This is a RadicalxChange production.

I've come to a place of which is there's problems with problem solving itself, that approach, and collective intelligence about solving problems. There's a common saying in the last several decades about humanity is very smart, but it's not wise. And homo sapiens means wise man, and there's lots of people questioning whether that's an accurate description. The fact is that our ability to solve problems, not only are there lots of problems with how we solve problems in terms of our cognitive distortions, you know, confirmation bias and stuff like that, but even the solutions we come to, and they're good solutions within the scope of a particular problem. It's like, how do you get people more effectively from a to b? So we create automobiles and put gas in them, and suddenly we find we're destroying the atmosphere, you know, the climate. And it's like the solution's another problem. It's like your solution becomes a problem because everything's connected. And if you particularly land on solutions and you say, this is the solution, and stand there while the impacts of your solution are reverberating all around and you are ignoring them because you're so happy with your solution, which we tend to do. We tend to get attached to solutions and ways of looking at things and ways of doing things, etcetera. And so is it possible to have a society where there's a cautionary approach to things. It's like we're not arrogant. We know that we're not going to know enough whenever we make a decision or have a solution. And so how do we go about doing our solution creation while we are trying to be in right relationship to reality. And part of the wise democracy vision is knowing you do the best you can. You include as many factors as you can. You include as many perspectives, whatever, as you can. And then you do your thing and you watch because we did miss something and reality is going to tell us what we missed. And so we're going to need to dance with that. And while all that's happening, reality is changing. So it's not an arrival dynamic. It's more like a dance and interactive dynamic. And studies of complex systems suggest that mutual responsiveness is what's going on in a complex system. So learning how to be a good mutual responder, a mutual learner, a mutual dancer with the real world, the real situations of bodies of people, ecosystems, organic dynamics, whatever, to be able to dance with all that humbly and creatively, and how to do that in a participatory way. And it's not just because I'm biased towards participation. Once you step into the level of complexity that we are trying to address and dance with, the number of things you have to take into account exceeds the ability of any particular group or system to take into account. So having the ideal as being able to involve all different sources of information, all different perspectives on what's going on. You can't usually do that because everything's connected. There are limits, but it expands gigantically if you can creatively use all the diversity, including the dissonance. That's one of the patterns is using diversity and disturbance creatively. If you can do that well, you are using everything that reality is currently giving you to work with. And then what you come up with is probably gonna work better. But again, you're gonna always miss something. Now I read that you spent some time in a Quaker community when you were young. I imagine that experience must have influenced you a lot. Can you speak a little bit about that and what it was like? My parents were not religious particularly one way or another, but they decided that my brother and I should have some kind of religious upbringing just to have that as part of our experience and looked around and decided Quakers were the best things for us. And so during our teens, we went to a Quaker meeting in Pittsburgh and participated in Quaker youth groups and stuff. And a Quaker meeting is a traditional Quaker Majority of Quakers and we're like Unitarians now, but the traditional Quakers sat in silence for an hour, individually communing with God and trying to be in touch with what they call the light. And if you are moved, literally moved out of your chair, moved to speak, you stand up and speak and whatever you say, people listen to and then sit down. There's no conversation per se. It's just a silence. It's funny because one of the founding ideas of Quakerism is you don't need any intermediary between you and God, and so there's no preacher. There's nobody between you and God. And so the sitting and meeting is collectively tuning in. And that's part of, like, the attunement stuff, which I is not native to me, but I have that pattern. I can understand that pattern of collective intelligence and collective wisdom. Is there's some higher knowledge, collective or transpersonal, whatever it is. It's a higher knowledge and you can tune into that. And there's people who do meditation for that. There's all sorts of ways of doing that as contrasted with the kind of collective intelligence and wisdom that comes from having diversity and helping it synergize. It's a different overall logic and narrative about what's going on and where things are coming from. Mhmm. And the people who are into attunement don't necessarily into a diversity. People who are into synergy put a lot of attention on diversity. Of course, you don't get synergy without diversity. But there is a waiting, an opening up, a letting go. You know, it's like you, theory, theory you. It's like there's a letting go and letting come kind of dynamic. There's not necessarily that level of sophistication within thinking of Quaker theology, but the idea of waiting on the light is an effort to be open. And that when somebody talks to speak and there's a little sub narrative that you need to be moved to speak. You can't stay sad anymore because something's coming through you, and you need to let it out. And that's God speaking to the whole congregation, so everybody attends to that. It has a resonance with sacred circle work. You know, you're holding the talking stick, and you are channeling the whole for the whole, and everybody's supposed to pay attention to that, and there's no cross conversation. And they actually run their meetings for worship for business. They sit in silence. Here's the situation. Blah blah blah. Everybody sits in silence and people speak up. And that's their form of consensus is hearing what everybody has to say and then talking about how to put the pieces together. Because all of it is a piece of the truth. None of it is the total truth. It's our job to figure out what God's trying to communicate with all these weird things that are coming through. When people say something, sometimes it sounds like their personalities, but you trust that it's something from God. Yeah. So that was one of the substrates underneath my inquiry on how to be collectively intelligent and collectively wise was my experience with the Quakers. Many other things fit into it, but that was a base.

