Stephen Boucher about Dreamocracy and how collective creativity solves complex problems in society

Welcome to another episode of Democracy Innovators

podcast. Our guest today is

Stephen Boucher. Welcome, Stephen.

Hi Alex, nice to meet you.

Thank you for your time.

So from your LinkedIn description, I see

that you help governments and

civil servants become more creative thanks to

collective intelligence. As a first

question, I would like to ask you:

what is collective intelligence for you and

how can it be

helpful? Sure, well, it's a pleasure. This

is one of my

favorite topics. So collective intelligence is the

ability that groups have, under the right

conditions, to develop better solutions and better

decisions than individual members of

the group would separately.

So basically, it's a little bit like

one plus one can be more than

two, again under the right conditions.

How is this different

compared to creative intelligence? Because I

saw that sometimes

I see it can be creative intelligence

or collective intelligence - is it the same?

Not necessarily, because creative intelligence

can be at the individual level.

Creativity is the ability to

develop solutions or decisions that are not

only adequate and useful, but also original in

a given context. Actually, at Democracy,

what we focus on - and this is

our motto -

is collective creativity for the

common good.

By this we mean the

ability that groups can have, if we

help them and they're

in the right conditions, to develop

solutions that are not only adequate and

useful, but also original.

About Democracy, can you

maybe say something about how

it is? What is it? Sure.

Democracy is a consultancy, so we

help people when we get contracts with

them to be

more collectively creative and for the common

good. That means to develop solutions to

complex collective problems. So we work a

lot with public authorities, we work with

NGOs, we work with interest groups, sometimes

political parties or politicians. Our

harvest is to both understand politics and

collective decision-making, as well as bring

them methods to do this better - to

be smarter together, to be more creative

together.

Do you have some

use cases or some

episodes related to this collective intelligence

that was applied? Sure, yes, we

have tons. One example of a

project that

I liked that we did recently was

to work with the Ministry for Social

Housing of the

Wallonia region of Belgium. The

ministry invited us to convene a group

of about sixty stakeholders who work on

social

housing and to get them to think

over a period of a month with

three days over that period of in-person

meetings to think through the context,

the issues, and to develop original policy

solutions - new methods, new

policies that the ministry could implement.

They came up with

about twenty new approaches that the participants

were very proud of because they said,

"We're not used to meeting together

across different disciplines and types of organizations."

And they're not used to having

specific approaches that boost their imagination and help

them think outside, as we said, the

box. That's a case that

we have many other ones of.

I can think of one of my

first endeavors in this sector -

and this is more participatory democracy, as

we call it. In 2007,

I initiated and organized the

first EU Citizens' Assembly. So

this was 350 citizens

drawn by lot, so representative of the

diversity of Europe's

population, and working together for two and

a half days. At the time, we

talked about pensions and climate

issues in Europe.

Democracy is

a sort of network of people, this

consultancy. I was

wondering which kind of skills

are important to have to do this?

Well, I think what makes

our team unique is that the people

who work with us

have both a very good understanding of

how politics work and how decisions are

made - the institutional system, but

also political dynamics, political communication, the

realities of working in public affairs and

the

political context. We combine this with

skills related to the methods

of creativity, convening, facilitating, thinking in groups,

and designing processes and events that allow

people to think better together.

You have lots of facilitators who

are very good at doing that -

for instance, to facilitate a board

meeting of a company. On the

other hand, you have lots of people

who are very good at understanding

political issues and who are public affairs

advisors or whatever. We have both hats

and try to be good at both.

I saw that your background is,

I would say, hybrid in some

way. Would you like to say

something about that?

Sure. Well, indeed, the activities that

I described reflect what I did before,

because I worked for about twenty-

five years in politics in the broad

sense. I was a

public affairs and lobbying consultant in London

and Brussels.

I was an advisor in

the Belgian government. I was co-head

of a think tank, and I did

some local community organizing. I

worked for foundations in various ways. I've

always worked on public issues. And

my last position in

that capacity was at the

European Climate Foundation, a large foundation fighting

climate change.

