Atelier WeekNotes w/c 21 and 28 April 2025
CATALYST & ENABLER. Services offered: could you use a strategist/futurist/facilitator?INITIATIVES. Assembly Dialogues. 0/DETECTING. 'The Rift': new Chatham House research. 'Speak Up' Agency launch
I am writing newsletter of #weeknotes of starting the Atelier of What’s Next (a studio for initiatives at the frontier of generating a better future). For my rationale for starting the Atelier see here.
Welcome to the first WeekNote after the Easter holidays. Below you will will find two weeks squished into one. It covers:
CATALYST & ENABLER
Services offered: could you use a strategist / futurist / facilitator?
INITIATIVES
Assembly Dialogues
0/DETECTING
'The Rift': new Chatham House research cycle
'Speak Up' Agency launch
How can the Atelier of What's Next be of service to you, and your purposes? We'd love to hear from you. Perhaps you have a challenge or idea to put in the studio. Maybe one of our existing topics appeals to you. What if you love to make new things happen by being part of the studio? Or if you have feedback or comments that would improve this deck. Either click the button below or email davidbent@atelierwhatsnext.org.
CATALYST & ENABLER
Services offered: could you use a strategist / futurist / facilitator?
The Trump Derailment event continues. I have had 4 substantive projects cancel in the last 6 months, including one teaching role which is usually very resilient. Huge signals that people are hoarding cash, mostly because of uncertainty but also because of the aggressive attacks on anything progressive.
All of which means I find myself with a lot of availability. Hurray!
So, do get in touch if you (or someone you know) could use an experienced advisor with deep skills on forming strategy, using futures and systems thinking, facilitating and coaching.
At the same time, it seems to me that people are unlikely to start spending until they accept this new level of uncertainty. So, I also see this as a chance to do some R&D, building capabilities, insights and/or methods which would help in the future. More on this in the next WeekNote.
INITIATIVES
Assembly Dialogues
Last autumn I was part of designing a series of critical dialogues around deliberative and participatory democracy. This was for The Humanity Project, which aims to create a new assembly culture to transform politics from the bottom-up. (See also WeekNote 23 & 30 Sep 2024.)
Purpose
The dialogues were an attempt to work through some of the gritty challenges of various participative democracy efforts that have been growing in the last few years, including citizen assemblies, citizen juries and popular assemblies.
The long-term aim is to create new governance structures for the 21st century. The short-term aims: connect people who are working on similar things; work out when to apply the different approaches, and how they can be complimentary; and, take a step towards making deliberative and participatory democracy.normal.
I'm writing this in the week that Reform have had a breakthrough in the local council elections. There's lots of drivers of their succes, but at least part is people feeling let down by politicians, politics and the political system as it stands.
For us, an assembly culture is an important way revitalising democracy and uniting us in a desire to build a better world than the one currently on offer.
Method
Each dialogue was organised around a question which explored one part of the practice, and a question holder. We invited people who had insight into that question, particularly looking for practitioners and citizens plus academics and NGOs in the space.
Each dialogue was 90 mins. After framing from the question holder people were asked to share short stories relevant to the question. Only after everyone who wanted to had told their story did we move into pulling out themes and insights. We chose to lead with stories to ground what people said in experience, rather than more abstract advocacy and claims.
The dialogues
The Absurd Intelligence team (not me!) have spent the last few months creating 'Match of the Day highlights videos of each of the dialogues, and putting them on a new website, Assembly Dialogues.
How can we make the relationship between bottom-up people’s assemblies and sortition assemblies work well, so that it’s an interesting, self-reinforcing, generative and productive relationship? Graham Smith, Prof of Politics, Uni of Westminster. Dialogue #1.