One of the things that marks traditional Quaker meetings, what they call queries, the idea of living an inquiry, living into an inquiry, is very real for Quakers. There's not answers, but there are part of a Quaker meeting for worship for business would be considering, are there queries that should be presented to the congregation to reflect on? And like during the Vietnam War, it's like, is it moral to resist the war, question the war, or to support the battle against communism? And the Quakers were divided on that. And since I was going to Quaker meeting in the late sixties, the war was going on, and whether to intervene but get involved in that stuff. And my early pacifism was totally rooted in the Quaker tradition. And I was an conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, and I got my deferment from going into the army largely because I was a Quaker and the traditions that Quakers have. And in a place like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is where we lived near, and there's lots of Quaker influence in Pennsylvania because it was William Penn who set it up and it was a Quaker colony at first. And so it was relatively easy to get a conscientious objector deferment. And then I went off to college and got a student deferment on top of that so I didn't have to do any community service. And then one of my colleagues in the Quaker youth groups became a draft resistor, and he wrote an article in which he said, and I've remembered this for now forty years or something, killing should be the exception, not the rule. You shouldn't have to ask permission not to kill. So he rejected the idea of asking for the conscientious object or deferment, that the whole system was rotten, ethically rotten. And I began to question my deferments and finally dropped out of college and became a draft resistor and started to organize draft resistance. And that was, of course, rooted in the Quaker, an extreme Quaker pacifism that was looking at what's going on in the larger system. I think that the proportion of systems thinkers within Quakerism was probably larger than most other places, except possibly Jewish community. Jews have a tradition of being socially conscious and critical and getting in trouble for social action and all that. Mhmm. My father was a socialist economist, and we got radical news media, and we'd watch TV at dinner, and he'd be critiquing everything that the news people were saying. So there's whole lots of things to say, but I grew up in progressive movements Mhmm. Particularly focused on peace, anti war, anti nuclear. My earliest memories from an activist perspective were having the seventh generation, future generations looking at me expecting me to do stuff to make it possible for them to exist. And the image is very similar to concentration camp images. The concentration camps were liberated. They had these gaunt faces hanging on the wire fences looking at the soldiers as they walk by. And it's like, that's the images of the future generations and going, What are you going to do about it, guy? You know, it's like, we can't handle it. You know, it's up to you. And that's at the age of 12. And that was largely under the influence of global thermonuclear war, which between the explosions and the radiation and the nuclear winter and all that could easily be terminal. That was the first sense of an existential threat to the entire planet, and that motivated me a lot. And every war potentially could expand into that. So that was a large part of my anti warness. It's not just protecting the people who are being hurt. It's just like this could end up in a really, really, really bad place Yeah. Really quickly. The whole trend of trigger, how to do more hard to detect faster attacks. And, of course, that means if you're gonna be attacked and you can't tell you're being attacked, you have to respond really quickly. And there's these stories. These two Russians, oddly enough, are those stories of these Russians who everything seemed like they were supposed to attack. And one guy, in these two different scenarios, a different guy, just read about this other guy recently. It was in during the Cuban missile crisis. There was a flock of birds that were mistaken by the Russian computers as a attacker from The United States. And he got direct orders from Moscow to fire the missiles before the missiles came to destroy the Russian missiles. And he's just going, something doesn't feel right. And and that one guy saved the world for total destruction. You have to talk about one person making a difference. Mhmm. You know? So that kind of sense of being on edge, particularly during the Reagan administration, was, like, very, very intense. Mhmm. And that has since evolved into, you know, largely climate change as potentially terminal. It really could go haywire really fast at some point. And nanotech and all these there's so many things that could wipe us out. So it's like, what form of politics and governance would be up to the job of addressing that kind of stuff? And that's the inquiry out of which the wise democracy theories come, and it's in no way solidified. I've gotten the more I learn, the more I go, oh, those challenges are so fucking big. It's so so much bigger than what I've designed so far, and there's lots of problems with what I've designed so far. So back to the drawing boards over and over and over again. So the wise democracy stuff is a great picture of where I was three or four years ago, but it's so many things that need to be explored about that now. I wasn't this much into the problem with problem solving back then. I define wisdom now as taking into account what needs to be taken into account for long term broad benefit. And that language, although the intention is clear on what I want, how I want to define wisdom, the language of taking into account has a linear quality to it, you know, an accounting quality. We're going to line up all these things and we've got them all lined up. If we've done a good job, we've done a good job. And I go, Well, no. It doesn't work like that. So I'm into inquiries now about what is a different way that is still coherent to see this. But for most people, what I've already done as of three or four years ago is just so revolutionary. They can't even quite think about it. So that's one of my problems. I keep on expanding my inquiry beyond where I was before and leaving all that. Yeah. That's why I sell it so much. Well, all my sites are just loaded with stuff, but those are footprints in my effort to find something that resonates, that takes into account how to evoke and engage the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole. Mhmm. That is the underlying principle of the whole thing, and that's what I'm now I'm grounded in that rather than any of the specifics of my wise democracy vision. Doesn't stay in this abstract realm.

