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.
Thank you, Stephen.
You're welcome, Alex.