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In Practice -
How we get our hands dirty

Here, we open up how we work – the practices, experiments, and approaches that guide our day-to-day efforts. From designing processes and tools to enabling change on the ground, this section shows the practical ways we put ideas into motion, keep our hands dirty, and help improve the ‘fertility of the soil’ for others to do good work.

Governing Together aims to better understand and strengthen the everyday foundations of collective action across divides by improving the relational capacity of governance.

We reimagine governance as something built with and for relationships. For now, our main areas of work and practice include:

Capacity Building

Developing individual, organisational, and institutional skills, capabilities, and capacity for:

Sensemaking and navigating complexity
Designing for embodied awareness, trust, and psychological safety
Mapping and fostering the critical conditions that help bridge divides, reduce polarisation, and support difficult conversations
Investing in these conditions as the new bottom line to improve organisational resilience, innovation, creativity, and long-term competitiveness

Process and Service Design

Creating structures and systems for improving sensemaking, better collective decision-making, and accountability:

Co-designing governance models and frameworks for complex challenges and contested decisions
Co-designing participatory processes that build trust and improve the quality and experience of collective decision-making
Improving AI-augmented systems and human–machine collaborations for collective intelligence
Design public tools and processes for collective sensemaking

Narrative Work / Reframing and Storytelling
That Mobilise Action and Sustain Engagement

Helping partners and organisations imagine beyond current constraints and perspectives, and align their everyday actions with deeper values and long-term purpose:

Co-creating stories that open up new possibilities
Improving the crises of storytelling and imagination through creative practices and design
Reframing stuck situations
Building and reframing narratives that mobilise collective action
Cultivating new imaginaries — shared senses of what is possible and desirable – and developing the practices that allow people to imagine and build alternative futures together
Designing collective, embodied, and relational processes that develops the collective capacity of teams, organisations, and ecosystems to create new worlds and perspectives, and strengthens their capacity to act with integrity, imagination, and care

Together, we co-create practical roadmaps for cities, organisations, and partners who work with us to foster trust, motivation, and the conditions for sustained collective action.

This means identifying the key principles, everyday practices, and governance structures that guide how decisions are made, problems are defined, and priorities are set across public, private, and civil society actors.

The first phase of our work has been both a reflection on our journey and a call to action for others to join us in shaping more relational, collectively intelligent, and resilient ecosystems.

Through a series of booklets and practical case stories, we aim to share our reflections openly for others to use and build upon.

In the coming months, our insights and resources will present the principles, practical approaches, strategies, and envisioned outcomes of the Governing Together worldview. They will highlight how shared responsibility and collective agency can be nurtured across the full ecosystem of actors in our communities, cities, and societies – governments, public institutions, local businesses, industries, corporations, and community groups alike.

To translate principles into action, we are focusing on five key areas:

1. Sharing practical city stories

We will showcase inspiring examples that demonstrate how strengthening relational capacity and building collective intelligence has become the new bottom line. These examples show how this relational governance approach can, even with limited funding, deliver tangible benefits such as job creation, local economic growth, community resilience, and civic pride across communities, local businesses, institutions, and in wider ecosystems of actors. In many cases, more meaningful outcomes were achieved – tangibly improving people’s wellbeing and sense of community – highlighting that relational and collective intelligence capacity are essential foundations, not optional extras.

2. Cultivating an ecosystem of practice

By collaborating across organisations and partner networks, we amplify promising approaches, co-develop new ideas and proposals, and convene and connect like-minded practitioners to build a supportive ecosystem around relational governance.

3. Telling the story visually

Through animated storytelling, we are showcasing how shifts in governance can bridge divides, reduce polarisation and social fragmentation, and unlock collective action, drawing on insights co-developed with practitioners and thinkers.

4. Building open resources and tools

Our current web platform is a growing repository of open resources. It will feature interviews with thought leaders, practitioner conversations, and an evolving glossary aimed at building a shared vocabulary and understanding. These materials are designed to help local governments, partners, organisations, and communities adopt and adapt relational approaches within their own contexts.

5. Grounding the work in practice