And that's a very basic level of complexity and systems thinking at their root or about the interconnectedness of everything. There's also a dimension of the oneness of everything, which is also a valid point. But the sense of all the pieces of any living system are interacting with each other. There's this dance, and dance is a nice way to put it, the conversation. The word conversation comes from to turn with versus turn, and con is in this uses is with. So we're turning with to talk back and forth and sort of explore a territory. Nora Bateson, do you know Nora Bateson's work? You know Gregory Bateson's work? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So Nora is one of his daughters, and Nora is rebirthing his work in a new way. And her fundamental principle, which she calls samathecy. I have a whole blog poem about samathecy in my blog. But she is saying that what's going on in the world of living systems and stretching that even beyond living systems is mutual learning in context. Everything is learning from everything else. It's having responses and adjusting accordingly. That's going on at every level of reality all the time. All your cells are doing that, you know, and all the organisms in the environment and all the issues there are, you know, everything is in this stance within particular contexts all the time. I'm really intrigued with where her work potentially fits into larger inquiry for wise democracy, generating participatory wisdom. She sets up physical space with different places where people can talk about looking at a particular issue from different perspectives. I did one of her first experiments in it in San Francisco, which had addiction. And it's like, okay. Here's the center for health. Here's a center for family. Here's a center for media. Here's a center for economics. And there's no expert in each any of these places or bunches you need to read. It's just you go to that place to sit and talk with other people who wanna talk about what addiction looks like from that perspective. Mhmm. And she says that she thinks of that as a context. That each one of these is a particular context where addiction manifests and interacts in ways. And what you're supposed to do is be in that space as long as some meaningful conversation, then move to another one whenever you want. And she calls this a warm data lab. Warm data is data that is intrinsically arises from and contributes to the multidisciplinary or multiperspectible, transperspectible perspective. And before anybody makes a decision on anything in the public realm, they should do a warm data lab to complexify their thinking and don't end up in a box thinking the solution comes from this box because it doesn't. It comes from the whole system. And so the move from pro life to pro choice to, okay, how do we deal with our children, with children that are wanted or unwanted? How do we basically, it's about children. So, okay, looking at the welfare of children growing up, being born from this perspective, that perspective, whatever perspective, before you go into deciding how you're gonna do decisions about any particular child. And there's another colleague of mine who is dealing with questions, how to get down to the really important questions. And it's a similar thing of small groups gathered around a question. And within, there would be 17 different groups, 17 different questions being looked at. And their purpose in a short time, fifteen, twenty minutes, is to think about other questions that would need to be explored in order to answer the question they're examining. And then they bring all those other questions back and there's a whole new world of questions having to do with this issue. And so now you can go and pick another question out of that and go and do the same thing. So it's exploring questions rather than solutions. And what is obviously to me really important to do that, how it fits in other dimensions of conversation and decision making, I'm not sure yet. But I feel like both the warm data labs and this I can't remember the name for his process, but the, those two processes feel like improving the soil before you plant your crops Yeah. For an encounter with complexity, for how you are going to approach complexity. This is creating that sensibility. And, of course, you're all again, from the WISEMOCI perspective, you're always gonna miss something. But this is a way of moving way beyond what would be missed if you just started to do approach. What are we gonna do? Pro choice or pro life, you know? Yeah. And then And it's also building a community. It can be designed that way. Yeah. You can have people temporarily coming in, or you can have people who are actually focused on that. And there's another part of my work has to do with how do you generate collective wisdom in groups of ordinary citizens Mhmm. As citizens through their role as citizens, like citizens vote. Well, citizens can also talk together, deliberate, whatever. So how can you help them when you gathered a bunch of people together often at random in the world of deliberate democracy, picking a random selection of a dozen or 500 ordinary citizens that sort of reflect cross section of their communities. How can they talk together in ways that will generate collective wisdom through that conversation? So that's one inquiry. Another inquiry has to do with the definition of democracy, which is those who are impacted by a decision should play a role in it. Those people are called stakeholders. Mhmm. So how do you have inclusive gatherings of stakeholders? The same thing. How do you help them through their diversity? Their diverse engagements, issues, perspectives cover the ground of whatever the issue is. If you've actually included all the stakeholders and haven't just had six or seven of the top guys, you know, if you actually look for inclusive, multi stakeholder networks that that you're going to bring into conversation and then help them come to something. That's really interesting. If you can help them come to something, they go back out in the world and they just do it, you know, and government could be part of that. But if it's not work, when when the citizens get to their, it's often it's, let's come up with something we pass on to government and say do this. Yeah. But in a multi stakeholder thing, it's a whole different operation. They just go out and do it. So there are very local issues that we have to deal with. But what about these big things, Climate change or the income versus capital

