Shared Realities

Social cohesion is fundamental to the functioning of a healthy society. It refers to the relationships of trust and connectedness that enable a sense of a common good across different communities, underpin the social contract between citizens and government, and allow societies to deal with difference and conflict in non-violent and non-coercive ways. Today, social cohesion faces a set of pernicious challenges and threats through the dynamics of digital misinformation.

While digital information technologies have the potential to benefit individuals and societies in many useful and important ways, their propensity to amplify and accelerate misinformation leads to vulnerabilities on a global scale.

This scale is possible because digital technologies have created conditions in which information:

– spreads further, faster across vast networks of interconnected channels and platforms

– can be micro-targeted to increasingly specific groups and profiles

– can be segmented so effectively that different realities can be presented to different people

These online conditions have real-world impacts and play an important role in the erosion of social cohesion. By exploiting tensions and fears and creating confusion around issues of deep importance for wellbeing and stability, digital misinformation fuels polarization, and makes it difficult to recognize which sources of information should be trusted. Likewise, the more difficult it becomes for people to discern fact from fiction, the more easily doubt is sown – in science, government, social institutions, and in one another.

In turn, this fundamental erosion of trust makes us more susceptible to misinformation itself,  affecting not only the choices we make as private citizens, but also the decisions and directions formulated and advanced by governments, multilateral organizations, and other influential institutions.This dangerous feedback loop between digital misinformation and social cohesion exacerbates our vulnerabilities to many threats, and its dynamics have been observed across a range of issues, including electoral integrity, climate change, public health, human rights, and gender- and race-based discrimination.

Digital misinformation dynamics have also played an important role in violent conflicts in Ukraine, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Cameroon, and Syria; in social tensions in Sri Lanka, DRC, Nigeria, and the United States, among many others; and is often instrumental in the radicalization practices of violent extremist groups around the world.

The Shared Realities Project applies the Transformative Scenarios Process (TSP), developed by Reos Partners, as a core method and combines it with Social Lab and Human-centred design approaches.  

About TSP

TSP is a process by which diverse stakeholders together create a shared framework and language for strategic conversations about the situation they are part of and what actions they can take to address it. The focus of TSP is the development, dissemination, and use of a set of scenarios (structured narratives or stories) about what is possible. 

The set of scenarios together provide a map of future possibilities which helps alert people to risks, illuminate opportunities, and to make subtle connections visible. The use of story and imagery allows for a great amount of complexity to be conveyed and processed more effectively than traditional reports or presentations.

The scenarios are crafted not by academics or experts but by a multi-stakeholder and multi-disciplinary group of actors who comprise a “microcosm” of the system. The impact of the scenarios work is achieved through the changed insights and capabilities of those who participate and come into contact with the scenarios, the collaborative relationships that are formed, and the new strategic actions that emerge to work on key leverage points for change. 

The TSP approach was born 25 years ago and has been applied by Reos Partners many times since then, including in the fields of drug policy, democracy, development, justice, education, land reform, and food security at national, regional, and hemispheric levels. It is a systemic and collaborative approach designed for situations of high complexity, uncertainty and discomfort. 

TSP meets SRP

By working together to bring the events, patterns, structures, and mental models of the larger system into view, Shared Realities Project (SRP) participants will create narratives of possible futures in their contexts.

This approach helps Shared Realities participants to gain a view on both sides of the feedback loop, and to find actionable ways of connecting them.

“Transformative scenarios are impactful because they speak to people’s felt concerns and lived experiences.”

Generating a collection of national-level scenarios creates a new kind of resource for scenario participants and many others, including scholars studying this system of phenomena, practitioners grappling with related dynamics in the context of their work, and everyday citizens navigating their personal, professional, and civic lives in increasingly affected information ecosystems. 

Shared Realities thus complements and builds on knowledge and processes that are already available and can engage participants across existing networks and initiatives. In addition, these national-level scenarios become resources from which global ones can be created in subsequent phases.