Our best wishes for 2023
In expressing our New Year’s wishes, we’re thinking about the iceberg mobile we use in workshops to illustrate the concept of systemic change. Every day, it helps us to address complex challenges, reveal their deep roots, achieve a global view of the system in question, and understand its underlying dynamics.
(Photos of the iceberg mobile at the Civic and Regulatory Innovation Laboratory event on December 8, 2022)
A collective approach we must emphasize
More than ever, and in the face of an urgency to take action, we at MIS believe that a systemic perspective is crucial in transforming the world for the better. It’s a perspective that shows us the mentalities, narratives, or stories that have defined our systems of living together to date. To accelerate the transition, we believe that we must revisit our collective narratives—because they have the power to transform our behaviours, our norms, and our public policy.
For 2023, let’s wish for new narratives to challenge the status quo and expand the field of possibilities—narratives that value community advancement, resilience, intergenerationality, decolonization and reconciliation—along with a renewed economy that will support the regeneration of our territories.
May these collective narratives contribute, by valuing the impact of inclusive governance, to the emergence of levers of social and environmental change. May they help bring about a culture of social and environmental experimentation that is institutionalized and anchored in our practices. May they give rise to relationships between sometimes divergent interests that mobilize and engage. May they foster collective movements that transform participation into political power, and may they strengthen a continuum of support from idea to impact, just as we seek to do at the MIS.
Let’s hope that these concrete levers can accelerate change: that more and more institutions and organizations will rethink their ways of doing things; that collaborations between civil-society actors will be aligned; that public policies will reflect the desires of communities; and that a change in posture and mentality will be evident at all levels of society.
Let’s hope that 2023 will be a tipping point for a real acceleration of the socio-ecological transition! We will be there with you to support citizen, public, and organizational leadership in this direction.
Our very best wishes to all of you.
The Maison de l’innovation sociale (MIS) team
📆 Please note that our offices (both physical and virtual!) will be closed from December 22, 2022 to January 3, 2023.
