Hello, Audrey. It's good to see you. We have the hour. Can you say where you are, and what you've been doing today?
I'm at Columbia SIPA, the School of International and Public Affairs, with Tenzin Yangtso, my co-author on Plurality and Civic AI. We have a room to ourselves through the end of the year, as a Carnegie Fellow at Columbia's Institute of Global Politics. We just came from a panel with Maria Ressa and a few other friends.
New York City.
You were with Maria. I really admire her. She received the Nobel Peace Prize, didn't she?
Yes. How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future.
So we have to stand up to many.
We thought we would start with the frame for this call: the next leading edge of whole-system development, and how to carry it into legislation, foreign policy, and the larger system. For me that also means bringing the open-source ethos in. We would love to hear where you are.
It would help to name the purpose out loud. Sandra, you're the one to speak to it.
Are you recording this, Martin?
We're recording, and I'll send you the transcription, Audrey.
Recording in progress. Okay.
Sandra, you want to start?
Well, Audrey, hello. I'm Sandra Janoff. I hope you know a bit about my work, because I've been doing some reading, listening and preparing, and I keep having the sense that you and I have been worrying at some of the same questions for a long time, though from very different places. I'm curious about what we might discover in the chance we have to talk together. I want to thank Peggy, Martin, Tom and Jennifer for making this happen, and all of us for showing up. It's good to be in the same place.
The question I have been working on is what it actually means for a human system to develop. We named this whole-system development very purposefully. It's not just about making a better decision or solving a particular problem, but about becoming more capable of acting together over time. And there's a similarity here, Audrey, from what I've heard you say and read in your work: we know we can't get there by trying to change people. We've spent decades learning what it means to design the conditions for this to happen, so that people can build the capability to act. In our approach, the future defines the task. The task tells you who needs to be in the system, and those people need the opportunity to encounter the whole, including realities very different from their own, before they act on their part.
What has become really interesting to me lately, to both of us, is what happens to that developmental process as technology becomes increasingly able to help people participate, listen, translate, find patterns, and coordinate at scales we haven't reached before. I don't know how far we'll get, but I think we'll dip into two questions. What does technology make possible that we couldn't do before? And what work do people themselves still have to do for the capacity to become theirs? That's my inquiry right now. Audrey, I'm very curious where it meets what you're learning. It's a joy to be in this place with you. Thank you.
Thank you. I feel the same sense of concern. I would call it a just-enough amount of panic: not too panicked, not under-panicked, just a real sense of concern about the same questions.
Your frame of differentiation and integration names what the plurality practice that Tenzin, Glen Weyl, hundreds of others and I have relied on for years is about: surfacing the differences that matter and working with them as an energy source. Don't flatten them. They're like geothermal energy. You don't need to make the tectonic plates agree to generate it. We can generate energy from the uncommon ground. So when people who usually disagree both find something helpful in the same idea, that is truly newsworthy, and this is what current technology makes possible. It can scale, not up or out, but across differences, so that people who see things from opposing sides begin to see in stereo.
In the panel I was just on, I talked about how two years ago in Taiwan we invited 200,000 people by SMS, and more than 400 of them deliberated in 44 small online groups on how to deal with online fraud. The proposals that survived were not the most popular ones on either side, not the YIMBY, yes-in-my-backyard, or NIMBY, not-in-my-backyard, positions, but the MIMBY, maybe-in-my-backyard, ones. That's geothermal democracy. People do change their minds, but not by changing their ideology or their position. They change by truly seeing each other and understanding that we share a future.
So I think the conditions decide, not the tools. But the tools are the enabling conditions for the conditions.
May I ask, speaking of tools: Marvin Weisbord and I co-developed Future Search decades ago, in the early '90s, and we have been growing and evolving that practice, and the community of people working with its principles, ever since. Are you aware that we have been working in a very aligned way, philosophically? You named what we call common ground, and we insist on common ground. I don't know how much you've learned about my work. Have you?
Yes. I believe I discussed many similar concepts with Tom Atlee. It's part of the water that my generation of practitioners swims in. I was born in '81, and we're literally swimming in this water.
