MAPA: Co-Creating New Narratives for the 21st Century

Abstract

This article presents the MAPA Social Innovation Lab and elaborates on the elements that influenced and/or led to constructing new narratives based on a plurality of views and multiplicity of people from different classes, gender and age, in different positions of power. It addresses the short period during with the lab itself was held, the tensions that arose on account of the very characteristics / particularities of the group’s participants, and the breadth and complexity of a co-constructed narrative. The social innovation lab was held in 2019 and was based on Theory U. It consisted of 37 leaders invited to rethink a social model anchored in the feminine-masculine duality starting from the central question: What does the new narrative of feminine and masculine values for the 21st century look like? We present three central principles that underpin the process and, from the point of view of a movement still under construction, we consider important issues for developing a MAPA experience as well as the limitations and possibilities that became (and have become) evident over the course of our MAPA journey.

Radical Participatory Design

“…There is still more work to do to decolonize awareness-based systems change methods which are not yet or not necessarily radically participatory. The MAPA innovation lab (Sbardelini et al, 2022), social field action research (Pomeroy et al, 2021;Wilson, 2021), systemic constellations (Ritter & Zamierowski, 2021), and social field pattern development, including social presencing theater work (Gonçalves & Hayashi, 2021), still maintain a difference between participants and researchers, researchers who planned or analyzed alone or chose methodologies for participants. Even Global Social Witnessing (GSW), a contemplative social cognition practice that facilitates mindful witnessing of critical events, is not necessarily participatory and can even be done alone without a community (Matoba, 2021).…”