Yeah. I have lots of thoughts, particularly because that's why I started doing the research. It's very useful at local levels. The wise democracy pattern language can be used by one person in their work, but that's not why I designed it. And I can describe possibilities and the rationale for doing things that way. As far as getting it done, that requires other shifts. It's like when I started this work, I realized what the possibilities were and I tried to think about how to use them to help progressive groups be more effective. A lot of it was connected to organizational development, organizational transformational consultants who had all these interesting processes they were using in their consulting work on helping organizations get more effective. So how to do that with progressive groups? I'm interested in what is the intelligence and wisdom of the whole. And here I am trying to support one part of the whole to be more effective. And that got me into thinking the wise democracy way. It's like the larger whole, the progressive worldview, which is in my bones from my upbringing, is still there. I still have progressive responses to things, but I've learned enough that I don't trust those to guide me or to be the center of my work. The word partisan is a really I say there's too many parties and not enough holies. And what does it take when you understand that a real solution, a wise approach to any circumstance, has to engage the whole, which is all the different players, all the different perspectives, all the different information. You have to be inclusive as a fundamental bias. And to start off with your preferred approach and try and organize things to go that way is not what the wise democracy stuff is about. But there's an awful lot of public conversations that are designed with that in mind. And within the participatory democracy world, it is most often where participatory democracy overlaps deliberate docs, these are two major movements within the democratic world. And the participatory democracy is focusing on things saying there's certain qualities of deliberation that result in better decisions, so let's do that. But there's within this handling of stakeholders, the handling of stakeholders currently is largely in terms of their power. And you're looking at the leading stakeholders that are fighting it out. And it's considered very advanced work to bring a half dozen of those thought leaders or power holders together to come up with some compromise that they all agree on. I know that there is potential that's not often been used, but I know some places where it's being used, where you are looking for a much more comprehensive range of stakeholders and having them use their diversity as a resource coming up with something that makes way more sense. It's not a compromise. It's a matter of finding out what is the creative use of all our different perspectives. And I'm sort of realizing this in the moment of the stakeholder collaboration work that I'm familiar with at this point involves getting together the leading power players in the system and having them come to a compromise of some kind. And the potential that I see is of thinking not in terms of resolving the power. It's not like conflict resolution. There's a approach of valuing the diverse perspectives and the diverse players as cocreators or facets of the whole system, that you wanna get the whole system in the room. You wanna have all the people who are co creating what's happening now. You want them to be in the room and in conversations which help them use their diversity and dissonances creatively, recognizing that it's like each of them have pieces of the puzzle, to use that metaphor. And if we don't include all the pieces of the puzzle, we can't get the puzzle put together. And there are approaches to conversation and interaction of various kinds that make it possible to do that even when there's very high negative adversarial energy in the system. And so using those modes with the whole system, if you come up with something that actually makes sense to all the different parts of the system, then they go about doing their work in the area and whatever the issue domain is they're all involved in in a different way, and different things happen as a result of that. And that can be looked at as a form of wise democracy because these are people who are gonna be affected one way or another. Their profits, their family's ability to survive, whatever it is, all these different things that are going on in these various systems. And if they all come to a shared understanding of what makes sense to do to proceed, they go out into their networks and spread the word of why this makes sense. And suddenly, what's happening on the ground is now happening differently than it was before. And this is like three years ago, something like that. I got that insight from two different sources. I wasn't thinking in terms of stakeholders hardly at all, but a friend of mine, Tracy Kunkler, who had taken a wise democracy course, wrote a blog post and she was describing her work with food systems in Appalachia. And so she was working with farmers. She was working with restaurants. She was working with retailers. She was working at farmers markets, working with regulators, working with different consumers groups, etcetera, trying to help them collaborate to make food systems work better currently and be sustainable. And that was her consulting practice. And her blog post was, I am noticing that I'm trying to help these multi sector, multi stakeholder, multi scale because her food systems overlap multiple states, help them work together. And what they come up with is changing what's happening on the ground in the actual world. And this is a form of governance, and it includes and transcends government as we know it. The public sector has included those regulators who are involved in this issue are part of the conversations, But it is different from government and that it offers a vision of a totally different way to organize ourselves, to govern ourselves collectively. And it has an issue domain centric quality to it as opposed to we the people, the citizen voting or whatever. And I've learned partly from that and partly some other stuff that the we the