Yes. Because of these similarities, we are speaking a very similar language. We've enabled this around the world for decades, in numerous places and in almost every sector, but not at the scale you are able to work at, and that's the big question mark we hold. So everything you say makes a great deal of sense to me, and not only sense: I believe it. In fact, Audrey, you won't believe this, or maybe you will, but I've watched your interviews, and I stole your idea and built a Rosetta Stone.
Ooh, so good!
I did!
Between which group and which group?
Between your current thinking and whole-system development.
Amazing. So where is the artifact?
After everyone has spoken, I'll show it to you on the screen, if that's all right.
Please do. If there's a website or a document.
I can put it on the screen right now, or after everyone has introduced themselves.
Here's my email, if you'd like to send it.
Should I put it on the screen for one minute?
Let's hold until we've heard from the others.
I just dove into the excitement of being in conversation with Audrey.
Let's do a short round of introductions for the rest of us. Audrey, you know Tom and me, so we'll keep it brief. Peggy, Jennifer and Michael, please go ahead.
Before we do that, I think it would help to hear from Audrey the way we just heard from Sandra: what questions brought her to this conversation. I'd suggest that as the rest of us check in, we speak to the same thing. Then we can open it up and see where we go, and save a few minutes at the end to ask what we've discovered and where we go from there, if at all.
Audrey, maybe you could start with that question, and also tell us what you're working on. Where is your mind these days, and where do you want to take the work? Maybe you're just saving the world from AI.
Saving the world with AI. We've just learned that we, the people, are truly the superintelligence. And now the place that has been the biggest source of polarization is working on superintelligence, so I'm very excited to join this humane-superintelligence idea.
I also have a recent publication, with Hélène Landemore as first author, that takes this method and argues that this is how we steer superintelligence: with a humane superintelligence. I'll paste it in the chat. Let the People Decide the Pace of Frontier AI.
But to go back to the scale question. In the Plurality book, Tenzin Yangtso and I have an illustration, Martin, you know it, showing that as scale grows, bandwidth gets narrower and narrower, until all we have left is voting and capitalism, which basically reduce everything to single numbers. With earlier generations of technology, compression was far from lossless, so mutual understanding, nuance and context lose their potency rapidly as you scale to more people.
But the internet didn't scale as a single network connecting everyone. It's a network of networks. The free-software movement is all about strangers who disagree fiercely and build different things, but make sure those things still talk to each other. They are collaborators, but not co-operators. That is the free-software way of scaling to internet scale.
In 2014, during our peaceful occupation of parliament, we always said: we're not protesters, we're demonstrators. We were demonstrating that half a million people on the street, and many more online, don't need to literally go into the same town hall. They can sit at tables of ten, asynchronously, communicating through various modalities and languages, and self-organize in a movement that eventually converged instead of diverged.
So I think that just-enough sense of concern, the shared sense of concern, is really the key. When people are under-panicked or over-panicked, it's so polarizing that you can't even start the conversation. But once people share a concern, it moves them toward the same shared future. Some of you may remember the image over the South Pole showing the big hole in the ozone layer. That's the kind of shared concern I mean.
And what are your edges at this point? What questions are you sitting with right now?
One question, as Martin knows well, is whether the Taiwan model, not as a copy-paste, can inspire even larger polities to institutionalize what we did in Taiwan. For a long time, Taiwan was the largest polity to have institutionalized this metabolism, this uncommon-ground process, at the institutional level. But I'm happy to report that Taiwan is no longer the largest. California, double the size of Taiwan, now has it in statute: the official state program Engaged California has been given its mandate by the legislature. I'm happy that the bill is there. And in Japan, five of the top six parties now share a broad-listening agenda. Again, Japan is larger than Taiwan.
So we probably can't say yet that a standing global citizens' assembly solves all problems, including AI. But we're getting there, because scaling across is happening.
