Thinking together

Creating a shared vision is one way of building the capacity of communities to adapt, survive and thrive into an unknowable future. Visioning can bring coherence to the activities of diverse stakeholders and create the incentive and basis for participatory planning. By holding workshops which integrate knowledge from many different sources and which offer opportunities for joint learning among relevant social actors, the foundations for successful innovation, or collective social competence are laid. The workshop on organic agriculture in Tanzania stimulated shared action through the creation of shared meaning.  The goal of this article is to explore how to free creative potential using participatory methodologies, and to provide ideas for designing interactive meetings that enable people to analyse their situations, envision more desirable futures and strategise in order to make the transition.