2025-03-17

I wrote this piece prompted by a call for “protocols” from the Imaginary Institute in the CLEA research centre in VUB.

The Imaginary User Manual looks forward to “a place where time can be spent listening, understanding, cultivating, and tending to, a complex system of relationships and ideas, nurturing a web of connections, thereby creating fertile common ground in which new ideas can emerge”. This “protocol” sets out an approach to helping with that.

Existing cultural narratives can be normative or individualist. The associated meta-narratives can either be competitive – asking, “which narrative is best?”; or supposedly inclusive – along with the postmodern rejection of grand narratives, it is each to their own, with no better or worse. Naturally, we can see individual variation on normative stories, but the point is that the meta-narratives seem to exist in this dimension. The aim here is to reach broader dimensions.

Different people in the contemporary world have very different narratives; they tell very different stories. Such is the fragmentation of society that stories proliferate. One symptom is fake news, and fake calling out of true news as fake. Many people don’t know what to believe any more, and when there is not enough social solidarity to provide generally acceptable stories, in a cultural paradigm where everyone is entitled to their own individual narrative, it is not only easy but inevitable that individuals, not having access to or awareness of many perspectives, either invent self-serving stories, or reproduce normative stories told by people who they believe in, for whatever reason. The reason could be that the influencers have high status, high power, high wealth; and particularly when different narratives are sanctioned, and people are afraid of saying anything against the powers that be.

In this world of grossly incompatible narratives, pitching one story against another becomes at best a futile conflict, and at worst a tragedy in which there is great suffering and loss of life (human or otherwise) — in turn sowing the seeds of more conflict-ridden partisan stories that are passed on to provoke more conflict in the future.

So, here is the challenge: how can we contribute to the telling of stories that bring people together – healing narratives – and then, not just telling those stories, but helping them weave deeply into human consciousness, so that they eventually form the cultural basis of the better world “which we know in our hearts is possible” as many people like to say.

We start by telling and listening to stories that are meaningful, significant, to the people who tell them.

We are imagining a group of people who want to find new stories. In a straightforward case there could be just two people who want to hear each other’s story, and find common ground through ontological commoning. But it could in principle be any number. Depending on the context that participants are looking towards, the stories should relate to that context. So, for instance, if the context is aimed towards some kind of co-living, the stories might be either about actual past co-living experiences, or imagined co-living experiences that would satisfy the storyteller. Or if the context was coming together on a venture to provide a new service, the stories might be visions of how that service was going to change the world for the better.

The stories need to be relatable in some way (such as suggested above). Where this is not easy, it may be helpful to craft a prompt or question that all sides can relate to. For instance, if the participants have a goal in mind, it is easy to imagine prompts tying into Scenario planning such as “tell the story starting from the actual present of how your goals were achieved” or “tell the story of everyday life now that your aims are met”.

Each story needs to be told and listened to, and the storyteller needs enough reflective feedback to know that the vital parts of the story were heard. The point at this stage is that listeners need to refrain both from offering their own different stories, and from offering their own opinions about the stories. The aim is simply to reflect back what has been heard so that the storyteller has the sense of being well heard by the others, who may, if important, ask (only) clarifying questions about the story. Similar practice appears elsewhere. The Presencing Institute’s Case Clinics start with this kind of practice and go on to generative dialogue; but we will be engaging in the dialogue later. Restorative Circles basic practices focus around this kind of feedback. But we are not yet following through here with the rest of that method.

Experience suggests that this may take half an hour or so for each participant. If there is a lot of clarification and reworking, it could take much longer. Or, if it is done as an exercise, people could tell shorter stories. Preparation time may also need to be factored in to compose a story from a shared prompt or question.

Underneath stories we can usually detect a system of beliefs. These beliefs may not be conscious in the minds of those who tell the stories, but perhaps with patience and empathy we can help the story-tellers to recognise the belief system that is implicit in the stories.
(If the story contains an ending like “and the moral of the story is …” then it is at least partially explicit.)

However, pitching belief systems against each other is often no more fruitful than pitching stories against one another. Much commentary has been written about how people can be in “bubbles” or “echo chambers” where there is a set of common beliefs that cannot be questioned. While the details of the belief system can evolve, the system as a whole remains within a framework that needs to be uncovered.

As I don’t have lived experience of this, I don’t know how long it would take. My initial guess would be, for simple cases, perhaps half an hour per participant. If that were done collectively, it would give the storyteller enough material to spell out. But it might take longer, and could potentially be something that could be done partially asynchronously through some web platform. Or, again, as an exercise, a well-attuned group with a scribe might be able to fill out a belief system more quickly.

This step could progress through a series of questions asked by the other participants, along the lines of “do you believe …”. The participants need to take care that they are only trying to elicit the actual beliefs of the storyteller – akin to what has been called “steelmanning” – rather than posing challenging questions that could be seen as setting up a straw man. Already, in order to do this, the other participants may need at least to attempt to imagine being inside the belief system, along with its underlying ontology.

The term “ontology” is here being used in two related ways. First, it points to the personal views of what appears to exist in “reality”, or perhaps in a more limited way what seems significant in a certain area of life. The second usage points to Ontology (information science). These two uses are conceptually related to the philosophical use of the term ontology, which is close to metaphysics, but distinct in that they are specific and applied.

