For those unable to hold the content of a monthly newsletter doing a system’s change deep dive at the front of mind. Check out the archive for parts 0 - 8.
The first thing I do when I arrive into a room is a bit of facilitation Feng Shui.
My wife would attest that this isn’t inherent to my nature. It is one formed by experience on how to make participation work.
How the chairs are arranged on arrival is usually a good clue as to whether it will sustain. If they are arranged in rows or around a long table with a fixed head surrounded by wood panels, the likelihood is that the default mode will be slow and authority driven.
Winston Churchill, arguing in 1943 for the bombed House of Commons to be rebuilt in exactly its original adversarial shape stated “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
He was defending confrontation as a way to do politics. I am usually trying to undo it by dragging a fixed-head table out of the middle of a room so twenty people can see each other’s faces.
Low leverage, high impact
I assumed, setting out on this journey to explore systemic leverage points to propel a future built on participation that the material would thin as we moved down Meadows’ ladder. That the further we got from a grand framing of paradigms and goals, the less there would be to say.
The opposite has happened. Where the leverage has lessened, the focus has shifted to observing things as they are. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the observed reality not the imagined future where most of the commentary exists.
We’re focusing this issue on the structure of material stocks and flows, tenth out of twelve. This is about the the physical infrastructure. Obviously crucial in any system, but not often a leverage point because changing it is rarely quick or simple. It does, however, give some clues to the world as is and the limitations and bottlenecks which hold it in place.
Thankfully for us, there is more opportunity here than tearing down buildings and roads. Because what we are focusing on here isn’t crafted in concrete. Governance is mostly built from belief and paper. Belief and paper can be rewritten far faster than concrete can be demolished and repoured.
That being said, there is still extensive infrastructure that both holds the existing system in place and that which is needed for a more participatory one to supplant it.
I’ll cover five areas: physical, digital, human, financial, and administrative. I’ll take them in turn, in enough detail for a single blog post and more briefly than any of them deserve.
Belief and paper can be rewritten far faster than concrete can be demolished and repoured.
Physical
Physical infrastructure is the most literal of the five, and the current default is not neutral. Most schools still put children in rows facing a teacher for the entirety of their compulsory education. Parliaments put adults in rows too, or in the future envisioned by Churchill on opposing benches built explicitly for confrontation rather than deliberation.
Two institutions, decades apart in most people’s lives, built around the same design decision: one person talks, everyone else faces the same direction and waits their turn.
What does the alternative look like? DemocracyNext’s recent paper on deliberative space names the alternative principles directly: Natural light. Decent acoustics. Furniture you can actually move. Proximity between plenary and breakout. A room that reads as belonging to the people using it rather than to whoever built it.
None of that requires a new building. It requires a choice between two verbs. You can rebuild, which is expensive, slow, and occasionally the right answer for a purpose-built institution starting from nothing. Or you can retrofit, which is what nearly every existing chamber, hall, and boardroom actually needs, because the honest truth is that the physical problem here is mostly an accessibility problem.
We already have a working model for retrofitting buildings nobody got to design from scratch, because we’ve been doing it for disability access for decades. The DemocracyNext principles are, in effect, an accessibility audit for deliberation. Apply them the same way, room by room, rather than waiting for a budget for a new building that is unlikely to come.
Digital
Digital infrastructure runs the same argument online, and it’s worth noticing how directly it’s linked to the same accessibility logic rather than treating it as a separate problem. A platform that only works for people with fast broadband and a confident grip on new software has simply moved the physical barrier from the door of the building to the login screen.
The design lesson from the platforms that have actually held up under real demand is the same one that applies to rooms. Build modular and open source, so different tools can be swapped in for opinion gathering, structured discussion and expert input rather than asking one piece of software to be the entire process, and build to connect rather than to contain. The blueprint here is the V-Taiwan model.
The platforms that get this right tend to look, from the outside, less like a single finished product and more like a set of interoperable parts that different institutions can wire together differently. That’s a retrofit logic too. You don’t need to build one perfect national platform with a single point of failure. You need the parts to talk to each other.
Human
Human infrastructure is where the real bottleneck sits, and it’s more complicated than a simple shortage. Another piece of DemocracyNext’s research is candid that the field has become largely professionalised.
There’s an obvious professional interest in describing your own field as open and inclusive while the commissioning processes quietly narrows who gets to do the work. The International Association of Facilitators runs a genuine, credible certification, and it has done real good connecting a freelance professional class that used to be invisible to itself. But it’s a network for people who are already facilitators, not an answer to how many more of them we need.