What I really don't know is precisely what new drawbacks these scaling-across tools may bring. We know they perform very well at scaling such practices across. But think of Freon when it first appeared. It was a good thing: it doesn't explode, and it made much better fridges. The unknown unknown was that it destroyed the ozone layer. So what are the unforeseen unknown unknowns in the systems we are developing now? Maybe your fifty years of practice can teach the newest tools what to protect.
I'll open it up for the others to share their leading questions too. Michael, would you like to start, since you also work with Sandra?
Yes, lovely to meet you, Audrey. My name is Michael Donnelly. I work closely with Sandra and I'm based in Northern Ireland. I've worked with whole-system development for many years now, and with deliberative democracy processes as well.
I'm very curious to find out what we have to learn from each other: where whole-system development might offer something, where the gaps are, and where you may have reached a point that you haven't been able to take further. One of my questions is about the role of authority, of leaders, in taking on board what you're trying to achieve with civic AI processes in particular, and with techno-communitarianism, which I find very exciting. I suppose that's a framing that cuts across all of this.
From our experience, and it's on Sandra's Rosetta Stone, which we'll hopefully see in a moment, one condition for success is having people involved up front: the diversity of the whole system, including the people in authority or leadership roles, so that systemic change can actually happen.
A pre-committed convener. Yes.
A bit about my background: I have been, in a sense, a chronicler, connector or gatherer of practices. What we call this keeps evolving, and I think that's exactly one of the challenges: what do we call this systemic, high-participation work that creates conditions in which people with very different points of view discover common cause and can move forward together?
Part of why this call came about is Sandra's recent paper on whole-system development, which I thought beautifully captured what the process world has learned about doing this. In 1999, and again in 2007, a couple of colleagues and I put out a collection in which a wide variety of practitioners described their practices in their own words. My selfish reason for doing that book was that I was seeking the patterns underneath, which I hear in your language, Audrey, and certainly in Sandra's. And you bring in the element of scale in a terrifically exciting way.
One observation: in just the last few months, I'm finding more and more people from these different practice communities saying, "I think we need to collaborate." I'm very intrigued by your comment that your generation is already swimming in these ways, in this mindset. A question I've asked through the years is: what if dialogue were our default mode of communication? What you said makes my heart sing, because it sounds like we may indeed be on the path to that. I'm hearing more and more conversations about connecting these practice groups, and in the world of democracy, about putting these ideas to the test both locally and globally.
I've also done a lot of work with journalists over the last 25 years. I never managed to get these ideas into the national media, but they are growing locally, and there's a wonderful network gaining traction called News Futures. They use the term "engagement" for what we're talking about, and their journalism is increasingly focused on community needs. So that raises the question for me of how the local and the global complement each other, and how we support that.
That's one of the questions I'm living in. Another is connecting these many networks so that we see ourselves in context, with a macroscopic view of these multiple systems. Those are a bit scattered, I'm afraid, but they're the questions and themes that fuel me.
Jennifer, would you like to?
Hi, Audrey. It's great to finally meet you. I'm Tom's daughter, so I've been steeped in Tom's world, with all its elements and threads, forever. My own work has been in the green building industry, and more recently in manufacturing and supply-chain systems, which still need these kinds of tools.
I had a little chuckle with Peggy while listening to you, because I'm hearing echoes of questions I have as well. One is what kinds of field-building interventions we can do now. I've been thinking about how we can better use our tools on ourselves as we connect these practice groups. The chuckle was about the saying that a carpenter's house is never finished. In the same way, we use our tools on the applications we work on, but are we using them on ourselves, and what would that look like? So that's one question.
Second, I really love the framing of the demonstrators from Taiwan. I'm very interested in the U.S. right now, in the dangers and opportunities we're facing, and in how we can demonstrate at the local and state level, and toward the national level, to create the kind of resonant interventions you did. In other words, the transfer from Taiwan to here.
The third thing I want to bring in: I recently heard someone say, "There are plenty of theories of change. We need more theories of power." I'd really like to hear from all of us how we address power in the world right now, and how our work can engage with power in ways that shift the systems we haven't yet been able to shift.
