways to create coalitions against him or her. Such inter-personal politics violates the practice of inclusion. The escalation of exclusion cascades dysfunctional triangulations into downward spirals of incivility, dysfunctional polarizations, destructive conflicts, toxic divisiveness, civil strife, terrorism and wars.

Praising people may evoke paradoxical dysfunctional triangulations. A person may call in the strengths or the contribution of a individual by praising him or her publicly. Positive public feedback may inadvertently reinforce group affinities and loyalties to exacerbate inside-outside dynamics that sets up tiered status of adulations, favoritism and marginalizations. The group dynamic of inequities reinforces implicit biases of exclusion that undermine inclusive belonging.

When group learning becomes dependent on the self-centered cult of the leader, who reinforces the conductor “hub-and-spoke” communication patterns of facilitator-centered group dynamic: such as, putting up hands up to gain permission to speak in turn. This process is more likely to set serial exchanges of scripted monologues than the learning spontaneity of generative dialogues.

These questions calls for building networks of launching pads for Equity Moonshot.

Facilitator-centered group dynamic decrease the degrees of freedom to co-create generative dialogues. Facilitators undermine group-centered ownership and facilitation needed to cultivate fertile ground for improvisation, co-creativity, innovation and social entrepreneurship.

Co-create generative dialogues

Generative dialogues are futuristically oriented. They involve divergent and imaginative processes to explore the “yes, and, and” possibilities of cultivating equity governance.

Generative dialogues explore new ideas and perspectives about how to co-create the meaning of fairness needed to develop and cultivate equity governance. These dialogues are about how we can co-create collaborative and transformational learning opportunities to address our complex web of self-inflicted, wicked problems.

The purpose of generative dialogues is to imagine and visualize a fair-free-flourishing-future for the benefit of all. Generative dialogues about learning more about how we can cultivate equity mindsets to do good for the commons, humanity, the common good, the well-being of all life, and the health of the planet.

All participants share in taking responsibility to hold the group accountable to the format, first principles, and simple rules. All are responsible for adhering to the format without one designed facilitator. The group members take turns in setting up the orientation for the format of the session and provide a brief orientation about the purpose of clarifying the flow of the dialogue. This orientation process shares the responsibility of setting the stage for civil discourses and generative dialogues.

Generative dialogues are based on cultivating open-mindedness to learn on how to be curious, collaborative, and co-creative. This inquiry process uses frameworks of complex questions to evoke how we improvise, innovate, and cultivate the social entrepreneurship needed to build networks of launching pads for Equity Moonshot.

Co-creating generative dialogues involves developing new insights, perspectives, ideas, collaborations, and shared meaning about how to respond to complex questions about wicked problems.

Generative dialogues inspire our curiosity and co-creativity to cultivate innovative capabilities and entrepreneurial capacities needed to address our wicked problems. These dialogues generate new insights and transformational understandings, within the context of personal-professional-family-community-organizational-network development. They enable higher levels of civil discourse about how to address our wicked problems.

Co-creating generative dialogues is a group-centered process where everyone is responsible for assuring fidelity to using the agreement

Facilitate civil discourses

Civil discourses are convergent operational processes about decision-making (“yes but, maybe, and no”) and implementing equity governance in the present.

Civic discourse is often structured around specific issues or policy debates and may have a more formal, sometimes adversarial, tone as different stakeholders represent different interests.

Civic discourses are about the pragmatic process of building consensus about how to prevent, minimize, and solve ethical, political, cultural, societal, community, and social problems.