"a shift from group-led decision-making to something that is more citizen-led"
A long read by David Jubb about a transition from group-led to citizen-led decision-making
We’re in the playground. My five and seven year old have reached the summit of the climbing frame. Two children are walking towards them. My kids break from their celebratory chatter and silently stare at the approaching strangers. The taller of the two children rests her hand on the lowest rung and stares up, she seems to be scanning my kids, searching for a signal, contemplating their souls. There is a suspended moment of spaghetti-western stillness as she weighs up her options: climb and take the frame, create an alliance, or just head for the swings. My two stare back silently.
I find the whole thing agonising and my forced cheery voice cuts the tension. “OK, just two minutes before we head off now!” My kids seem momentarily defeated while I just feel relieved. Is it me or have they become more territorial since they started attending primary school? As soon as they set foot in the place they were divided into Apple Blossom, Busy Bees or some other saccharine sounding sept. This enforced gang-culture must nurture territorial thinking, right?
They concede the frame, undermined by their grown up who has caved-in to the intense stare of a tall child. The three of us head for the exit and I feel bad for letting our team down. Someone kicks a football which lands at the gate and the adult in me tries to rescue a bit of humanity from this miniature Wild West. “Who’s that?” I ask my seven year old. She looks over. “I don’t know her” comes the flat reply “she’s in Teddy Bear’s Picnic”. I launch into a monologue about making friends with children in different classes but then my five year old attempts to kick the ball back, shanks it and it strikes a toddler who wobbles and collapses. “I’m sorry!” I mouth at the child’s shattered grown-up and we close the gate behind us.
You know that in their primary school there is a “class of the week” competition. This accolade comes with a reward for the winning clan, I mean class. Why is it that the school is so determined to divide them into different groups and then reward one for doing better than the others? I guess education prepares children for life, and if nothing else, life is one big tribal adventure. We just can’t get enough of being in gangs. We belong to families, join clubs, follow religions, support teams and work for organisations. Our lives are filled with gatherings, crowding around, joining forces, banding together and finding strength in numbers. And when our adventure comes to an end, what happens? People congregate at our funeral to mark our passing. Or at least we hope they do.
We have been socialising and organising in groups throughout human history. Our desire to experience life through a kaleidoscope of groups is reflected back at us. Our languages speak to the culture, identity and heritage of both past and present groups. Our maps are divided into nations, regions and districts, which have been shaped by the political, economic and social histories of different groups. The way we decide stuff in these territories is led by groups, often called political parties, each with its own structure and ideology. The way we trade stuff has been divided into economic sectors and inside these are affiliations and unions which gather us into yet more groups sharing common needs or interests. When cyberspace was created a whole new way of being became possible and what did we do with it? We filled it with online communities and 21st century digital versions of ourselves which can create groups, follow each other, and display allegiances by clicks and likes. We just can’t get enough of groups!
By belonging to different groups in different parts of our lives we can associate ourselves with different ideas and different values. Being part of a group can enable us to learn new thought or behaviour patterns or help us to express ourselves. I will do anything for my family. I work hard for an organisation that I believe in. I can’t stop laughing about being a Tottenham Hotspur fan. They give us purpose and direction and help us to navigate our day-to-day lives. They become part of our identity which means that associating ourselves with new groups can show others how we are growing or changing. Because we actively make assessments of one another based on the kinds of groups we are or are not a part of.
I need to give my kids’ primary school a break! They are just doing their bit to induct children into a life lived in groups. We all need to learn about this stuff because it is how things work. All the time. Everywhere and for everyone. Without groups, we couldn’t function, they are like humanity’s operating system.
Having said this, I think it would also be good for my kids to learn that there is one major flaw in this operating system. Something that is arguably bad for all of us. A key problem with our use of groups is the particular way that we use them to lead important decisions. We could call this group-led decision-making. This way of making important decisions, in my view, needs to be completely reimagined.
In the UK, group-led decision-making is most clearly illustrated in our democratic system. Groups or ‘parties’ vie with each other to lead and govern. The winning group then gets to make important decisions including the implementation of new laws and regulations. The governing group has an extremely powerful role. This perhaps contributes to a widely held view amongst the public that government decision-makers are dominated by an advantaged elite. Evidence about the composition of the UK’s political establishment in recent decades tends to bear this out:
every Prime Minister since 1937 who has attended university, except one, has been educated at a single institution, Oxford University
at any one time between a third and two-thirds of cabinet ministers have been privately educated compared with around 7% of the population
almost three-quarters of civil servants come from affluent backgrounds and the composition of the service has barely changed since 1967
Powerful decision-making groups which are dominated by advantaged people are not limited to the world of politics. A case about privilege could also be made about the governance of large organisations or companies. Wherever power exists, it attracts advantaged people who tend to share power with people like themselves. It is how things work. There are lots of great people and organisations that swim against this tide but the waves just keep on coming.
