Ottawa (de)tours

How are topics chosen?

Our journey has been somewhat serendipitous. We started off with a bunch of ideas, and along the way have met some amazing people with great ideas. While our themes are a combination of the two, a season’s worth of coffees, calls, and walks has left us committed to examining things that are:

Complex. Massive topics that we can’t stop wrestling with, yet often feel are too complex to be tackled, and yet where we are trying to find ways to start thinking and talking about them. Democracy, banking/finance, war and peace, our relationship to our food, Aboriginal people, gender and sexuality, our healthcare system, etc. These are topics many Canadians clearly value deeply, but we struggle to have good discussions about them. A big part of our motivation is empowering people to take ownership of what they do know, find out what they don’t, and help give them the tools to access the big questions without influencing them in their solutions (see tactic number 3: 9 Why’s in Liberating Structures, an amazing set of tools that were introduced to us and that we use during our walks: http://www.liberatingstructures.com/3-nine-whys/)

Current. While history is a great starting point, and a great entry point into a conversation about any topic (i.e. did you know Tommy Douglas loved that pizza place on Bank and Somerset?), we want to cover topics that would resonate with folks today, and which will be important to think about in terms of the future.

Meaningful. We recognize many topics are meaningful, and certainly enjoy a good pub crawl ourselves, yet there really are only a handful of topics that allow us to get at the core of our existence, and which help us dig into deeper questions. What we have in mind are questions that revisit how we approach a given issue: (“will changing how I understand this topic give me new choices about how I live,” or “have we structured our [social safety net] in the right way”, or “what are the next barriers to inclusion that we can take down”. These are fundamental questions, and they are essential questions. Complex issues seem best understood when the most simple questions are asked, and re-asked. As we grow in our understanding of a topic, we can ask the same question over and over. The answers may (or may not) grow in complexity, and, over time, in their wisdom and understanding as well.

Written by Dan Monafu