That's when I really thought, "Well,

I need to be better equipped to

understand how we can help groups shift

the conversation,

work together more efficiently, and be more

creative - come up with new solutions and

get people behind them, get

enthusiasm." So for the past

ten years, I've written a couple of

books on political creativity and

collective intelligence and democracy -

that sort of thing - and that's what I

do now.

I was thinking

about your academic background that I see as

sort of hybrid in some

way.

So how did you approach

this? And when did you

realize that in

the

political field, there was

a necessity to bring

some creativity or more?

I'd be curious to

know where you think my

academic background is hybrid. For me, it's

quite classic - I studied political science at

Sciences Po in Paris, and then

ten years later I did another

master's degree in public administration at the

Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

So I've always

been in that field. What's more unusual

is taking a turn towards creativity

and innovation in politics.

So

sorry, what was the second part of

your question? I lost track.

I was thinking when you

first thought that creativity was

missing in the political field.

It was really when I was in

this job at the European Climate Foundation.

Actually, it was

a little bit before - it was when

I was at the Kennedy School of

Government at Harvard, where I was already interested

in the political fight against climate

change.

I was struck by how in

the curriculum of the Kennedy School

there was nothing about...

Well, what happened exactly was

at the school we were allowed to

take classes in other schools on the

Harvard campus and around MIT, etc. So

it was great - an amazing

opportunity to learn things. So I

looked at the courses

offered at the business school, for instance,

and at MIT, and there I saw

that you have things like

"Design Thinking for Innovation" and "Making Your

Team More Innovative" and "Driving

Success with Creative Thinking" - whatever the

titles were, but that sort of thing.

I was struck by how we didn't have that

at the school of public affairs and

government. And I got curious

and I went to the library of

Harvard, which is one of the largest

in the world, and I typed

the words "creativity" and "business,"

and there were hundreds, thousands of

books about making your business

successful with creativity techniques and

developing innovative products, etc.

And I typed "creativity" and "politics," and I

remember seeing four entries, including one

about political theater in the Czech Republic

in the Soviet era, etc. So I

was amazed. I thought there's something missing

here. So that stayed with me when

I went to the European Climate Foundation

and I saw how we were constantly

facing a barrage of opposition and resistance,

that people were struggling to get to grips

with this challenge. And I thought

we need as a society to learn

the way companies learned to come up

with new solutions fast and get

people enthusiastic about them and

sell them. We need to do the

same with solving large public problems. That

was the process by which I got into this.

So you think that in some

way politics is slower compared to

business in adapting to new

situations, technologies, and so on?

Yes, of course. But a company's job is easy.

They sell a certain product, sometimes a

single product, sometimes a range of products

within a certain domain. So

even if you're Dyson - the

British guy who invented the

bagless vacuum cleaner -

okay, he's very inventive, but he's only

trying to solve a very simple, very

narrow problem.

Policymakers, civil public administration, politicians -

whatever - they're trying to solve problems that

are super complex with a huge variety

of stakeholders, and it's

incredibly more difficult. Solving climate change

is much more difficult than improving

vacuum cleaners, with all due respect to

vacuum cleaner engineers.

Absolutely. How do you think,

in relation to climate change,

collective intelligence can help?

Is collective intelligence more

related to stakeholders, public administration, institutions,

or also, as you said

before, more

related to civic participation? So how can it help?

How do you see collective intelligence applied

to such a big problem like climate

change? Well,

that's a very vast question, so it's

not easy to answer simply.

One high-level answer

is that a problem like climate change

is that we need to change ways

of producing and consuming that are entrenched

in society. So basically we need to

invent new ways of living

and deciding together and organizing things.

So that requires imagination. That requires the

ability to imagine, to think of

a different world - a world in which

things are done differently - and to make

that world come to reality.

That is a process of imagination leading

to innovation - things that happen in the

real world. The political system is

not designed to

nurture people's imagination

all the way to

creating and implementing innovations. It is designed

to do all sorts of things, and

some of them very legitimate - organizing

people, organizing decisions, coming up with

parties and representatives and people running for

elections, and organizing stability in

the system, and executing the decisions of

governments and all sorts of things. It's

not designed to foster imagination and nurture

it all the way to things

happening.