I haven't actually asked myself the question in the form it's being asked here, but after a recent meltdown of my beliefs about my work and calling, I made a note of how I would answer it. I'm now wondering what the best link is between the development of AI-assisted citizen and stakeholder engagement and the regenerative dynamics of Earth's living systems, into which we need to consciously evolve. That's my best statement of where I am now.
One of my key questions: yesterday I was interviewed about my book Finding the Light, and I said I'm trying to translate the spirit of Taiwan, not the methodology. I gave a short recap of how the IETF was influenced by Quaker decision-making: the humming, "no kings, no presidents," rough consensus and running code.
And I see how administrations get caught up in protecting themselves from criticism. They have a certain control system, and they're not fit for the running-code approach, which works with complexity because you're always probing the system. I think that transition, a governance system learning to work with complexity, is one of the key challenges. I'm wondering how to translate that. So it's all along the same line.
I'd like to open our conversation now and maybe start with you, Sandra, if you'd like to begin.
Maybe with the Rosetta Stone. Interoperability between systems.
Thank you. I had looked at the purpose that was sent out in the email. Maybe you saw it too. The first thing that struck me was that we are not the right people to address that purpose. We don't have the whole system in the room. I've felt that as we've been talking, as all of you have named what matters to you: depolarizing communities, the intelligence we all hold, and how we go forward.
My purpose has been very narrow: to look at Audrey's work, her current thinking and everything she has done to date. I have read your work and listened to your interviews, Audrey, so I know what you have done, and I hold it with deep respect. My hope is that you'll get to know whole-system development, through the essay as well, and that we look at what it means to bring just these two schools of thought into the foreground, because maybe there is a way for what we hold to take a next step. That's a big question mark. I don't know. But that's what I'd like to zero in on, because we are the people to answer that question.
So let me put up this lovely Rosetta Stone that my dear AI friend put together. Where is my share button? Audrey, it has a question mark on it. I wouldn't go anywhere without a question mark, because this has to make sense to you. So why don't you just read it? It combines everything my AI was able to glean, and it does that well, with my own work of the last thirty years. I'd love for you to respond or react. What do you think? Does it make sense?
Yes, this is a really good gift. I'd change the question mark to an exclamation mark, because almost every row is really, really good.
The plurality idea is exactly this: differentiate before integrating, and reach uncommon ground without forcing unity. And the row on who is missing answers it well. A race asks who is leading. A mission asks who is missing: authority, resources, expertise, information, need, and so on. These are the questions you ask when you are not in takeoff but in a holding pattern, as I call it. I think your design criterion is a stronger formulation of the Civic AI version, which is just a gap check, but it's the same thing.
I also think the bounded, local, inspectable, retireable kami isn't exactly the same as "the future defines the task." Yours is about purpose, and mine is about humility. It's humility toward our future, of course, but also toward other communities, and toward more-than-human communities. It's also humility across one of the most divisive splits in the AI world right now, between the intentionalist stance and the humanist stance, humility toward both. So it's not only about the future. It's also about contemporary communities.
And tools are, of course, the enabling conditions for the conditions. So it matters that people do the meaning-making themselves. It's like a lift, literally. When I was in Oxford with Tenzin, we went to a gym on top of the Westgate centre. A lift takes you up there, but once you're in the gym, there's no lift for you: you still have to do the lifting yourself. So we want something that lifts everyone up without replacing the lifting, because the point of going to the gym is to train your muscles. If we send our robots, there's no point. Then we've failed both our tests.
So yes, I'm happy to keep contributing, annotating the living document and so on. But it's definitely an exclamation mark.
I want to respond to one or two things you said. One thing that gets missed when we talk about diversity in the system, maybe because it's the default, we have to reach for what we don't think is reachable, but we're really talking about a system in its context.
When we speak of embracing humility toward our own community and toward other communities, nothing is done in isolation. We are task-driven, meaning there is a future that people want to build, but it doesn't exist without its context. Our principle is "everybody improving the whole system." Everybody means those inside the system and those outside it who have a stake in the future, however the system's boundaries are defined.