The distinction I keep coming back to is between two jobs we’ve flattened into one word. Designing a participatory process well is a specialism, and it deserves the deep training and professional recognition. Facilitating a room that’s already been designed leans much harder on soft skill and contextual judgement than on formal qualification, and the people who already have a version of that skill are hiding in plain sight. Teachers, obviously, though it’s a small irony that the same institution putting children in rows might also be the best untapped source of people who could run a circle well. Bar staff too, and I mean that seriously rather than as a joke, because reading a room, managing a disagreement and knowing when to let a silence sit are not exotic skills. They’re the daily craft of anyone who’s worked a busy Friday shift.
The infrastructure we’re missing isn’t another certification. It’s a training pipeline that treats facilitation as a skill worth building formally into professions that already touch it. Providing opportunities for paid work and empowering people to take initiative to further extend this in their own communities. This should be paired alongside a genuine political and professional route for the specialists. Furthermore, there should be a traceable and legitimising signal which signals sufficient trust to let people run sessions themselves rather than waiting for someone with a lanyard and a professionalised contracting team to arrive.
Financial
None of the above gets built without money, and the honest answer to where large scale training and infrastructure funding comes from is still, mostly, government. That becomes considerably more likely if the earlier issues in this series have actually worked, if a goal has been named and a rule passed to back it, because funding tends to follow political will rather than create it. But a single funding source isn’t a system, it’s a dependency, one budget cycle away from disappearing. Charity funding, in my experience, tends to top things up rather than build them; it’s rarely patient or large enough to fund infrastructure that takes years to pay off. In the cases that it is, after all the US philanthropic ecosystem is responsible for over $600billion a year, it should be focused on ecosystem development rather than one off assemblies. (Another nod to Democracy Next here, after all their raison d’etre is to build the infrastructure for this stuff).
Beyond this, the hope, and one of the reasons that Sorted Collaboration exists, is a genuinely creating a demand for a genuine commercial market for this work, one that reinvests its own income back into building participatory infrastructure rather than treating participation as a service sold once and then quietly absorbed into business as usual. That’s still mostly aspiration rather than evidence. But it’s the piece of this puzzle I’m most directly trying to build as well as write about.
Administrative
The final capacity, administrative, is a piece on its own. It has a footprint over most previous issues. So I’ll only sketch the shape of the problem here. Institutions built to hold participatory infrastructure need to be collaborative and competitive at the same time. Embedded closely enough with existing governments to have real authority, independent enough to hold their own when that authority becomes inconvenient.
Ostbelgien’s standing citizens’ council is the clearest example I’ve found of getting that balance right. The obvious failure mode is the opposite. A participation unit that becomes a side entity, an innovation lab with a nice logo and no route into an actual budget or an actual agenda. The type of entity tolerated because it’s harmless rather than backed because it’s necessary.
The fix is easy to state and hard to do. Tie the administrative home for this work into leadership directly, rather than letting it become a selective pocket that everyone can point to when asked whether the institution takes participation seriously. This again is a key example of not being a leverage point in itself, but is real evidence that the layers above understand the signal to shift to a participatory future.
Bringing this all together…
Build it and they will come, said a film about baseball in a cornfield. It’s normally a dangerous sentence for anyone thinking in systems, because usually they don’t, not without a goal worth showing up for and a rule that makes their showing up count. But by the time you’ve got this far down the ladder, with the paradigm named, the goal set, the rules written and the self-organisation protected, I think it mostly holds.
Which is why infrastructure sits so low on Meadows’ list and still matters this much. It isn’t where the change happens. It’s where you find out whether it did.
Because so much of what a system of governance is actually made from is belief and paper rather than concrete and steel. Getting this far rarely means demolition. It means retrofitting a future you’ve already half agreed to onto a present you didn’t get to design. This is a less romantic project than starting again on a blank site but a far more honest one, and considerably closer to how governance actually changes than any founding myth about tearing it all down and beginning again.
Most of the time it means what I’m usually doing in that wood panelled room before anyone else arrives. Not tearing the building down. Just shifting some outdated furniture into a shape that lets people actually talk to each other.
It means retrofitting a future you’ve already half agreed to onto a present you didn’t get to design.
These reflections are very much a work in progress, often emerging as they are written. They are offered as provocations rather than prescriptions. Challenge, critique, and invitations to build something better together are wholeheartedly welcome.
Would love to hear from you, and if you know anyone who imagines a better, participatory future, please share.
Next month, I'll be delving into the next leverage point 'the size of buffers and stabilising stocks', where the question stops being whether a system can absorb a shock, and becomes how much slack it was allowed to keep in reserve before the shock ever arrived.
Until then,
Ben