So the system, on the contrary, has many

elements that are nurturing what would be called

path dependency - so things that were

done in a certain way keep

renewing themselves. They have a

tendency to impact the future and

shape the future. Our political system

resists change more than it encourages it.

And again, for very legitimate reasons -

we have rule of law, we have respect for

established laws and previous decisions, etc.

There are also not so great reasons,

like political parties always seeking

the safest way forward, and

members of political parties not being

very imaginative at a personal level, etc.

This is all very complex with

lots of causes. But overall, climate change

requires change on our part. If we don't change,

it's the climate that changes. And the political

system is not built around managing change

fast and in that

imaginative way.

So we have to change the way

we live. I wonder if this

is a sort of cultural problem.

Maybe you have some thoughts about

culture versus policies. Now I don't

want to say in some opposite

way, but I'm thinking if the solution

is, as you said, changing

the way we live and changing also

maybe the design of

how we take decisions and so on,

or also changing the policies. So one

is what I would say more

bottom-up, but the other may be more top-down.

Well, certainly one thing that struck

me - and maybe I was influenced here

by the fact that I'm half French

and half American - is how

in France there's a certain culture of

expecting that the state will solve things

for you. There's a certain dependency on

public institutions to take control and manage

our lives, versus a certain culture of

autonomy and self-management and political entrepreneurship

in the U.S.

It strikes me that

if we want as a society

to be faster at creating new solutions

to solve problems, we can't

just rely on governments to think for us and

solve things for us. It is a

general culture of caring

and thinking together. In the

handbook of political creativity I wrote

about ten years ago,

in the conclusion I said something

like: in France

the motto is "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité" -

Freedom, Equality, Fraternity. Well, we should add

to this creativity - "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, Créativité" -

because the first three are

difficult to nourish and

flourish in these difficult times if we're not

also creative.

So I think there is a cultural

aspect also, and therefore it

also means helping kids be more creative

at school. We have very

non-creative ways of teaching in schools - very simplistic,

very old-fashioned, even in many

schools. So that cultural aspect of

being more participatory in

business, in teams, in corporations,

in public administration is something I think

we should do more.

About this kind of dependency

on public institutions, I've seen

how people often think that

they do not have the power to

change the world they're

living in. Do you think this is because of

school, or we're not used

to being creative?

I totally agree about

changing the educational system.

We have come to equate democracy with

a system of delegation of our decision-

making power to representatives. And many people

don't feel they have what

you described as agency - people don't feel they have

agency. They don't have the ability to

get involved, be heard, say

things that are relevant and useful and

contribute to public decision-making.

So indeed, a

culture of the state and citizens

coming together to be more creative and

faster at solving

public problems requires, on the part of

decision-makers, the willingness to listen and

share power. And on the

part of citizens, the willingness to get

involved, spend time, and trust

that they can make a meaningful

contribution. And the system - the political system -

should make them feel confident that they

can contribute.

There was an OECD study on trust

in governments that came out in October

last year (2024). You can find it

online. It said that

one of the first factors for

trust in government is the perception that

governments listen to us.

I find this striking. If people perceive

that governments are genuinely listening to them,

they trust governments. It is not so

surprising when you think of it, but

actually when you look at

the way governments function today, there's not

such a huge investment in actually actively listening to

citizens on many issues. They often tell

citizens what the topics should be and

what the policies should be. It's very

much top-down.

If we think about democracy now, we think about

representative systems. Do you think

that with collective intelligence and

other kinds of intelligence - suddenly artificial

intelligence - that could help?

Maybe intelligence that could help collective intelligence

emerge? In the future,

will we see some other kind

of system different from the representative

one?

Is your question specifically about artificial

intelligence?

No, like do you have any

thoughts about the future

of democracy? I think

we are seeing some

technology that - I mean,

thinking about AI is quite

disruptive - so I wonder,

in the future,

what could change? And

if the system that we have now

will actually change or not, and

if it could be very dangerous.

Well, yes, I'd be

surprised if in fifty years democracy looks

like what it looked like for the

past fifty years in

Europe. I would be

hard-pressed to guess what it will

look like in fifty years, but one

direction it can take - and that's what

some people favor - is authoritarian regimes, and

we lose the distinctive traits of

liberal democracies.