That is one of the ways we have been very different from what I'll call large-group interventions: we are purposeful about who's there. If there is an intention to move in a direction, to use our shared intelligence, our superintelligence, to do what we were not capable of doing before, that means giving everyone the opportunity to learn about the diversity of the system as it is in real life: its parts, its environment, the environment's impact on the system, and the system's potential to influence its environment. The breadth of that learning, the deepening opportunity to understand the complexity, is the journey. Then comes the convergence: what do we believe, and what do we have the will to go forward on?
And then there's the word itself. "Common ground" has been so distorted and misused, but we didn't change it. We didn't get into the cleverness of calling it uncommon ground. I appreciate that you did. But we have taught it and acted on it. When we work around the world, common ground for us is what is explicitly agreed to, 100 percent. If someone in the system says "no, that is not common ground," we hold that boundary. I know the term gets played with loosely by most people, but in our world, common ground means explicit, 100 percent agreement. Then, when people go out to work on their parts, they do it under a shared umbrella of values, propositions and intentions, knowing that it has been agreed to by all.
Yes. I understand that. Not just that people can live with it, but that they really agree.
Yes, that's frustrated me through the years, so I've appreciated what you've done. But that's yours.
I see Tom is writing something in the chat about the Rosetta Stone as a shared artifact. Is it okay if I upload it to a website somewhere?
Oh my gosh, of course. If we keep going, and if you don't have other reactions, I'll keep talking. This has to do with scale, with bringing technology into our world, and with the meaning-making part. I know you've been able to use technology to identify patterns. Am I right?
Yes.
This is the biggest question for us. Building capacity, for us, has to do with people making meaning together and discovering, I really want to highlight that word, discovering that there is common ground they share. You see that, don't you?
Yes.
So, granting that AI could do the meaning-making, and granting that AI could say, "Here is the bridge you stand on," the question we hold is this: where does that leave capacity in human beings, if they haven't taken that journey together?
Thousands of Future Searches have been run around the world over the past thirty-some years. I have trained over 9,000 people in those years. And there has been great depth. I can point to organizations, communities and sectors where the principles, the capacity, have become so deeply embedded that the system can solve problems as they arise or get the help it needs. So capacity has been built in systems. Maybe it's on us. We've written books and people know about the work. But in terms of where you are, influencing on a very large scale, the point is that we really are human beings who can do this. We know a lot gets in the way. It is dialogue, but it is also learning about the complexity, being grounded in reality, and having the people with authority and the people impacted by the outcomes in that conversation together, which may be a struggle.
Always a struggle, yes.
Thank you. I didn't want to generalize, but it is always a struggle.
Like construction is a struggle. If there's no struggle, it isn't worth it.
But if the conditions are right, these players, these human beings, have the experience of moving through the struggle to a place where they can hold the differences that are not yet integrated and still work on the common ground: a common future that all of us want, 100 percent, to go forward on. I want to emphasize that not all differences are resolved or integrated. They remain in the system, because it's an ongoing process.
So, given that we have done this, and given that you probably hadn't heard of it, some people hear about Future Search, many don't, and given that the world is broken, let me say that: at this moment, 12:14 pm East Coast time on September 25, 2026, this is not the world most of us want to be living in, and we can do better. We are people here who can, and want to, create opportunities for people to find those places in themselves and to have the conditions where they can learn, discover, act and implement healthy, productive futures in an ongoing way.
What do you hear in that? I would like Audrey to interrupt me.
I don't think there's anything to interrupt. I'm really enjoying this. I just want to share a link. When I talk about deliberative or civic muscles, I don't mean it in a generic sense. I mean seven specific muscles: self-reflection, reasoning, dialogue, vulnerability, collaboration, imagination and facilitation. They're described in this paper, which I advised on. Deliberative muscles and AI.
I think assemblies are not decision machines. The decisions are really just an excuse. The recommendations, however good they are as common ground, are just the output of the gym where citizens build their deliberative muscles. The actual value is in those muscles. If we let them go unused, for lack of practice, in exchange for a few percentage points on the ideal policy slate or whatever, then of course they atrophy, and we miss the point. That's exactly like going to the gym and handing your gym card to your robot to lift the weights for you. We don't do that.
