After more than a decade of shaping what we’ve come to call Generative Journalism, something new is clearly calling to be born.

The energy here at Axiom News is a swirl of that excitement and anxiety that characterizes any kind of birthing.

“Dialogic media-making” is one proposed descriptor of what we’re otherwise calling The New Thing. Peter Pula, Axiom News founder and CEO, is the visionary in this, as he was in the case of Generative Journalism.

While there’s more to be sorted out, last week a few of us listed some of the core elements that we see the new thing sharing with both Generative Journalism and some of the engagement methodologies we’ve been most drawn to, including Appreciative Inquiry, World Café, Art of Hosting and Open Space Technology.

These shared elements include, but aren’t limited to:

• a possibility bias,
• a commitment to the restoration of humanity,
• a belief in the importance of personal and collective efficacy.

We see the new thing evolving and transcending the former things in the following ways, possibly others. It adds in:

• a focus on the importance of an emergent narrative and, with that, narrative tracking,
• an ongoing ecology of conversations,
• provocateurs with a critically useful perspective,
• and a business model.

Every community has to have a narrative about “what it is that binds us together and what empowers us and what summons us to act” or it will not be sustained into the next generation, Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann says.

Not only is it important to have that fusing narrative, but that narrative must be constantly brought back to remembrance. “You create community by re-enacting the narrative,” Walter says.

At the same time, for a community to live into new possibilities, there must be a way to see what is not yet. Author and management consultant David Logan’s research has revealed that companies and communities that achieve a reality they hitherto thought impossible have come to a place in their community conversations, both print and oral, where they embraced a different kind of language.

In short, they learned to speak of the desired future as though it were already true. And by so doing they open up space in their hearts to try on the very behaviours needed to access the new realities that they were speaking about. David calls it a generative language.

Might dialogic media-making be a way to both re-enact and evolve the narrative of a community? To bring the story of the past and the story of the future together in a way that enables fresh life in the present?

As someone who’s been trying to figure out how to practice Generative Journalism on a daily basis for a long time, I keenly feel the anxiety/thrill accompanying the emergence of this new thing.

What’s exciting me more than anything at the moment is the recollection that I stepped into 2014 with this question: What role is there for media in creating the space for people to act on what matters most?

While this new thing wasn’t put in place to answer that question, I think it does hold huge promise for doing just that.

You can comment on this blog below, or e-mail michelle(at)axiomnews.com.