Michael Donnelly

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.

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'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.