So we really need to distinguish between AI systems. The term "AI" is like the term "mobility" or "transportation": what does it even mean? It can describe a bicycle or a rocket. You probably wouldn't want to bike from Taiwan to New York. It doesn't make sense. Some AI systems are like bicycles: they strengthen you as you use them, but they have their limitations. So the real design question is what training the muscle actually feels like, and making sure that all tool builders have that experience and build it into their tools.
I think we see that in how we're using the Rosetta Stone right now. We already have the beginnings of a shared reading of sorts. But this kind of experience, being in the same room and using these tools to build Rosetta Stones together, is as important as disseminating the tools to people.
Everything you're saying resonates deeply. One thing stands out in what you said about building muscles, and I don't want to lose that metaphor. I think we lose muscle when we ask people to meet and the right people for the purpose aren't there, so they end up frustrated. That's what we're pushing against, Audrey. We are not about recommendations. We are not about good ideas. We are not about what you want others to do. When the right people for the task are present with one another, the outcome is action they can take steps on themselves. It may only be a next step, but it is a step. Meetings that don't accomplish what people hoped they would are frustrating, and I think that frustration depletes muscle mass.
Exactly. Air guitar might be a thing. Airlifting doesn't make sense.
It happens all the time: we ask people to come together, and unless the purpose is getting to know each other, understanding communication processes or higher consciousness, if that's the purpose, fine, it falls short. The world is in desperate shape, and those at the ends of the spectrum, whatever it happens to be, have a lot of energy for noise and opposition. And Audrey, I think I can say that you and I both know what it means to enable a conversation among all of them, with whatever differences are out there, so that they discover: yes, there are things we truly own and want to go forward on. That's our purpose.
So I get very frustrated when people say, "Oh, it's okay that this group was missing. They're just too busy." I don't think anyone can be too busy these days for an important gathering that could possibly do something constructive in this world. We all have to make the time. That includes the people we say have authority, who are very busy, and the people who are impacted, who are also very busy. And we are all being impacted. I'll stop there, but we want these gatherings to matter.
So Sandra, I think one of your key points is that you have actually the power in the room. Is that correct?
Absolutely. And as for power: power implies that I could do something that harms you, or have influence over you that I shouldn't have. Authority is different. You can call it power, but we speak of people who have authority in relation to the task. The task defines the system: who has authority, resources, information and expertise in relation to the task, and who is impacted by it. Because I don't want to be in a meeting saying, "This would be wonderful, if only they were here."
I just want to check: do you have a specific question for Audrey to pick up on? Is it the matter of scaling, that you're still wondering how to do that? I'm just wondering where you want to go with this.
I'd like to know, Audrey, whether you have a question about our work that would be helpful to explore. When I read what you wrote, especially about the next frontiers, I loved the participation officers. Is that the name?
Yes. The PO network.
They're the integrators. That's a beautiful name for that role. Each of the parts has to be differentiated according to its goals and needs, but a system also needs integration, and participation officers are a beautiful way to establish it. I also hear you talking about the legislative level: how do we move there, and how do we include it? I think that's a great thing to explore.
Yes, definitely, and that's why I'm so excited about Japan, where five of the six major parties have adopted this. All of them are legislators, including Team Mirai, the future party, which now has 11 legislators in the Japanese Diet and is really moving the needle. They don't have a platform in the usual sense. Their platform is literally a technological one: a way for people to chime in and deliberate through what they call Idobata, and to co-create the bills they propose to parliament. Because they create common knowledge through this uncommon-ground, broad-listening device, they then win the other major parties' support, which means they're more popular than populism. And then Japan's ozone heals itself, so to speak. That's a very good example, and hopefully we'll see it in more legislatures.
The California legislature putting its stamp on Engaged California, making it a co-sponsored initiative and not just an executive-branch one, is also a very good sign.
And I think the pre-committed convener can become the default mode. Someone new to office, or someone about to leave office, has a natural inclination toward power with rather than power over. If they have access to existing tools, including a participation-officer network that's already in place or can easily click into place, then power-with becomes the default mode of how they operate.