But there are signs

that we could invent a new system

that is more deeply democratic,

with more ways of involving citizens and

engaging with society in its different shapes

and groups. For that, the

book that I coordinated that came out

a couple of years ago - "The Routledge

Handbook of Collective Intelligence

for Democracy and Governance" (long title) -

gives all sorts of examples. There are thirty-six

case studies from around the world, from

the use of prediction markets to smart

crowdsourcing to AI combined with deliberative democracy,

to hybrids and mixed forums where politicians,

civil servants, and citizens come together,

and the use of theater and

different approaches to help lower-class or

less educated people express their opinions and

grievances if necessary with civil servants.

There's a vast amount of new approaches

to governance that is much more democratic

and open,

but that doesn't necessarily hit the media

headlines. We hear a lot about

the populists of this world who

are very good at communicating

and seizing the public agenda,

but we don't hear so much

about these democratic innovations, as we

call them in the political

jargon.

You are saying that

this kind of experiment does not

hit the media headlines.

I was wondering if it is

just because the

media has to sell, so maybe they want to sound

catchier?

Maybe talking about an

experiment related to democracy is not so

interesting for readers that are also

customers, or if there are

other kinds of reasons?

It's interesting because we're actually initiating

- I hope with the support

of a foundation in the near future -

a research project on this, because it's really

striking how there are some amazing

democratic innovations out there. More

than experiments, some of them have

been really established and

repeated many times and have proven

their value, but they don't

get much, if any, coverage at all.

This is a concern because all

people hear about when it comes

to democracy is problems and

crisis and negative

news. So we really feel

it's important that they hear that there

are some people out there doing good

things and trying different approaches based on

the principles of collective intelligence. So I

don't know the exact answer. I've heard

from journalists that they're trained

to look for problems more than solutions.

I heard a journalist

once tell me, "We were told in

journalism school: if it's positive, it's advertising.

You're not here to

say so-and-so did some amazing

stuff."

You're more here to identify problems. But

on the other hand, the same journalists

told me how there is an

increasing recognition that

negative content feeds anxiety and negative

dynamics in society, and how we need

to be more constructive. But I

don't know the root causes of this,

and I hope we'll have an idea

soon.

In relation to

the possibility that there will be some

authoritarian regimes, I think

about the previous

century. I think maybe when

we talk about authoritarian regimes, we can

talk about a

sort of collective stupidity.

I know that it's hard to

think about a solution,

and I think that collective

intelligence and creative intelligence can of course

maybe find a solution to

this. How do you expect

that people can

build something that is different

from an authoritarian regime?

Well, this is also a very

vast question, and

indeed something that I've

been trying to tackle.

So first of all, yes, people are

very good at collective stupidity. Yes,

we're very good at that. We can -

history has shown how collectively

we can make often

bad decisions.

But it also shows how, even in

situations of crisis and difficulty, we come

up with much better decisions. So

it's not a question of

mental capacity, so to speak. It's a question of

how we organize our institutions and our

political culture.

So I think

the key issue for the coming months

and years is

certainly to resist the temptation of populism.

Populism is a great way for some

policymakers to gain votes.

They argue that they speak on behalf

of the people and are the true

voice of the people, with simple solutions

that look very much like common sense.

Donald Trump, who says "put all the

tough guys in Alcatraz" - well,

that sounds tough and he's listening to

people who are concerned about safety on the

street. But on the other hand,

what are the solutions in front of

this that would be more appealing to

people, more effective, that deliver fast? That's

not easy, right? So he's probably not

going to reopen the Alcatraz prison -

it's probably more for

posting and media headlines.

Those who are serious about politics need to be

better, not only in terms of solutions

and delivering results, but also communication and

appealing to people's emotions, etc. And again,

that's where creativity can help.

Creativity can help us

generate faster, better decisions that are

more appealing. I'm currently writing an

essay on six examples of such policies.