Is there really anything neutral about an assembly, or a facilitator? Claire Mellier, Iswe, an independent democracy innovation centre, and Global Citizens’ Assembly. Dialogue #2
Who sets the agenda, and how does choosing the question “set the frame” for assemblies? Rich Wilson, Iswe and Global Citizens’ Assembly. Dialogue #3
How can assemblies be more radically anti-racist than they have been so far? Lee Jasper, Black community leader and former deputy mayor of London. Dialogue #4
What’s the bigger implementation plan? And how do we make the outputs of any national-level assembly unignorable? Jon Alexander, author of Citizens. Dialogue #5
My reflections
My reflections on Dialogue 1 in September was summarised as (more here):
Preparing for more failure of mainstream politics. In the half-year since, the performance of Labour in governing means preparing for the failure of the mainstream is more urgent.
It's always horses for courses. The different methods each have their strengths and weaknesses, and can be used in different points of a wider process of change. For instance, a 'whoever turns up' popular assembly could force a public body to address an issue, a representative citizens jury could give insight on priorities.
Who guards the guards? Questions of legitimacy and authority are not magically solved by using participative methods. The way forward is going to be about a web of relationships with accountability, making sure the rationale for decisions is transparent (including peopel seeing that their voice was heard) plus being open to changing decisions as circumstances chance.
Everyone is right (except when they claim exclusivity). Lots of the supposed intractable differences amongst practitioners turned out to be fine, as long as folks didn't claim their locally-true' insight must be applied by everyone, everywhere, all the time.
Some more reflections now:
There's lots of great experimentation. We heard stories from citizens who had taken over council buildings, and from charities helping local communities on deep, structural challenges. There's lots of great stuff happening.
Follow up action cannot just be for public bodies. People had stories of citizen juries, commission by local authorities, making recommendations which were then ignored. In some ways, worse than not going through the exercise. My conclusion: you also need to have action which people in the room can do themselves, as well as recommendations to others.
WHAT NEXT
The Humanity Project are continuing their efforts. "There’s no-one left to turn to but each other, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for." Support them!
0/DETECTING
'The Rift': new Chatham House research cycle
On Tue 29 April I attended the launch of 'The Rift', a new research cycle from the Sustainability Accelerator in Chatham House (put another way, in a forward-looking research unit of a world-leading international relations policy institute).
Here's the introductory paragraph of their explanation of what they mean:
"Over the past decades, much work in climate and sustainability has focused on finding ways to support and preserve current reality – to sustain, to protect, to make resilient. With this research cycle, we take a different approach. We are asking – what happens when we view our current moment as the first years in a new reality? The first act in a fundamentally new period of human history. A new climate reality. A new global (dis)order. A new set of relationships. The Rift."
They are organising their research cycle into three themes, with orientating research questions:
Collapse: no way out, but through.
How might we hold the space for dialogues that explore the implications of climate collapse with nuance?
And how can we ensure considerations of collapse form a productive role in the discovery and creation of our shared futures?
Uncertainty: navigating unknowns.
How can institutions take better decisions in contexts of deep uncertainty?
What tools might be most helpful, and how can they effectively pilot and test such approaches?
Renewal: fostering transformative adaptation.
How might the roles of government, business and civil society evolve to better support the emergence of transformative adaptation?
And how might forms of regional and international governance interact with more localised efforts to drive system-wide renewal?
Also, "The research cycle for The Rift will be conducted over the next two years via collaborative mechanisms that harness collective knowledge, build networks of practice and generate practical progress for our partners and broader systems."
If you are a regular reader of WeekNotes, or been active in the more radical parts of the sustainability agenda, then you will recognise a lot of the intent and terminology. These kinds of questions have been currency in my niche (/epistemic bubble) for quite a while.
Indeed, one could read these questions as a good articulation of my main professional intention for the year: how can I embody a practice of Deep Transformation? (Where 'Deep Transformation' puts at its centre creating a world where humankind living in ways that align with nature, and where people can choose their own version of the good life. More than 'Strong Reform', uses the insights of ‘Radical Resistance’, but not retreating to 'Make Good Ruins'. More explanation here.)
So, the novelty here is less the content than the messenger -- a world-leading international relations think tank. Admittedly, the deliberately slightly weird research unit, but still. My main reflection was: this is how niche perspectives get to influence and shift the mainstream.
