Faith, Hope and Parity
Why participation is so powerful
Welcome back to our monthly download.
Up until a few days ago, this issue was going to be about something completely different; but then two reports came out that we just couldn’t ignore. One was on trust and confidence in the UK’s politics and election system; the other was a more global view on trust and authority, especially around the subject of innovation. Both gave a distinctly gloomy appraisal of the state of our faith in politicians, governments and other powerful and influential institutions to create a better future.
As a result this issue is now all about the relationship between those people making the decisions and those people affected by the decisions. We’re drawing on our years of experience to look at why listening, engagement and participation are such essential tools when you need to build trust with diverse groups of people.
But first, a bit of news from us…
Updates from the Brink universe
Behavioural Innovation is what we call our approach for unlocking the kinds of behaviours that are needed to make real and lasting change in the world. Coming up with the name was the easy part (what else would you call a combination of behavioural sciences and innovation methods?); but how the approach works, what makes it different, and how to apply it… All that takes more time to explain and understand.
Last week we added this page to the Brink website. It’s designed to be a Behavioural Innovation guide and a toolkit. Somewhere we can lay out the thinking behind what we do and how we do it, as well as share some of our tools and frameworks with you so you can use them in your work.
Please go take a look, we’d love to hear your thoughts.
Faith, hope and parity
A few weeks ago, PR consultancy Edelman published its annual Trust Barometer, detailing the global levels of trust in the media, governments, NGOs and businesses. This year the report focused specifically on technological innovation, and one of its most striking findings was that 39% of people believe tech innovation is “poorly managed”. Even amongst those who think innovation is well managed, around a third believe that technology is “leaving people like them behind”.
These views were echoed by another report published just last week by the National Centre for Social Research, entitled ‘Damaged Politics’. This analysis found that 45% of people in the UK believe that politicians can “almost never” be trusted to place country above party. That’s an 11-point jump in just five years.
Ironically, these calamitous drops in trust are happening in what has been called ‘the greatest democratic year in history’; in which around 1.5 billion people around the world should feel more heard, more empowered and more involved than they have in a long time. So what’s broken?
The ‘Damaged Politics’ author, Professor Sir John Curtice, was quoted as saying that fixing this lack of faith would require a “style and manner of governing that persuades people that the government has their interests at heart after all”. But what if persuasion is not the right approach?
What if it’s more about participation?
Democracy versus HiPPOcracy
In our experience, solving a complex problem is impossible without gathering collective intelligence from a diverse group of genuinely engaged and empowered people - both decision makers and the decision affected. But so often this opportunity for dialogue is dodged. Instead, a one way, top down exercise disguised as a forum takes its place. And even if a group sets off with the best of intentions to research, gather evidence and develop solutions in the most participatory way, there’s often an invisible force that steers their hand: power dynamics.
Research has shown that, in a typical six-person meeting, two people will do more than 60 percent of the talking. But if you ask the people who are speaking the most how egalitarian their meetings are, guess what they’ll tell you? Yep, they’re adamant that everyone gets an equal say.
Another dominance hierarchy was identified by the author Avinash Kaushik in 2015, when he coined the phrase "Highest Paid Person's Opinion" (or HiPPO for short) to describe the tendency for lower-paid employees to defer to higher-paid ones when a decision had to be made. Very often this leads to those who know most about a problem becoming the ones who are least likely to speak up (and even if they do, they may not be heard).
Whether it's a six-person meeting or a government's dialogue with a national population; unchecked power dynamics and performative ‘listening’ exercises that are not acted upon, degrade trust and parity and destroy any curiosity and creativity that might have existed. To even begin to understand a problem you have to be able to shift this dynamic from the highest paid or ‘most important’, to those closest to the problem. And it’s not about giving those people a voice; because they already have one. It’s about making sure those voices are listened to and acted upon.
Go Go Power Changers
Overcoming these damaging dynamics need not be complicated. The biggest step is often recognising that they’re there in the first place. Once you’ve done that there’s a number of tools and tactics you can use to shift them in your favour…
Our work with the Africa Smart Towns Network meant bringing together 11 city mayors and their teams to co-create digital services with their citizens. We saw time and again how a Mayor’s voice could override all others. So, our first move was to go from a vocal forum to a written one.
If you ask a group to orally generate ideas, then power dynamics will ensure that the loudest and most confident mouths dominate the conversation. But, there’s no such thing as a loud pencil. Leigh Thompson (who led the original research into the ‘meeting loudmouths phenomenon’) calls this ‘brainwriting’ in order to differentiate it from brainstorming (more on that in the Dive Deeper section, below).