people vision, the sense of the citizens collectively are making the decisions or making the representatives who make decisions, etcetera, the power to the people, that concept of the people as citizen. Citizen is a resident of a place. Citizen like Denizen, you know, you're you live there. That's a city where you live. And I hadn't realized that there's a place based quality to the way our democracies are currently organized because of that legislative district or your city or your state or whatever. And we elect our representatives or we vote on our initiatives for our place. And this other thing is an issue centric. So it's like if you wanna evoke and engage the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole, what is the whole? Well, the whole of the population can be carved up in these two different ways. All the stakeholders are citizens. All the citizens are stakeholders, but it's two different perspectives in terms of how you create the conversations. So now one of my interesting inquiries is how to combine those and to maximize the ability of each approach, the holistic effort to access the whole of a community and access the whole of everything that's going on with an issue and then to integrate through those. And the sense that that's possible is with a little time, I can explain all the ways that's possible to actually do it. But one of the biggest barriers is just recognizing that it's possible and desirable. And from my perspective as an activist or a semi ex activist is that activists focus on their issue within the system and within the system, particularly a majoritarian take all system, you need to be one of two options. If there's three or four or 20 options in play, you can't get a majority. It doesn't work. So there's a pressure, particularly in the winner take all things like ours as opposed to, you know, what's going on in Europe and other parliamentary systems. There's this pressure to pick a side for or against pro choice, pro life. And if we want to be politically effective, we have to kind of enter into a narrative that is much narrower than we think is appropriate. But if you don't have that perspective, you can't be functional in the system. So ultimately, it requires a shift in the system in order to get a holistic outcomes, wise outcomes. And the people who care most about what's going on and are doing things to change it for the better, from whatever perspective they're doing that, are being channeled into this adversarial battle. And how can activists who have the motivations we want be brought to understand that ultimately whatever they want to have happen cannot be dealt with well by the system. It's not designed for that and to put attention on changing the system. And there's a funny way in which one of the stories I tell myself about what Gandhi did is he changed the game. The British had a way of maintaining their empire and Gandhi came along and said, Go ahead and arrest us. Go ahead and kill us. You know, it's like, whatever you do, it's going to undermine your empire. So I want you to be in conversation with me. Authentic conversations appear and pulling power games, you're going to lose. And there's a shift of the whole game so the dominant players could not play their dominant game and still have it work. And I see conversation and particularly wise generate inclusive generation of wisdom. That's changing the game. You're going to include the power holder. You're going to include Exactly. Jeff Bezos. Yeah. You know, we don't exclude anybody. We just want the whole system and then peer interactions. Mhmm. And if activists in all these different issues put 10 or 15% of their attention and resources and work into doing that shift, then things would start to work out. But they're so caught up, I don't have time to deal with this. I've got to fight for my issue. Mhmm. It's like, okay. You know? Yeah. All I can do is explain the possibilities, but right now, there are not resources to actually make some progress on this because people are still stuck in the adversarial system, you know. It definitely wouldn't solve everything, but it would permit the kind of inclusionary

Yeah. And one of the the sicknesses of the parliamentary system is small parties often become kingmakers. You know, you want me in your coalition? Well, you're gonna have to do x. Yeah. And these people who represent 4% of the population are determining what happens with x, you know. There's a whole alternative thing, which is having a rotating body of randomly selected citizens. Like in Greece democracy? Greece Greece was a forerunner of the sorts of things we could have. We could do it in different ways that are better than what they have. But the fact that they had what was called the Oule, you know, ULE, this is 500 people selected at random, were the closest thing they had to a legislature. They actually controlled a lot of the issues that were brought before the assembly, and the majority of people did not attend the assembly. It was not able to They actually limited who could come in. So didn't you have to be a landowner? Yes. You had to be male Mhmm. And your parents had to be residents of Athens Mhmm. And you couldn't be a slave. So those were the main conditions. So, yes, they had a limited people who were citizens, but the idea of all the citizens have a chance to come and vote on this and all the citizens could be randomly selected at any time. Like, 90% of their government offices were staffed by randomly selected people. And it was random selection was their way of doing things. And they thought of elections as elitist. And they also thought random selection was governed by the gods. So this is a way to remove human agency, say, we don't really know enough to be able to do this, so let the gods decide who's going to be. And then you do your random selection. You're in charge of fixing the roads. You've never done anything like that before, but that's now your job for a year. That's all the juries and the legislature and all that was being picked at random from all who were citizens. So there's no reason you couldn't expand that to be just, say, expand the vote. You expand who is part of the pool from whom the random selection is happening. There's lots of interesting history random selection pool. This is what was happening much later in Italy when they were doing random selection. Yeah. So that's at that