For instance, Sweden, which in the

2000s decided and announced that it

was going to go for zero deaths

on roads. So very appealing, very strong

message: "We no longer tolerate that when

you get in your car - the

most dangerous activity you can get involved

with - when you get in your

car, you should be safe and get

to your destination without being seriously harmed

or killed." And by treating this

with a lot of rigor and in a

systemic way, and actually a lot of

creativity, etc., they managed to drastically reduce

the level of injuries and deaths on

roads. Sweden has been copied

by other Scandinavian countries, relative

to countries that didn't have that same

level of ambition.

So it's appealing to the heart - zero

deaths on roads, I get that - and

it's appealing to the mind, and it

gets the mind working. So

the easy way forward for

a politician is to be a demagogue

and a populist and come up with

simplistic solutions. The only way forward

for democracy is

to be very smart collective thinking politicians,

I think.

I agree. I

think about what you said about

school and the educational system. Many

times I thought that at school we

used to learn how to compete

instead of learning how to collaborate.

I wonder if you have some

thoughts related to school

or maybe some memories from when you were

a child.

Well, I have two daughters - one who's finishing high

school this year and the other one

is now at university. I've witnessed

how they were taught, and

the schools were good and the teachers were well-

intentioned. But indeed, it's striking:

ninety percent of assignments were

on your own. Ninety-

five percent of evaluations were for work

done on your own, in front of

your piece of paper, and virtually no

collaborative work,

no learning of how to work as a

team, and no education in terms

of group interaction, collective thinking, etc.

So this science of collective intelligence, which

is deep and very well

documented now, is not in

the curriculum. So it's great to learn

history and it's great to learn mathematics

on your own in front of the

teacher, but it's not sufficient.

Plus the competitive spirit -

you still have teachers who hand over

the grades from the top to

the bottom, so the guy or

the girl at the bottom feels absolutely

hopeless about studying, and

the one at the top is competitive.

It's horrible. It's really

silly. It's quite primitive.

Absolutely. Last question - not the

question, but

a sort of message to the people that

are working on finding new ways

to decide, to brainstorm, like

people that are searching for new solutions

for new kinds of collaboration between people.

Well, yes, I would have a simple

piece of advice: dare to be

creative, dare to change the way groups

work, and allow imagination to come

in. As a consultancy, I've had that

in my life - every time I

was a consultant, I often realize that

you help groups do some pretty common

sense, basic stuff. When I was

a lobbying consultant, the common sense

thing was: think of your audience, don't

think of what you want to say,

think of what they need to hear,

what they need, what they want to

hear, etc. And people always forgot that.

Now as a creativity

consultant, the common sense basic service

we provide to groups is: challenge your

group interactions. The group interactions are

totally unimaginative and the same across all

institutions that we work with. People have

meetings - people have meetings that are usually

one hour, where there is at

best an agenda, and where people

talk without any sense of time.

They do not have any idea

of the dynamics of a group, of

what creates the right conditions for a

group to think together.

It's really, with all due respect, very primitive.

So my advice is: allow yourself to challenge those

formats, to be reflective on how

to conduct your group interactions, whether in-person

or in the jargon "asynchronous" when you're

not together, and to organize it.

Be mindful of what will create the right

conditions for a smarter group.

Maybe just as a finishing note, as

this is important:

the conditions to make a group smarter

are essentially the following. First, if you

can make the group larger, do so.

Collective intelligence has the word

"collective" in it. If there's

two of you, it's great, it's better

than one. But if you're ten, you're

likely to be smarter than two.

More diversity - so it's better

to have ten than two. But if

the ten all look the same, have

the same ideas, come from the same

background, it won't be as good as if

you have ten people who are very

different in experience, skills, etc.

Then allow these ten people, or however

many, to deliberate well. And that means

information, that means time to reflect, that

means the ability to listen to one

another. So psychological safety - you probably need

a facilitator to make sure everybody gets

to talk, everybody feels free to disagree, etc.

And then you need a way to

capture what's being said. You could have ten

people who are diverse who deliberate well,

but if you don't have a way

to capture the data that they produce -

the decisions they suggest -

whether it's voting systems or other mechanisms,

you need to aggregate.

These are some of the key conditions

that you need. So if you challenge the way

you do things with these criteria in mind,

you can invite a lot more

intelligence and imagination in your interactions,

and that can help maybe save

the world or your problems.

You're welcome, Alex.

You're welcome, Alex.