Jon Alexander is the author of CITIZENS: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us — a book that seeks to reframe the moment in time we’re living in as one of huge opportunity, not just crisis and collapse, and in doing so, opens up a world of possibility for organisations and leaders across sectors and across the world.

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These are live-blogged notes from a session at NEXT24 in Hamburg. As such, they are prone to error, inaccuracy and lamentable crimes against grammar and syntax. Posts will be improved in the coming days and this note updated.

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Why did Taiwan have one of the best Covid responses in the world? Because they’d already built a model of participatory democracy. And they used it — avoiding the worst of lockdowns, and actually making pink cool for a while.

We’ve trapped ourselves in a narrative of the consumer. But the one that’s rising to replace it is worrying: it’s the return of the subject story. We should keep our heads down, do what we’re told, and be glad for what we’ve got.

Telling the citizen story

We can’t solve our problems within the consumer narrative. Likewise, we can’t work with nature when we’re told we are separate from it. We can’t solve inequality when success means rising above others. We’re trapped in mutual distrust between people and institutions. As each side withdraws more, the other gets angrier, and further withdraws. That’s the cycle we need to break.

And to achieve that we need a citizen story. It is the idea that our fundamental need is to participate and create. And it is happening. In Ireland, they now have citizens assemblies are part of their political process. During their abortion referendum, the ordinary people who were part of the assembly were able to go on TV and counter the usual misinformation suspects. In Nigeria, they crowdsourced their startup infrastructure. Trust the people to participate, and trust in democracy goes through the roof.

If institutions start trusting people, people will start trusting institutions again.

Feeding the narrative shift

This emergent system needs help. The Berkana Institute’s Two Loops explains exactly the support we can give: the narrative shift needs naming, it needs networks to support it, and it needs nourishing with communities of practice. But we have to do this.

The most prominent example of the collapse of the consumer narrative into the subject one was the January 6th attempted coup in the US. Movements like QAnon wear the clothes of participation, but only to destroy the existing system. To stop them, we need to start wearing those clothes genuinely.

Far too many organisations are trapped in speaking to people as consumers. It’s what people are taught.

What do we need to make this work?

• Participation based on representative samples of people, not just who turns up.
• People see thousands of marketing messages a day. Participatory spaces have to be built in a way that asks for input, not feedback. They’re not market research panels, but genuinely participatory examples.