The problems of group-led decision-making are not only limited to the largely narrow demographic of people who are part of these powerful decision-making groups. What is also corrosive is the way that the decision-making groups tend to behave. Because when a decision-making group has a powerful role, which places the group in a superior position to others, then the supremacy of the group can begin to matter more to its members than almost anything else.
In the UK’s political ecology this manifests itself in a variety of ways. If the main priority for a group is to gain and retain power, it can mean that the group's decisions become more motivated by power than by the consequences of its decisions for other people. Another repercussion of the power struggle between groups is that each becomes obsessed with proving the other is wrong. This emphasis on ‘we are right and they are wrong’ can even be at the expense of trying to positively set out your own group’s ideas and values. It shifts the focus away from the substance of issues and encourages party political behaviour.
In our current political landscape these behaviour patterns can lead to the use of corrosive tactics such as culture wars, used to set different groups of people against each other, tapping into entrenched views to encourage conflict. The environment on social media is ideal for hosting this kind of conflict and it has quickly become dominant. Some politicians take this art of distraction one step further by seeking to blur what is reality and what is fiction. Again, the impact is to occupy people with conflict, this time with arguments about what is real and what is not.
These approaches have one thing in common. They result in the decision-making group needing to focus less and less on actually addressing complex issues while the people that give them a mandate are engaged in rising levels of conflict and distraction. The outcome is to polarise people and to entrench some people’s allegiances. It is a vicious circle because it also encourages the decision-making group to further prioritise tactics to secure power rather than to address the issues that people actually face.
Another depressing consequence is that decision-making groups can begin to disregard the views or experiences of people who do make a direct contribution to their group's efforts to gain or retain power. This means that powerless people who are disconnected from the decision-making process can begin to be ignored even more than were previously. Conversely, decision-making groups are likely to give undue influence to anyone who increases their chances of winning power. This is why party funders, lobbyists and media management have such a powerful influence on decision-making groups in the UK’s democratic system.
I accept this is a pretty bleak perspective on group-led political decision-making and yes, there are plenty of positive stories to tell too. But I think this is a realistic analysis of the overall ramifications of the approach. I think if we reflect on this way of using group-led decision-making, it is possible to see how it has emerged out of a colonial mindset. Because it is characterised by one group making decisions in its own interests often to the cost and detriment of others not in the decision-making group. Perhaps it is little wonder that group-led decision-making in UK politics has left millions and millions of people feeling powerless, without agency or voice and that trust in politicians is currently at an all time low.
Group-led decision-making is also the dominant modus-operandi for companies and institutions. While there is no mass public election to select a governing group, the group-led aspect of decision-making is similar. A governing body and executive sits at the top of an organisation, retains power and leads decision-making for the organisation. It often acts in the interests of the group and is prone to protecting its own position. It is an incumbent power structure and creates its own codes of dialogue which can seem impenetrable to the outsider or those who want to challenge the organisation and its approach.
I wrote a piece in 2022 about my sense of the broken state of governance in the UK's cultural sector. I had no idea that the piece would be so widely shared and that so many people would get in touch to say how it struck a chord with them. This seems to suggest that we know about this stuff but that we are struggling to make the space to do much about it; again with some great exceptions.
In my view, there are three fundamental flaws in our current approach to group-led decision-making both in political and corporate governance.
Firstly, decision-making groups tend to be made up of similar types of people which reduces the opportunity for a much wider and more diverse range of people to shape decisions.
Secondly, over time, the people within decision-making groups will develop relationships with each other and these relationships can often mean that decisions are not appropriately challenged, tested or iterated.
Thirdly, people in decision-making groups develop an allegiance to the actual group (or even a reliance on the group for income, status and reputation) and this reduces people’s appetite to challenge the group or ‘rock the boat’.
These are all obvious problems with group-led decision-making. Yet our political and corporate governance systems choose group-led decision-making as their basic approach to shaping the future.
Now we have reached a point where it is not too wild to say that humanity’s future (certainly in its current form) is in doubt, with existential threats such as climate change, AI and conflict on the rise, I think we need, more than ever, to reimagine group-led decision-making. It is not serving us well as a species. Like others, I think need to make a shift from group-led decision-making to something that is more citizen-led. A citizen-led decision-making process can still bring a group of people to work together but the status and value of the individual citizen remains intact throughout the process. In other words, people's humanity is not subjugated by the power of the group and the group’s interests. I will explain what I mean.