point, you are now operating on the basis of the whole rather than on the basis of part. Yeah. The parties are parts. And if you had, like, a third of a you know, every three years, you are replacing a third, and they're just slowly circulating out. So you have experience developing within that body. There's lots of discussion of what the pros and cons and dimensions of having a random legislature, but that wasn't even being talked about by hardly anybody five years ago to say nothing ten years ago or thirty years ago. And now there's multiple people writing up their visions and critiques. That's a whole subset. And that radically shifts the potential for domination and manipulation, just having that. That's my vision in my Empowering Public Wisdom book. I have my own version of that vision in there. But random selection is on itself. And what we right now, we randomly select for mini publics, for small groups of people who are going to do a deliberation on a particular issue. And that's probably 90% of what random selection is used for in the deliberative democracy world right now. But it could be as broadly used the principle as voting. Voting is at every level in all sorts of activities now. And you could also, in many, many circumstances, have random selection. Juries is the only standard way we have random selection in The United States right now. But you think about the power of a jury and it's interesting. You're only picking 12 people. And sometimes they're deciding life or death or multimillion dollar outcomes, etcetera. So That's true. You could do that bigger. Yeah. And I guess if you take away the the restrictions on who can make up that pool. That's one of the pieces. Another piece, if you're thinking inclusion and accessibility Mhmm. You know, you need to set it up so that the single mom with two jobs, as well as being a single mom, can attend such a thing. Yeah. You need to be able to include a thing where somebody's illiterate or blind can attend such a thing and participate. So there's a lot of inclusion things, but there's lots of people who are already doing research and experiments and that kind of thing going on and establishing principles in the theory of deliberative democracy. So it is something to attend to, but it's not an obstacle to actually doing it. And whatever you do, you're not going to do it well enough for somebody. So it's just like anything else, having a system where you can the system can actually grow and improve itself over time is another thing. Mhmm. And the issue of self selection right now for these things, you're inviting a whole pile of people and only some of them respond. And from those people, you're gonna do a demographic cross section and you end up with and it's, like, so much better than what we've got. But there's all sorts of criticisms whether it actually represents the people. But I'll just point to that as a field, the whole question of inclusion, which is at large in our whole society in all sorts of different areas, particularly the racial and gender inclusion and equity. That inquiry is a lie within the realm of deliberative democracy for how do you do it well. But we just to point there and say, it is something to take into account. It's not an obstacle, and there's lots of people already working on it, and there are ways to do it even better. I'm an advocate of diversity outside of demographics. That right now, when you say diversity, sadly, everybody thinks of all the ways we oppress each other rather than what would actually contribute to generating collective wisdom. And some of the research on that is cognitive diversity, epistemic diversity, how people go about thinking about a problem in the first place. Yeah. And there's wildly different ways people do that. How do we select for that? Because research shows that's the dominant thing. Mhmm.

That's already being well confronted Mhmm. In terms of the inclusivity dimension Mhmm. More than the selection dimension. I don't know of anything which says a charismatic person has a particular role in how it comes out. Their ability to dominate does. Mhmm. So that's handled by the way the facilitation happens. You can do facilitation that makes it so that all the people can speak, and there's a much more peer balance in how much the kind of things they say and the attention that people pay to it. So that's a facilitation challenge more than a selection challenge. Mhmm. But there are people who would say, oh, I'm ready to stand up and do my civic duty, and other people go, well, I don't know anything. You know, You need to get by that in the selection That's true. Too. And do you do that by requiring them to show up? Well, there's a whole downside to that too. So there's lots of trade offs, but it's a very different world to talk about those trade offs rather than looking at what's going on in the system right now. Where the trade off we have is from one powerful guy who's a professional politician to another powerful guy who's a professional politician. It's like, hello. In my book, I also wrote about the number of millionaires there are in the Senate and the House. Yeah. This is not We the People by any stretch of the imagination and the number of lawyers. I mean, the whole thing is just how do you have participatory generation of wisdom that gets actually applied at a collective level is the challenge, and that's what the pattern language is talking about. 96 different dimensions of that take into account if we wanted to actually create a system. If we wanted to create a system, there's lots of guidance on how to do that. Getting to the point of people going, oh, this is something you could actually pull off. Yeah. But that's a shift that I'm not sure how to make that shift happen. I feel That's gonna be my question. Well, I don't. I have I'm a really good visionary, theorist, curator, networker. But in terms of convincing people, I don't have it. And it's and part of the reason is I've been studying it for so long. It's so clear to me that I don't know how to lay the path to people getting it, even in doing there's lots of controversy when people are closely involved in my work about how to teach this stuff. And if you choose even the right metaphor for what we need to do. Yes. That was gonna be my question. If I knew that answer, you'd know I don't know that answer. That's not even happening at a massive level.