The main risk being that the niche concepts are diluted along the way. This is a particularly large risk when the content of the ideas is, essentially, that the status quo we have been used to is ending, and so there is no version of the status quo which can thrive.
That is a very big rift to exist in; far safer (in the short term) to try to use new ideas to keep the status quo. But such collusion makes the inevitable shift all the more catastrophic when it happens.
The team in the Sustainability Accelerator tried to signal their intent by having a very not-Chatham House event as the launch. There was a small theatrical stage, poetry readings, workshop-style writing exercises and other provocations. If the medium is the message, then the message here was they do not want this to be a standard research cycle. For which I applaud them.
In this vein, one challenge I have already raised is in the research questions, many of which start with 'How can institutions...?'. That formulation implies existing institutions. But what if the appropriate response is to create new institutions, which form their habits and routines in the new context of the rift, rather than trying to change the existing practices of a legacy institutions which, almost by definition, is part of the problem?
WHAT NEXT
Invite people to get involved. Sing up to the newsletter here.
Meet up with the team to find out if there is a way I can be involved.
'Speak Up' Agency launch
The following evening, Wed 30 April, was the launch of Speak Up, a "purpose driven speaker agency setting the tone for a new conversation". (Speak Up is one of the collaborations being run by Absurd Intelligence, so the same crew as the Assembly Dialogues above.)
Here's how they explain themselves:
"At Speak Up we know people are tired of hearing that nothing ever changes. The same old stories fill our news feeds day after day, leaving us angry and powerless.
But what if our media was filled with ways the future could be made better? It’s time to change the conversation.
Speak Up works with speakers to tell the stories missing from the mainstream news. Stories that challenge cut-and-dried ways of seeing the world today, that open up new possibilities for tackling the massive issues facing the 21st century.'
The theory of change is to bring new and different voices into the mainstream culture, and shift what gets talked about in ways that then lead to change.
In the section on the Rift, I said what if we needed new institutions (whether organisations or in the broad sociological meaning of organised systems of norms and structures that help regulate and govern specific areas of social life, such as family, education, religion, and government).
In that sense, Speak Up is an example of a new institution. A bit like a rock placed in a brook that changes the way the water flows downstream, a new institution can change the patterning of a system, in this case of the stories which are circulating in the mainstream culture about the future and what can be done.
The evening itself was a mix of music, conversation, quiet speeches, extrovert speeches, a panel discussion on social media that was actually insightful (i know!), and a rousing call to arms.
Content-wise, you could almost call what people said the views of the new silent majority. Not the traditional sense of silent majority, the socially and economcially conservative. Those are now well-served by Tories, Reform and -- alas -- Labour.
No, as Prof Simon Wren-Lewis of Oxford argues here (emphasis added):
"If we use the term silent majority to represent those voters without a strong voice in terms of political representation and public debate, then in the UK and perhaps also the US, the new silent majority are those voters who are either socially liberal, or centre to left wing in terms of public service provision (or both). This new silent majority is probably actually a majority of voters. It extends way beyond what is typically referred to as the left in the UK."
Those views don't have an easy home in mainstream media, beyond the Guardian. The BBC is so afraid of rightwing criticism that it has cancelled a podcast on heat pumps. Heat pumps! The loudest media is clearly strongly to the Right.
So, the challenge for Speak Up is not whether there is an audience, or having speakers. It is finding the channels / platforms to connect the two. But, if it can find those platforms, then there could be success -- even runaway success.
Format-wise, the event had amix of styles, no MC and was in an unusual space: a square church. It was St George's Church, Bloomsbury, which ha a radical history, including hosting the funeral service for a controversial suffragette, and a visit by Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. One attendee told me that, after a day of task-orientated meetings, the whole event felt like a warm hug.
if the medium is the message, then the message here the opposite of 'we will hector you to death'; it was 'we will make being in a generous and positive world fun -- do join us'.
WHAT NEXT
Fingers crossed Spea Up finds the right platforms to connect speakers and audiences.