I want to catch that. I think "hopefully" is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence, because getting people in leadership positions to buy in is really the issue. That's the constraint we impose on ourselves at the start, and it's why whole-system working is still a niche movement in the world: if the leadership isn't there right from the start, then move on, because it's not going to shift. The system isn't going to change. So getting leaders to take on that sensibility, to work this way, is the deal-breaker. I'm really interested in how you've experienced that.
I hear Audrey talking about that as well.
Peggy, one second. Audrey, this is really exciting and brilliant, and we have to share our learning on this. We know there are personality and emotional elements built into why leaders are afraid to give up control, or hesitant to act in this way. We've worked with visionary leaders, but of course those whose ears are closed to everything you're talking about are not ready. What you are doing is evidence that we can still work this way: leaders can step into this and survive, maybe even thrive.
Audrey, do you have any learnings about what happened, or what made a leader take this on? Or were these new people, as with Mirai in Japan, where a newcomer basically started from scratch and brought it into government?
It started from the Plurality book. He literally read the Plurality book, actually translated part of it, and then went into the demonstration. And I think that's exactly the point. The point is not to make a few chosen ones our champions who embody this. The point is to make it much easier to say, "Yes, let's do broad listening," so that it's simply the default. Actually, the one party in Japan that isn't a broad-listening party now has to justify why it isn't using broad listening. And maybe they'll come around too.
Yes, exactly. That's the point: to make it so much the default that people expect it of all office holders, and of civil servants, starting with issues that concern themselves. For example, in Engaged California we ran a government-efficiency consultation with state employees only, and before that, one on the impact of AI on work. In Taiwan, too, the participation officers nominated their own internal petitions, instead of only handling e-petitions from citizens.
In all these cases, including the German case Martin knows well, Deutschland, was geht?, what's bugging you, what works, how's it going, it starts with the civil servants. Granted, rather unusual civil servants, in the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation, SPRIND, and the new ministry for digital and state modernisation, but they are public servants.
So the idea is to get public servants to use these civic-tech tools, to see them as govtech tools, and to use them on themselves as the main stakeholders, and to build a network of participation officers from every department. On issues that don't concern their own department, each participation officer is just another citizen. If I'm from the Ministry of Transportation and the issue is shortening tax filing from three hours to three minutes, I'm just another taxpayer. It has nothing to do with transportation. So everybody takes turns experiencing how a regular citizen would, in rooms where pretty much all the decision-makers are present. And then you broaden it out.
It's a bit like the RAND tabletop exercise, which started as Cold War war-gaming and then spread everywhere, like Open Space Technology, Foo Camp and so on. Everybody uses tabletops now. The point is that you start with the civil servants who have to implement this, so that when elected officials or legislators come in, they say, "Oh, this is just how the state works."
I don't know if you know this book. Marvin Weisbord and I wrote Future Search, now in its third edition, and in it we interviewed the leaders who get it. We've told the stories, and we have stories all over our website and in our community. So we have stories. But I'm with you. Maybe I'm a little more impatient. I contain my impatience, but we have to make the circle bigger. We have beautiful stories and very deep engagements. I've worked across IKEA, which embeds these principles. I've worked across Northern Ireland, and in many different countries. We have to make the circle bigger.
Let me just say, lastly, that it's truly wonderful to be in the same moment and the same place with you. You're doing exceptional work, and I'm very proud that we're in the same place in time on this planet. Thank you, Audrey.
I was going to suggest what Sandra began: as we close, let's take a few minutes for a final reflection from each of us on the gift of taking this time together.
Do you have five more minutes, Audrey? We're over the hour, sorry. Jennifer will rejoin by phone in a moment.
Yes. I don't have anything until one.
I'll offer what I put in the chat. I'm very intrigued by your intentionality: that a key purpose of the work is essentially to grow the work, so that the experiences themselves build civic muscle, and to do that consciously. I know our work does that too, but the consciousness, the deliberateness with which you do it, adds a regenerative quality that I appreciate. Thank you.