ways to go about it. And the inquiry about what are the highest leverage ways to start introducing this stuff in visible ways that are very potent. One of my models, oddly enough, comes from before the high-tech era. In 1991, Maclean's Magazine, who is the Time Magazine of Canada. This is a time of tremendous upheaval, particularly with Quebec wanting to secede and doing major referendums about that. And the native people, the first peoples saying, This is our land. What are you talking about us as one of the people that needs to be taken into account and helped out and all that? You guys took over this shit. And there'd been lots of different conversations, focus groups and whatever. And MacLean's decided to do an ultimate experiment and they got their polling firm to pick 12 people who represented the diversity of Canada. And this is on a number of demographics. So it's like, how do you get 12 people to represent all these different demographic things? And brought them together and hired Roger Fisher from Harvard's Negotiation Project, who was probably the best known negotiation expert on the planet. He and another guy, William Murry, wrote a book called Getting to Yes, which was a watershed book in the whole field of negotiation. And they hired Roger Fisher and two of his colleagues from the negotiation project, gave him two and a half days, long weekend to come up with a vision for Canada from these people. And that itself was really interesting. How they covered it was totally revolutionary and has never come close to since, which is they had their reporters and the Canadian TV people totally film everything that went on. And then, they did 40 pages of coverage in this July issue in 1991. I had that whole issue on my website. I had interviews with the major players that I hired an investigative reporter that I knew to go and do the interviews of the editors and Fisher. And those things are up on the page about Maclean's. And the whole one hour public service documentary that was done on it by CTV is also up there. The whole wall material is there, a whole pile of analysis, a whole pile of interviews. And what I concluded from my studies of it is it allowed people who are viewing or reading their material to vicariously experience what it's like to go through such a process. And part of what's interesting from a media perspective is it had lots of conflict. It's like the whole It's entertaining. Yeah. It was it was ready to come apart. By Saturday night, nobody was listening to anybody. It was a mess. And And so there's a very specific And there's a chapter, I think it's chapter 12 in Doubt Democracy, which is my effort to digest all the stuff that McQueen's did and give a story of what happened. But in their coverage, one of the first things they did was a half page bio of each one of the participants. So as a person's reading it Like a character list account. Yes. Exactly. And they're reading about who they like and who they don't like. So they're starting out, and then they get a blah, blah, blah, account. The play unfolds, and it's written like a play, you know. So and so said this on Friday night. And you see the photographs of people's body language as the thing's unfolding. And as it's getting worse and worse, You know, the arms crossed and the leaning back and the people with their heads in their hands. And the breakthrough, interestingly, although it was well prepared for by the facilitation, the facilitation had gotten clear on what the conflicts were and people could not comprehend how they're going to get over the conflicts. And then this one Canadian woman over dinner on Saturday night listens really well to this Quebec woman who is at her wit's end. You guys will never get it. And listens to her so well, she says, the Quebec woman says, If this is possible, anything's possible. And Roger Fisher is off in the background. He realizes they're really a hot point here and he is going over the chart pads from all the conversations trying to figure out if there was an agreement, what would some of its elements be? So he's kind of doing the head work at the same time that these women are doing the heart work at dinner time. And the next morning, Fisher has his sheet of let's look at this and see what we can agree on and the Quebec woman says, Just a minute. I want to hear from the indigenous woman. You, what's it like for you? And she just talks and talks and talks and there's this emotional shift in the whole world. Suddenly, everybody's kind of on board with, Let's see how we can do this. And they take the work that Fisher had done and start working. Or you see them sitting around the pool, everybody with sheets of paper in their hand working over these things and then they do some direct negotiations for specific parts of it. And they come up with this incredible it's like four pages of parchment colored paper. And they all sign it. And you know, the John Hancock's at the bottom of their vision for Canada. And the last pictures are then before they all leave of them hugging each other. That's amazing. And talking about how much they need to learn from each other and all this sort of thing. And so this has brought the population of Canada through this process. Somebody took this out of the recycling pile and gave me this magazine. I'm going, What happened? I mean, how could this not have transformed Canada? And that's when I hired the investigative reporter to go interview these people and see what happened and ask them what happened. And they didn't know they had done a democratic innovation. Really? They had a fancy focus group. So what happened was there was conversation all over Canada about this and lots of talk shows bringing people on to say, What do you think about this? And they started to drag increasingly important public officials in about what they thought of it. And it got to a point where the you know, it's like, What are you going to do about this, Prime Minister? And the Prime Minister's going, Woah, this is getting out of hand. There's a funny sense of putting oil on the waters of all this interest. And the interest sort of died down over months. And from my perspective as a democracy theoretician, it was like, what McQueens didn't do was do it again next year. You don't have an election once. You have a process of elections and that creates a feedback dynamic. And this is a very powerful feedback thing that they had created. And to do it only once, it's just really stupid. So if they'd done it again, part of the issue would be, what did the politicians do with what we did last time? How are we going to handle that? It's a sense of having a we the people voice generated and reflected. The whole society is thinking about this. This is a tool for the whole society to think about it. That magnifies. There's tons of dialogues, but they happen and some people know that they happen. Sometimes the outcomes are reported, but there's never an immersion, which is what was happening there. And so I sort of hold that up and I go, what's the twenty first century version of that? That's a method that can be shared. Yes. We don't necessarily have the dominant media structures that we did then. You know, what is the social media dimension? We know lots more about different kinds of conversation that can be done at all different scales.

What's the follow-up on their big vision that they came came up with? I don't know that. They didn't report on it. Six months later, they did a report on the individual participants, many of whom informed friendships and, you know, talking to each other regularly. But in terms of the unfolding of that, they were thinking how remarkable it was that they actually came up with something, whereas all these other dialogues and focus groups and stuff hadn't been able to come up with something. Yeah. But they didn't go again. If you think of it as a focus group, you're You're not trying to come up with something. That's fine. Yeah.

