By whatever names we may call the spreading movement to embrace people-to-people dialogue; collaboration as a rule not exception, and collective wisdom, ‘it’ is energizing many people. ‘It’ is giving people palpable hope that together we can deal with our local to global challenges.

It is crucial, generative, and healthy for humans to have palpable hope. In twenty-some years of community and public issues research, I have observed the kinds of hopes and people-to-people activities that galvanize communities and plant seeds of hope for positive change. I have seen many hopes built up. I have seen many hopes dashed. I mourn when that happens to people. It happens too often.

I would rather help keep hope alive and well-placed. Sturdy hope will spring from firm premises, not wishes. The excitement of participatory paradigms may find firm premises via signposts along the way to inform them. Signposts below address perennial challenges in work that aims to address complex issues. These might support new participatory paradigms’ path-finding. Successful path-finding fulfills hopes!

How will we know we are addressing the actual complexity of issues? Two signposts will indicate ‘we the people’ realize we all have hands-on work to do, including changes in our own behaviors.
Signpost 1: We realize official policy alone is insufficient to fix problems.
Signpost 2: We realize voting is only one tiny part of the work that ‘ordinary citizens’ of all kinds must do to fix problems.

How will we know when we are generating wisdom or collective intelligence? Two signposts will indicate wisdom in our speech and thinking.
Signpost 3: We notice that our public issues-talk is less and less characterized by mere opinions, assertions, biases, single-cause diagnoses, fact-wars, and blaming.
Signpost 4: We notice that we are doing better at evaluating whether reasoning—our own or others’—is well explained and how much of an issue’s complex causation it recognizes.

How will we know when we are generating, or listening to, wisdom? Two signposts will give us important clues.
Signpost 5: We notice that simplistic logics and slick slogans no longer seduce us.
Signpost 6: We notice we have become patient with, and genuinely interested in analyses that are more complex and contextually nuanced, and try to understand them.

How will we know when our efforts are truly participatory and diverse beyond just counting how many people are involved? Two signposts will indicate (r)evolutionary shifts.
Signpost 7: Perspective-taking skills—e.g., flexibility to suspend preferences long enough to hypothetically walk in diverse others’ shoes—are showing up in dialogues, deliberations, and policy-making practices.
Signpost 8: Our cultures support the development of perspective-taking skills by expecting us to use them.

Sara Ross PhD, Founding President ARINA, publisher of Integral Review