If we take a look at citizen-led decision-making in more detail, there are two essential elements which make it different from, and in my view, significantly better than group-led decision-making.
Democratic lotteries
The first is that democratic lotteries are used to select the people in a citizen-led decision-making process. We select juries by lottery to make decisions about people's innocence or guilt. But beyond the jury system, the sophistication of modern democratic lotteries is improving all the time. It is now possible to select a descriptively representative group of citizens to form a decision-making group. Typically, a group of citizens will come together for a limited period of time to focus on a specific issue, until, like with jury service, people return to their everyday lives. The way that democratic lotteries are conducted and the care with which citizens are recruited and supported means that a citizen-led decision-making group has a series of significant advantages.
Citizens, in this context, means people who live, work or stay in a place. In other words, everyone can be selected for a citizen-led decision-making group. This means that the resulting group is diverse and includes people from all walks of life with very different life experiences. This diversity strengthens the group’s ability to make more informed and balanced decisions.
Citizens are paid for their time and their other costs of participation (such as transport, caring costs, access etc.) are fully met for the duration of the decision-making process. This financial structure is important to enable fair access to the process. But it also means that as decision-makers, citizens do not have any long-term financial incentive, provided by the process, which might cause them to hold an allegiance or lean towards a particular decision. In our political system, members of the decision-making group have ongoing payments and benefits which can ensure allegiances to a specific group. This can also be the case in corporate governance and executive decision-making in companies. Even in the charitable sector, where there is no payment for members of a board, personal bonds and ongoing professional relationships can have a similar impact. In a citizen-led decision-making process these undue influences on the people who lead the decisions are not inbuilt.
Similarly, citizens are very unlikely to become the target for lobbyists or people who want to influence the decision-making process in a particular way. In a group-led process, whether in parliament or in the boardroom, the people who have the power to make decisions become a target for other bodies or organisations which may seek to influence their decisions. This opportunity to influence the process, of course, favours people and organisations with existing power and resource, simply because they can afford to practise this kind of expensive process of persuasion. In a citizen-led process, like the jury process, it is much harder to buy a decision.
In a citizen-led decision-making process, people are invited to take part because of their identity as citizens: as people who live, work or stay in a place. In other words, they are not taking part in the process as part of their ongoing professional role. In group-led decision-making, people participate as an integral aspect of their ongoing work. This creates a risk that they seek shorter-term solutions which can be implemented, for example, during the term of a governing group. This is particularly the case in politics in the context of election cycles. But it also relates to the likely term of people's employment and the barriers and complexity that they are prepared to take on in their current roles. Many of the most serious issues we face require long-term solutions and for decision-makers to embrace complex ecologies and complex solutions. I think when citizens are faced with making a decision together, they do not have the same concerns about how a decision will directly and immediately affect their role or their career. Anecdotal evidence suggests that citizens are more likely to think about the future for other citizens, that they feel they are representing through the process, or even their own families. Given that a citizen-led decision-making group is so much more diverse and includes so many different types of people, I think this is a much more productive mindset for making decisions which have an impact on other people and the future for all of us.
People are often at their very best, their most truly inspiring, when they step away from their own day-to-day to support something that is linked to a greater good. Isn’t this one of the reasons why we often see the best of people in a crisis? There were some pretty amazing stories about the things people stepped up and achieved during the worst days of the pandemic to support each other and to support communities. Compare this with the behaviour and pattern of decision-making in government, that we are currently learning more about through the public enquiry, and it provides a very stark contrast indeed. I think the latter is an example of how our group-led and privileged decision-making processes can bring out the very worst in people. Whereas when citizens are asked to represent and support each other, a very different outcome can be achieved because a very different set of values and motivations is at play.
Deliberation not debate
The second element of citizen-led decision-making that is different from most group-led decision-making is that it uses a deliberative process to achieve its outcomes. This is an alternative to the more conventional and adversarial approach of debating decisions . A deliberative approach also has a series of significant advantages.
Deliberation means weighing up an issue as a whole. In order to do this, you have to consider evidence and life experience from all sides of the issue. This requires a listening and learning approach. This is not to say that listening or evidence is not important in a conventional debating model, debates are usually argued out between different positions on a subject using evidence. But in deliberation you do not start from a stated position, instead you are encouraged to review multiple positions and experiences in order to create a full picture that you can then assess and evaluate. I would argue that this provides any individual who is part of the process with more space to reflect. Reflection is an essential aspect of making better decisions. Of course the individual in a deliberative process will have both biases and opinions from the beginning but by not publicly stating these, I think deliberation gives people more space and opportunity to reflect and even change their mind through the decision-making process.