The power-busting magic of ‘brainwriting’ is that all post-it notes are created equal. The format flattens the hierarchy. As a result, our ASToN workshops weren’t about ‘giving voices’ to juniors and residents (they already had voices!) they were about making sure those voices were heard on the same level as those of their seniors (we also found that their ideas were typically far better quality than those of the ‘HiPPOs’ in the room, given their proximity to the challenges we were discussing).
Oral contributions shouldn’t be dismissed entirely though. We are wired to believe stories and they are very effective at changing our behaviour, so harvesting stories from the people closest to the problem you’re trying to solve, and then presenting those to decision-makers in a raw form can be very powerful. We did this with a world-leading foundation we worked with, by recording voicenotes of their grantees and then playing them back to the Board to literally bring those diverse voices into the boardroom.
Participation doesn’t have to stop there. There’s a brilliant mode of research blooming whereby local residents are trained as ‘citizen scientists’ who develop and implement research methods and analyse data, as well as conduct interviews with policy-makers, community leaders and other residents. These citizen scientists use their knowledge of the local area to inform, influence and shape the direction of research. You can read more about how we engaged with citizen scientists as part of our research into the informal economy in Kenya in this post.
People’s voices deserve more than lip service
Steve Jobs famously said,“People don't know what they want until you show it to them”. And, yes, maybe when it comes to phones the public might struggle to articulate what they’re after. But when it comes to answering the kind of pressing and complex challenges which are affecting them directly, then citizen recommendations are incredibly valuable… As long as they are genuinely heard and acted upon.
It’s not enough for those who hold power to claim they are 'being brave' by listening to people. Listening should not be approached as a risky, marginal enterprise. Nor should it be an exercise in optics. That’s where trust is lost.
Instead, it should be an imperative if we are to solve the challenges of today. Taking the time and the effort to draw out insights and ideas from a diverse set of people who are close to the problem and to truly listen and act on them has to be an integral part of any innovation practice. Only then can trust be earned.
Your Cognitive Booster Shot 💉
Each issue we ask a member of the Brink team to select some articles, book recommendations and other nuggets of wisdom that have recently inspired them or changed their practice in some way. Making the selection this week is Bryony, a Community Manager in our Collectives practice.
Become the noun
Ellie Perkins, the copywriter, creator and (self-confessed) “over-sharer”, recently posted this advice to LinkedIn: "Don't ask your audience to take action. Instead, invite them to become an (aspirational) identity." The logic of encouraging someone to ‘become the noun’ rather than ‘doing the verb’ to create a sense of belonging, is something I think has great potential beyond the world of brand marketing.
The need for new tools
In her 1984 essay, the poet and civil rights activist Audre Lorde wrote “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” It’s a powerful reminder that we can learn from others, but if we are to truly address issues such as “racism and homophobia [the] real conditions of all our lives in this place and time," then we need to think and act differently.
Churchill versus padding
In 1940, Winston Churchill wrote a memo to his staff, imploring them to make their reports more concise to save time and aid clearer thinking. "Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether or replaced by a single word,” he wrote as the Battle of Britain roared overhead. “Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational”. And on that note, I’ll let you get back to the rest of this newsletter 🙂.
Dive deeper
For more on creating participation in groups and driving trust amongst communities take a look at some of these links:
In this video, Leigh Thompson explains the concept and mechanics behind Brainwriting, and why you should always avoid ‘guessing’ and ‘confessions’ (Thompson also wrote this article for Fortune which goes into the methods of Nominal Group Technique and Cyberstorming).
This article on Power Dynamics in Collective Impact by Mary Jean Ryan of the Community Center for Education Results is a decade old now, but the lessons it contains around disrupting the status quo to achieve collective impact have not dated at all.
A few weeks ago, our Collectives Practice Lead, Miranda, wrote this post explaining why it’s so much easier to talk about harnessing the power of the collective than it is to go ahead and do it. It also outlines the commitments we’ve made at Brink to avoid some of the most common pitfalls.
In an article for Apolitical from last year, Aline Muylaert of CitizenLab argues that the problem of low public trust levels can be solved by building what she calls a ‘culture of engagement’.
That’s it for another month. If you’ve got an idea for a future issue of the Download, or a story about how you have brought people into a project to drive it forward, then you can email us on editor@hellobrink.co. And don’t forget you can follow us on LinkedIn for more regular updates and news.
See you next month.