Long Finance’s Long Decisions Group consists of 30 people interested in how groups arrive at longer-term decisions in complex situations, ranging from the ‘liquid democracy’ movement to how decisions are made in the Linux community.
In 2013 Sir Geoffrey Nice (Gresham Professor of Law), in conversation with Michael Mainelli (Long Finance, Emeritus Gresham Professor of Commerce) and enlisting the support of Tim Connell (Fellow of Gresham College), Robert Ghanea-Hercock (Long Decisions), Jan-Peter Onstwedder (Long Decisions), and Giles Abbott (Professional Storyteller), raised the idea of trying to discover ways of “extracting better narratives from inquiries and commissions”.
We are trying to answer a wordy question ‘how do we develop a better format to have productive discussions, as part of the role civil society should play, about complex problems, so solutions can be develop that have genuine legitimacy across a wide swathe of the population, and that therefore have a better chance of being implemented’. After a few meetings, we suggest the following:
The core idea is that the purpose of the Mythologue is for the group to agree which basic ‘story’ best fits the question. Our core assumption is that we can identify a short list of narratives. The Mythologue is an interactive process helping the audience to use the short list of narratives to classify problems. Stories have historically been a good way to communicate complex issues, issues with nuances and multiple angles, and so the search for a narrative structure that can be used to start the debate. Stories, think Homer, have also been a good way to communicate complex issues over long periods of time (though perhaps the Poems of Gresham may be a subsequent stage).
Having participated, people should go away enriched by having worked together and engaged in classifying the situation to a narrative. It is hoped that, after having classified the situation to some basic plot, participants will:
Roles:
Date
Monday, 04 April 2016
Time
8:30 - 11:00 BST
Cost
Free
Share this event on social media:
Location
Z/Yen Group (90 Basinghall Street)
90 Basinghall Street
London
EC2V 5AY