Deliberation does not encourage conflict in the same way as debate. The roots of the word debate are multiple, including the “Old French debatre (“to fight, contend, debate, also literally to beat down”)” and from the Latin “battuere (“to beat, to fence”)”. By adopting different positions at the start of a discussion, debating is designed for one position to win out over others. Of course it is entirely plausible for a debate to be carried out with courtesy but it is undeniable that the roots and design of the debating process are linked to winning and losing which itself links back to power. This approach clearly suits some people more than others. You could argue that this is why debating is the chosen method of powerful elites in political and corporate governance. If we accept that decision-making is better when a wider range of people are involved in the process, then we need to select a decision-making process that is more inclusive, less conflict-based and which enables everyone to play their part.
A key part of the deliberative process is to give space to hear everyone’s voice. In my experience, a deliberative process tends to encourage much greater respect and empathy for the people you disagree with. In order to make a decision in a deliberative process, everyone needs to work together to build a consensus. This requires everyone to explore each others' ideas and seek to understand each others' motivations. I would argue, this empathetic approach is far more likely to enable us to think of something new because by seeing things from each others' perspective, we are more likely to open up undiscovered ground. You rarely innovate by rehearsing the same arguments again and again. What enables people to invent something new is when they consider mixing things or ideas which have not been brought together before. Deliberation literally encourages people to do this. When it comes to debate, based on one argument winning over the other, I think innovation is less likely and it is more typical for the losing side to harbour resentments and to continue to try and prove the winning side wrong.
In a group-led decision-making process it is very typical for the group to have stated views or positions on a whole series of issues. This can happen in both political and corporate governance with the decision-making group adopting historic and well argued positions. In a more day-to-day sense, when reviewing decisions, this approach can lead to groupthink. One of the damaging aspects of group-led decision-making is that people can simply adopt the position and interests of the group that they are aligned with at the expense of being open to different ways of doing things. A citizen-led deliberative process does not start from these same rooted positions for the group as a whole. Instead the group is made up of very different people with diverse starting points on the issue at hand. I think this means that the group has greater potential to open up space to see or view things differently.
Modern deliberative processes begin by upskilling everyone in a group. This can include learning about active listening, critical thinking or detecting bias. Plain speaking is encouraged and there are mechanisms to enable people to interrogate experience, arguments or ideas that are not explained clearly enough. In a good deliberative process there is also accommodation made for people who think in different ways. This means that information and evidence may be shared visually or physically or even through direct experiences, rather than just in verbal or written form. How many conventional group-led decision-making processes can claim to involve this level of thoughtful engagement? Group-led processes are far more likely to place the responsibility for understanding what is happening or being said at any one time on the individual in the group. I actually think a lot of governance is carried out with some people not actually understanding what is being said or even what is being decided. But people go along with the group decision, preferring not to reveal that they do not fully understand everything that is being discussed or decided.
Good examples of citizen-led decision-making include the modern citizens’ assembly or citizens’ jury. These approaches hold democratic lotteries to bring together descriptively representative groups of people to go through a deliberation process, to learn from each other and to reflect in order to make recommendations or decisions on complex issues. But these assembly or jury models are only one way to use democratic lotteries and deliberation. If citizen-led decision-making is to provide a better approach than our current group-led models, then we are going to need to normalise the idea, in communities, in organisations and in politics. This is going to require lots more experimentation and innovation in using democratic lotteries and deliberation to help shape new decision-making processes.
Having said all this, it is also important to acknowledge that citizen-led decision-making is not going to be the right approach in all circumstances. I am not proposing it as a silver bullet or panacea. I am just pointing out some of the significant advantages of the approach and why it is worthy of more focus and attention. With such catastrophic failures in our current decision-making processes, I think it is important to experiment with new ways of making decisions. Neither am I suggesting a citizen-led approach is easy. For hundreds if not thousands of years we have become hard wired to group-led decision-making. Since Saad and I started Citizens In Power together, about six months ago, we have reflected on our own learning experience with this stuff. And on the conversations we have had with lots of other people about this stuff. One thought we keep coming back to is that it feels like our human brains need rewiring to get our head around the potential of citizen-led decision-making. It is like we have to retrain ourselves to reimagine alternative power structures.
Saad and I have launched a callout for this network as a way of bringing people together who are either already doing citizen-led decision-making or who have exciting plans to test out new approaches. We think that by working together as a network we could support each other with experiments in citizen-led decision-making and perhaps lead a wider shift towards it. If you are interested please do get in touch. The deadline date for the callout has now passed and we hope launch the network in April 2024. Thanks for reading.