If we have a well-documented, coherent belief system, we could expect that the terms of those beliefs may be clear. To take an obvious example, some belief systems include the concept termed “God”, while others do not. Some people may have belief systems including something that plays a similar role to “God” but under a different name. Or on the political front, different people may have different beliefs about, for example, “communism”, but still use the same term.

To draw out the ontology, one needs to document both the entities and the relationships of the world that is taken to exist, to be “real”. We can extend this to entities and relationships that are explicitly understood as imaginary, or as belonging to imagined worlds.

The design and implementation of software-based systems benefits from a coherent ontology of the things (including relationships) that are represented in the software. As an aside, I note that the more there is a close mapping between a personal ontology and that of some software, the more that software will be experienced as usable; the better the “user experience” will be. When we are dealing with organisations that have information systems, it makes sense to look at the ontology defined in that system; to make it visible to people, and to compare it with the way that the relevant people see the world.

The end point of drawing out the ontology will be when we have the participants’ recognition that this is a reasonable representation of the ontology they have been working with. This does not require us to use the term “ontology”, but it should be possible to work out some way of explaining the intention that makes sense to the participants. Though people may want to defend their belief systems, or their stories, the aim is to get them to assent to the ontology independently of the story or belief system. How this works out in practice remains to be seen.

I imagine this process being helped through expert or technical assistance, rather than being carried out live in a group. The possibility of AI assistance remains to be investigated. We want the individual ontologies documented; while also recognising that the process leading up to documentation may well result in modifications to what the individual sees as real, as that comes up to conscious awareness. While software ontologies tend to be fixed, personal human ontologies evolve.

Who knows how long this process of documenting ontology might take? I see it as ongoing, right up to and beyond the time when the various parties agree to work together sharing common cause. It is bound to be revisited during and after the next step. On the other hand, again, if done as an exercise with a smart group, it could be relatively quick.

When two or more variant ontologies have been made explicit, the way is open to asking about the correspondence, or mapping, between terms in the various ontologies. For example, when I say “X” and you say “Y”, are we talking about the same thing, or the same relationship? What do you mean by “Z”? In the process of dialogue around the ontologies, each party tries to understand the terms used by other parties in terms of their own ontology, while allowing their own ontology to evolve and stretch to make sense of the other.

The hope here is that by getting underneath the stories and the belief systems, people will feel safe enough to have this dialogue, because their belief system itself is not being challenged. Obviously, a container with this psychological safety can be delicate. But it seems essential to genuine dialogue (in the tradition of David Bohm and others) that people feel safe enough to participate without their identity being under threat — as often people identify with particular stories or belief systems.

On the other hand, because the ontologies are rooted in significant stories and beliefs, they have weight; they ask to be taken seriously because a lot depends on them. We do not want to be creating abstract, disembodied ontologies about which people don’t really care. So the dialogue should feel important, not just an intellectual exercise.

We are not trying to have everyone adopting exactly the same ontology, but rather to find a common ground that supports the dialogue, so that each party can understand and relate to the ontologies of the others. We can see this common ground as rather like mycelium in the soil: we are not trying to make one big tree, with everyone hanging off or perching on a branch of the same tree, but we are supporting the health of the (conceptual) ecosystem in which everyone’s tree of knowledge is nourished by a common mycelium-rich soil that communicates and shares resources.

The result can be seen as an ontology commons supporting meaningful communication and dialogue. It has the qualities of a commons: a shared resource, in this case a conceptual resource; a body of people who use, maintain and govern the resource, and a set of rules according to which the ontology commons is governed and maintained. The process of governance needs to give space for all participants to develop and change their own ontologies, alongside change and development in the common ground. This isn’t a step that can be defined by time constraints, but by outcomes.

The outcome of this dialogue can be new stories, and new or better collaboration.

This is the creative step. We’ve done the analysis, now for the synthesis.

The dialogue, newly possible through diving beneath the stories and the belief systems, and leading to change and development of personal and shared ontologies, will at very least open up the possibility of new, shared belief systems, new stories around those, and new questions. The new belief systems may be at a different level from the old ones that support old stories. New stories can emerge at two levels. Stories could emerge which change the narrative at the same level as the old stories; or they could be at a deeper level – perhaps one could call them meta-stories – stories could tell of how different perspectives can work surprisingly together to foster collaboration on projects and initiatives that make a real difference — in the short, medium or long terms.

There’s no reason why the ontology should not cover things that are seen as fictional or imaginary, and that gives a powerful opportunity to envisage what-if scenarios collectively. While I don’t expect common fully-fledged coherent belief systems to emerge, some general common principles may come through. And I would expect those common principles will serve to support new narratives, new stories, which will start in the imaginal realm. Perhaps those stories can be worked through to support new paradigms of culture and consciousness.

Any change of ontology invites new questions. The question could be pathways to new stories and new collaborations, or they could play a part in the evolution of the belief systems and ontologies that have been discussed here.

I haven’t tested this whole methodology yet, but I would like to try it out with any two or more people who would like to work or live together better, and who don’t yet have an ontology commons.

Also — would anyone like to help with the potentially fascinating task of semi-automating the steps of story→belief system and belief-system→ontology, presumably using AI tools? How would we do this?

• I've drafted a 90-minute exercise structure which I will maintain.
• More about ontological commoning on my web site.

• ontological commoning
• ontology
• dialogue