004 - Naming the Goal for a System Built on Deciding Together Thinking in Systems - Part 2

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So far in this attempt to map out a systems view on the possibility of a participatory future. I’ve found comfort in abstraction. Both through the initial exercise in imagination. Then through a exploration of the preeminent paradigms that stand in the way of that future emerging.

The next move down the systems see-saw starts the shift from abstraction to possible action. It is where politics starts to emerge. Not that of policy tweaks and tax adjustments. That comes later, much closer to the ineffectual end of the spectrum. At the level of goals, politics is about the big picture.

As Donella Meadows reminds us, the goal of a system is not what it claims to value. It is what the system is actually organised to maximise, especially when trade-offs appear.

You can begin to make out what this is by asking a few simple questions.

What consistently wins when values collide? What does the system protects when it is under stress? What kinds of behaviour, relationships, and forms of organisation are rewarded over time?

Goals function as selection mechanisms. They shape which technologies are allowed to scale, which behaviours are reinforced, and which forms of self-organisation are encouraged or quietly suppressed.

Goals do not prescribe action in detail. Instead, they create the conditions within which action can emerge. Seen this way, goals are not just about direction. They are about permission. They signal what kinds of futures the system is prepared to let grow.

After my last newsletter, I had an illuminating conversation with someone else working in the participatory space. She pointed out that I had missed an obvious paradigm. Financialisation. That everything, in the end, is geared towards making money.

She was right to name it. But I would draw a different conclusion.

Financialisation is not the underlying paradigm. It is the operative goal in action.

A more detailed description of financialisation is that it is set up to maximise stability through financial growth and insulation from uncertainty.

Focus on GDP growth, productivity, bond market stability are often mistaken for the goal itself. In reality, they are strategies in service of this deeper organising logic. They are the means through which the system protects itself.

Growth stabilises the system by expanding buffers against disruption. Hierarchy fixes responsibility and accountability in place. Efficiency minimises friction, deliberation, and dissent.

So , where does this leave our participatory ambitions?

The reality is it is tolerated only where it does not meaningfully disrupt stability. A Citizen Assembly that provides clarity on a morally contested topic is welcome. A Citizen Convention that demands a radical shift in government climate policy, less so.

Participation is not failing because it lacks advocates or stronger narratives. Both of which are true. It is being correctly deprioritised by a system optimised to contain uncertainty rather than distribute agency.

You’ll be pleased to hear, that I’m not going to use this space to try and to settle debates about the capitalism nor wade into binary political positions that tend to generate more heat than clarity.

That is neither my area of expertise nor really the point here. I just thought it was important to ground ourselves in today.

So I want to shift the focus. Away from what the system is failing to be. And towards how a system might be refigured so that participation is the goal, rather than a side line experiment

The role of leadership

Changing the players in a system is usually a low-leverage intervention, as long as those players are stepping into the same structure. The exception sits right at the top. Very occasionally, a single leader has the positional power to shift the goal of the system itself.

This is politics in its purest form. Rare moments where a new leader enters an organisation or a society, articulates a new goal, and suddenly hundreds, thousands, even millions begin moving in a different direction. Not because they were forced. But because the organising logic changed.

Margaret Thatcher is good example of this. Not because of a single quote or policy package, but because of the clarity and repetition with which she framed the purpose of government. Over and over, the message was that the issue was not how people should support government, or how government should support people. The goal was to reduce government’s role altogether. To get it off people’s backs.

Of course, broader structural shifts made her pronouncements possible. But the durability of the shift in public discourse is the point. The assumptions stuck. Therefore, institutions, incentives, and expectations reorganised themselves around a newly named goal.

That is the leverage Meadows is pointing to. Like a Spanish Football commentator. It is important to clearly articulate the goal. Repeat it. Insist on it.

Over time, the system does the rest.

So what might this look like when moving towards a participatory future?

A simple starting point might be this. That the purpose of our institutions is not to manage people, but to help people govern together.

To maximise the system’s capacity for collective self-governance under conditions of uncertainty and ecological limits.

Or for those more into snappy soundbites - “Ask not who will decide for you, but how we will decide together”.

Leaders cannot manufacture participation. But they can name the goal that allows it to grow. When they do, systems listen. Of course, this also depends on a whole host of other conditions such as charisma, luck and excellent communication strategy.

There are emerging signs that Zohran Mamdani as New York City Mayor is leveraging this to build something uniquely participatory. The systems cynic in me says wait and see.