Thank you.
I've learned a lot in just this hour, Audrey, from hearing directly from you how this plays out and some of the thinking behind it. I know there's a lot of overlap with what whole-system development has been doing in person, around the world, in many different systems. But there's so much to learn, because you're moving at a speed far faster than whole-system development ever has. It has taken us thirty years to learn our way through all this. So it's robust, and we know that.
So there's an opportunity to be faster and to do more of this, because the world needs it, and making it available is one massive part of that. That includes our capacity as practitioners to tell people about it and describe it. I love your idea that this becomes a default way of working. The magic is how to get it to be the default. But the message you're putting out is clearly catching attention. So if there's any way we can redouble our efforts to get the word out about why this kind of work matters so much, and that there are methodologies people can access, that's really important. It's not magic. It's will.
It really is.
I'll jump in. It has to become a default way of working. I know it when I see it, and there is real evidence. I'll share just one example. A number of years ago I was working in a health system, enabling this work: we were running Future Searches across the system on patient care delivery. Off to the side, outside the conversation, I overheard the vice president of nursing talking with a colleague. She said, "We have this meeting next Thursday. Do we have the right people coming to it?" That had become the default. And those are very structural questions: Do we have the right people coming to the meeting? Do we have enough time for what we set out to do? They're structural, and they're doable. When we don't ignore them, that becomes the default.
Beautifully put.
I sense a powerful confluence between Audrey's work and Sandra's, and I'm wondering how to extend the logic of "the whole system in the room" into the more-than-human world, the larger system in which we're embedded. All the stakeholders in that world, the citizens of the planet, are not included in our conversations, and our ignorance of them is becoming more and more visible. So how do we get beyond "all the people in the room" to what's missing? I don't know. I have a strange feeling that there are both human ritual dimensions to this and AI capacities that could help. But I'd like to see more of that inquiry.
I'm sorry I had to step away. I was picking up my daughter. I'm inspired to have the connections, and really interested in the participation officers, and in what's going on with Japan and California, and how to pursue that kind of spread further.
That's great. There's a good study on that, which I just pasted in the chat: Japan's Team Mirai Uses Tech to Bolster Democracy, Not Undermine It.
In general, there are many good links on how to transfer this to other places. I just had a conversation with someone from the Office of Mass Engagement, which by its very name is like a participation office and network: embedded activists inside government. So there are many places in the U.S. now that are doing this.
Thank you, Audrey. I love your consistency in spreading the memes, the demonstrators. And I'm still really intrigued that you don't seem to get caught up in, or worried about, the so-called people in power. Instead you spread the demonstration of things that simply make sense, until everything else becomes obsolete. I think that's really key, and I love how cheerfully you do it.
I'm in Philadelphia, Audrey. If you want to come visit, that would be splendid. It's only an hour and a quarter by train.
Maybe next time I'm in New York. I'm heading to Reykjavík very soon.
Anytime. Keep it in mind.
Reykjavík is considerably farther away, and I've never been, so I'm very much looking forward to it.
Thank you for the gift this hour has been. I think true interoperability between our traditions is already there. The Rosetta Stone, which now has a hyperlink you're all free to share, audreyt.org/rosetta-stone, incorporates the real work we have been doing. That work is not really about convincing this power holder or that one, but about making room for the default: so that when people think of rooms, they default to this kind of room. I think that's really the point.
And the living document really is living. When I call it a living document, I mean the website keeps changing: every time one of us says something, it changes dynamically. So feel free to share it openly.
I'm happy to explore how we can bring the more-than-human world into the room, because in a very real sense, your AI friend and our AI friend are literally part of the room. Without them, there would be no Rosetta Stone. So I think your fifty years of mostly human practice is exactly where these new tools can learn what to protect: what is valuable now that they're part of the room. And then, seeing the other planetary parts of the room, we can ask what the uncommon ground is across all those extremely different intentions. Maybe we share the same practice of care.
Yes, that would be wonderful.
Live long and prosper. Thank you.
Thank you. Bye.
Thank you.