And when you say, is it enough? The question is, enough for what? Enough is according to some standard. Enough to save us from climate change. Enough to reorder our economies, redesign this, that. And it's like, you know, you had to engage inclusive stakeholder networks. I mean, what you were doing was an interesting exercise in visualization and, you know, in potential transformational perspectives. But who do you need to do that shift? Yeah. Who needs to shift in that way, either numbers or roles or they're embedded in some movement that once it's clear what direction we're going, that movement rolls with that. I mean, there's different ways to scale it, different logics to scaling. I'm not somebody who can land on the idea that what happens in the room shifts everything outside the room. There are people who operate on that basis. You know, that there's a field effect. And if you create the right kind of shift among certain people in the room that the field shifts all by itself. It's like a psychic, a transpersonal, whatever phenomenon. And I believe that that is a thing that can go on. I don't think we know enough about it. I think the people who are in working in the field, so to speak, largely assert it with very limited, what we would call evidence. And I can't be satisfied with that. I don't deny its potential role. And I have working the field is one of the patterns in the pattern language, but it's one of 96 patterns. And I feel there's an awful lot of other things that need to be attended to as part of that Yeah. Part of the game. But I'd say if you wanted to replicate in Canada what was done by Maclean's but do it with the process that you were working on and you didn't have Maclean's to work with, all you had was modern connectivity and social media and the ability to make and spread videos and blah, blah, blah. You have the modern media scene. How would you do it? Understanding what it was that Maclean's did that was powerful, you know, how would you reach tens of millions of people in ways that were totally compelling?

Yeah. Who's trying to do the same thing. Now. Yeah. Yeah. And they were a dominant media force, you know, And I guess sort of the equivalent of the non centralized media is going viral. Mhmm. That that spreads to large numbers of people. Look at QAnon. There's studies of QAnon as a game, which I find fascinating. Participatory game. And it's like somebody took a bunch of memes and made them into an actual real world game, which is highly toxic, but it went viral. Yep. And it's having real world consequences. And I go, okay. So how do you make that positive social beneficial? I don't know. But that's of comparable magnitude at the very least. As a model, whoever is behind that, what they did is like MacLean's in terms of its whole system impact, a different narrative and having people think radically differently about the structure of the world and their role in it. And, of course, our conditions in our society are made. We have manufactured a rich environment for that particular invasive plant to take off.

And eventually The epidemic has helped us move towards that. Yeah. It's eerily

being in a large complex system too. It's like different cells can't survive outside your body. And the question is, is the larger entity that we're part of have the capacity to keep surviving so we can keep surviving in it? And that's their serious question at the moment. It has grown organically into something that is not able to stay alive, I. E. Not sustainable. And that's a whole another dimension of the work on all sorts of things. But from a systems perspective, that's what's going on. The idea of human civilization going extinct as being a real possibility is like, if you look at it as an organism, it's like, hello. Overwhelming 99.999% of species in the history of the planet have gone extinct. So it's not unusual for an organism to not be able to survive in its environment, particularly when its environment is changing. Then we have a way of changing our environment and not being set up to be able to respond appropriately, I. E. In ways that fit what's actually going on. And that's what the Wise Democracy project was an effort to figure out how to make a system that could respond appropriately to what's going on with a view towards the future also and the flexibility to continually dance with the past, present, and future so that there's a fit. The survival of the fittest is totally inadequate and makes it seem like it's intrinsically competitive. Survival of the fit is much more accurate. You don't have to be dominant. You just have to fit within the context. Being able to maintain that over time is at a small scale what intelligence is about. But once you get into large, complex living systems, intelligence is inadequate by itself to do the work that's needed. And that's why the intelligence that can embrace more of what's really going on and more of the future and more of the past, etcetera, That's what I'm calling wisdom.

I think I would just reiterate the vision of evoking and engaging the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole with all the different definitions of whole you can come up with, which I like to explore. Study of wholeness is one of my fundamental research projects. That weird spiral thing on the back wall is one of my models of wholeness, which is also on the Co Intelligence Institute site. It's a whole section of Co Intelligence Institute site on wholeness. But having that motivation and being alert to what it means to live in relationship to the whole, and trying to ask what kind of systems would serve that. And the wisdom is the guidance and the resources and energies and attention and caring, all that. And how do you evoke that from all aspects and dimensions of a system or issue? If people find that attractive, that statement attractive, that vision attractive, then there's lots of homework that has been done about how one might go about doing that and what it means to do that in my work, and it's constantly evolving. So if people wanted to engage in that, I'd be happy to hear from them. Ciiigc dot org. C I I is the Co Intelligence Institute. I g c, instituteforglobalcommunications.org. And you can also subscribe to either my newsletter or the Wise Democracy newsletter, which are subscription spaces on the sites. And I'm still struggling to do adequate communication to all those. If somebody's really interested, you know, like you were getting in touch with me for direct communication, express interest in the Wise Democracy work in the subject line, I will know that I need to open that email rather than leaving it with all the other unopened emails sliding into the past. Yeah. Thanks so much, Tom. Yeah. Wonderful. You're very welcome. It's It's fun. As always. Mhmm. Okay. Bye bye. We'll take care. Bye.

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