However, if we are to take this overarching goal seriously. There is a need for complementary system goals that would operationalise a participatory future. I’ve listed three below. These are a few of the minimum conditions that would need to dominate when trade-offs appear.

1. From efficiency to adaptive collective capacity

Under the current system, stability is pursued through speed and scale, with success measured by how quickly decisions translate into expansion. Decisions are designed to be made fast and rolled out widely. This works reasonably well in stable environments where problems are predictable and solutions are known in advance.

A participatory system optimises for something else entirely. The capacity of groups to deliberate, adapt, and revise decisions over time. Not once. But repeatedly.

This shift also implies a different way of measuring progress. Not how much output has increased, but how well a system learns. How effectively it incorporates feedback. How capable it is of revising course without crisis.

Complex situations do not reward speed. They reward learning. When cause and effect are unclear, feedback is delayed, and problems evolve as soon as you intervene, efficiency becomes brittle.

Participation is slower and messier because it keeps multiple perspectives in play. It surfaces disagreement early. It allows decisions to be revisited as conditions change. Under a growth-and-efficiency goal, this looks like friction. Under an adaptive-capacity goal, it is how the system stays alive.

In other words, participation is not a moral preference. It is a functional response to complexity.

2. From insulated authority to distributed, provisional judgement

Under the current system, uncertainty is managed by concentrating expertise and authority in a professional bureaucracy. Durable hierarchies narrow who is allowed to decide on the assumption that fewer decision-makers reduces risk.

A participatory system optimises in the opposite direction. Judgement under uncertainty is made through distributed, temporary authority. Decision power moves to where the information is, and shifts as conditions change.

Expertise still matters. But it informs decisions rather than closing them down. Authority becomes conditional and rotated rather than fixed. This is not about eliminating leadership. It is about preventing certainty from hardening into entitlement.

Seen this way, citizens’ assemblies are not engagement exercises they are sense-making infrastructure. They are mechanisms for aggregating diverse knowledge, testing assumptions, and making collective judgement when no one has a full picture.

This goal selects against entrenchment in the same way competition law selects against monopolies. Not by moral appeal, but by design.

3. From growth targets to collective good

In the current system, decisions are most often justified by their contribution to growth or value creation. Optimisation appears straightforward because growth has a dominant proxy. GDP. Whether people feel connected to what is being decided, or responsible for its consequences, is largely treated as secondary.

A participatory system optimises for something harder to reduce to a single metric. Collective responsibility for shaping decisions and for living with their effects. The question shifts from whether an outcome contributes to abstract growth, to whether it strengthens shared goods people actually depend on. Trust, care, ecological stability, social cohesion, and the capacity to decide well together again.

When people are involved in making choices that affect their lives, those choices become commitments. Responsibility no longer sits with institutions as a distant burden. It is distributed across those implicated by the decision, including its costs, compromises, and long-term consequences.

This changes how disagreement and difficulty are handled. People are less likely to disengage when they recognise their role in the outcome. Trade-offs are faced more honestly because they are owned collectively, rather than justified after the fact by GDP figures.

This is what moves participation beyond performance and into purpose. Decisions are not simply delivered and measured. They are lived with, together.

Pushing this shift forward does not start with designing the perfect participatory process or persuading everyone to agree. It starts with paying attention to what goals are actually winning in the systems you are part of. And then choosing, deliberately, to interrupt them.

That might mean slowing a decision that is being rushed in the name of efficiency. It might mean refusing to treat people as stakeholders to be managed, and instead involving them as co-authors, even when that complicates timelines or unsettles authority. In public life, it might mean backing processes that redistribute judgement, not just amplify voice.

This work is rarely neat or dramatic. It is often awkward, occasionally unpopular, and almost always incomplete. But it is where system change can happen.

And it does not happen without leadership. Not leadership that promises certainty, but leadership willing to name a different purpose and stand by it. Leaders prepared to say, plainly, that the role of institutions is not to manage people more efficiently, but to help people govern together. Even when that slows things down. Even when it introduces uncertainty.

When leaders do this, they do more than endorse participation. They change what the system is allowed to optimise for. And that, as Meadows reminds us, is where real change begins.

Next month, I’ll be delving into the next leverage point “The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure”. This is where the first policies and structural reforms begin to emerge. Where I’ll be looking more to my initial template of an imagined participatory future for inspiration.

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 think this would be of interest to anyone else, please share!

Until then,

Ben