On to Imagination: Glimpses of Citizen Democracy
I was recently sent an internal research report developed by a UK campaigning organisation. The premise of the work is that campaigners in the UK need to prepare for very different dynamics to come under what is likely to be the first Labour government of many of their employees’ adult lives.
This is a good initiative. We need to be ready for the space for hope to open so as not to waste it.
But I worry about where the insight is coming from. The places this organisation has sought to learn from are Germany, the USA, and Australia. Nations where Restaurant Hope is currently in the process of its worst and most dangerous failure. Where the space for hope is being wasted, and the Subject Story is on the rise.
The reason these places have been chosen seems to that these are the nations where the organisation in question has sisters. At best this feels insufficient; at worst it brings to mind the old joke about the man who searches for his wallet under the lamppost — not because that’s where he lost it, but because that’s where the light is.
Appreciative Inquiry
As I shift gear in this writing-and-thinking exercise, from the clarity of seeing the troubles in this world to the work of imagining what might be different, I want to come from a different angle, and start by learning from some of the places where the real light is.
This is based in an approach to strategy that has become core to everything I do, called Appreciative Inquiry.
The original AI, Appreciative Inquiry is a disruptive approach to strategy that is based on two key insights. First, that what we pay attention to grows, fed by our attention; and second, that most strategy processes focus our attention on what’s wrong. Combine these two and you find yourself in a world where the very act of trying to fix something ultimately tends to make it worse. To misquote Bayo Akomolafe slightly, it is in seeking to break them that the prison walls gain their strength.
Appreciative Inquiry, by contrast, asks that we start by paying attention to the best of what is, and seek to feed that instead. First put forward by academics David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva in 1987, it is deeply linked to Citizen thinking: if you see people as citizens not just consumers, you can’t help but believe that somewhere, somehow, someone will already be finding a way to address whatever challenge you face. Instead of diagnosing problems to the nth degree and trying to define the perfect intervention at scale, you reorient your effort to finding the best of what is already happening, likely smaller initiatives that might have been missed to date, and figuring out how the principles of that approach might spread (not scale) so that everything worked that way. It tends to work in a cycle with four steps:
Discovery: Glimpses of Citizen Democracy
The first step in the cycle is Discovery: asking what give life, and seeking to find the best of what is already happening.
With this in mind, my next posts in this writing exercise are going to go on tour, looking in depth at some of my favourite example of Citizen Democracy in action from around the world: Taiwan, where a participatory approach resulted in arguably the world’s most successful Covid response; Wales, where national government is collaborating on climate and nature with businesses, councils and communities in a way that is truly inspiring; Ireland, which has bucked the global trend and significantly increased trust in government in the last decade, with Citizens’ Assemblies right at the core of that success. I’ll also take you to Iceland and Chile, countries which have similar fortunes in their attempts at Citizen-style constitutional renewal, though for very different reasons…
Onward…
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This is the fifth piece in a writing exercise I’m undertaking at the start of 2024 to figure out what I see as the work that needs doing in the world, and the work I need to do. Check out the Introduction for a little more framing, and Clarity Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 for the first steps in the logic. If any of it sparks something in you, post a comment or email me, I’d love your thoughts. If you want to stay in touch, you can join my mailing list here.
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