Improving Australia’s Ability to Have Constructive Discussions

Born out of Next25 Recoded, Intergenerational Futures is a new initiative to bring parliamentarians, public servants, and young people together to learn and apply new tools to tackle complex community challenges. Next25 is currently developing this initiative to help address one of the deep contributing factors identified in the 2021 Recoded report – the need for Australia to improve at constructively discussing complex and contested issues despite our varied experience and perspectives.

Why Constructive Discussion

Recoded is critical in creating the change Australia needs; it is a research program that identifies some of the deep contributing factors of the nation’s biggest issues and sparks initiatives to address them, rather than addressing the symptoms.

In 2021, we released the Recoded report that found four new factors, grounded in a synthesis of conversations with 50 leaders across the country. We then analysed these to decide where to focus our next steps by considering how each could make a positive difference, matches our capabilities, and would add to (rather than duplicate) work by others. We consulted with a range of stakeholders as part of this analysis. Of the four new contributing factors, we chose to work on the lack of constructive discussion in Australia. For more information on the four deep contributing factors and their leverage points, visit the Recoded page.

Since January 2022, Next25 has been collaboratively exploring the challenge and how it might be addressed. The purpose is for Next25 to identify an idea that might be developed into an initiative and implemented in the system, like we did with Next25 Leadership. To do this, Next25 engaged three constructive discussion experts to join a Steering Committee to help guide our work. An additional 21 diverse stakeholders from across the system also joined us in a series of two workshops.

About the Workshops

Workshop One focused on understanding and exploring the challenge. Workshop Two focused on ideas to improve constructive discussion in Australia. Participants from various backgrounds including law, communications, community organising, deliberative democracy, psychology, and more joined us. For a full participant list, and an overview and analysis of the workshop activities, see the workbook or click “See the board” in the interactive Miro Board below.

The Workbook

Click “See the board” to view an overview and analysis of our work on constructive discourse to date. Select the arrows in the corner of the board to view in full-screen mode.

Alternatively, download the PDF version of the workbook by clicking the button below.

The Ideas

These are the ideas participants developed in workshop two.

Participants were asked to use the Gaddie Pitch template (Anthony Gaddie) to articulate their ideas in 30 seconds.