Automatic transcription, there could be errors.
Alessandro Oppo00:00Welcome to another episode of the Democracy Innovators Podcast, and our guest of today is Sir Geoff... Geoff Mulgan. And thank you for your time and for being here.
Sir Geoff Mulgan00:10Thank you, Alessandro, for having me.
Alessandro Oppo00:15And the first question is if you can maybe say something about you. I know that you have worked on many things and... But, yeah, if you can give an overview of what you worked on and maybe what are you working on, and maybe your personal background also could be interesting.
Sir Geoff Mulgan00:36Yeah. And first of all, we should say we are having this conversation on quite a good day for democracy. Brazil went a different way from many expected. The students in Serbia overthrew a strong man. And so this is a time... Sometimes it looks like democracy is in a very bad way, but this is one of the so far one of the better weeks. So my background, I was very much a political activist as a teenager. I then became involved in technology at MIT. I did a PhD on networks and so on. And I guess that's what first got me interested in what we're gonna be talking about. I was running a think tank in the nineties called Demos in London, and I published a survey on how democracy could use technologies to transform itself, to get back to sortition, the models of Athens, new ways of mobilizing the collective intelligence of society. It seemed obvious then thirty years ago that our democracy had really frozen in nineteenth century forms, the parliament, periodic elections, parties with lists. There's nothing wrong with that, but that's not the only way you can organize democracy. And in some ways, it's a bit amazing to me thirty years later, we're still having some very similar conversations. In the interim, I've worked in many governments. In the UK government, I ran the strategy function. I was head of policy in the prime minister's office. I've run foundations and in at least one of them, Nesta, we we oversaw quite a big program across Europe of democratic innovations, working with Barcelona and Amsterdam and others, and also with the political parties experimenting with liquid democracy. And I guess I've had some involvement in citizens' juries, citizens' assemblies, the various devices of of democracy for several decades. And, which I hope leaves me both an enthusiast for innovation, but also sometimes skeptical of anyone who believes that a single new idea is the answer to everything. And I've more and more become convinced democracy is quite a a complex ecosystem of many elements, all of which need innovation and reform. But none of us should overestimate how much any single change, whether it's to voting systems or citizens' assemblies or participatory budgeting, none of these on its own is gonna be the answer to everything.
Alessandro Oppo03:29Sure. And and also I see a sort of tension between, let's say, experimenting in the democratic field and also having some stability in the sociopolitical system and how to, let's say, have experiment, but still that kind of stability so that we do not pass, let's say, from day to night to another system.
Sir Geoff Mulgan03:58Yeah. No. I think it's very important that constitutions and governance systems should be legible to people. They should understand how is power used, and that requires a degree of stability. And a whole set of institutions and social norms and habits grow up around a democratic system, and it's very dangerous to change everything overnight to, you know, to get... If if we got rid of all parties and elections and parliaments tomorrow, that would be a complete disaster. And I think some, you know, reformers in the past seem to be recommending that in the sixties. It was push button democracy. Permanent referendum was thought to be a good idea. It always never is a good idea. More recently, some have thought that, you know, AI enabled or digitally enabled democracy can simply get rid of everything else. I I have a much more evolutionary view of how change should happen, that we need to build up new types of democracy like participatory budgeting at a local level or like the use of citizens assemblies for big moral questions or new ways of enhancing parliaments with citizen input. And let's grow these over time so they become more normal and more understood and more legible to the public rather than sudden revolutionary breaks, which have never worked well in the last two hundred years and probably won't in the next two hundred either.
Alessandro Oppo05:39And you have written recently a paper that... In the name as also work in progress.
Sir Geoff Mulgan05:47Mhmm.
Alessandro Oppo05:49And if you like to tell us something, because it's also very related to what we we are talking about. So
Sir Geoff Mulgan05:59Yeah. So in in the paper, we start off by looking at all the many ways democracy is under attack and in crisis. I'm afraid there are many, many signs of that. It's not just the rise of autocrats all over the world from Russia to to Iran to, South America. The Bolsonaro luckily left. But also there's a declining confidence in democracy with each generation. If you survey people in Europe and North America, each new generation has less confidence in democracy as a system, which is why there's large groups who quite like the idea of an autocratic leader who will cut through, the problems and the constraints and just fix stuff. And then in some countries, there's been a weakening of some of the underlying substrates of democracy, the habits of decision making, the habits of mutual trust. And we talk quite a lot in the paper about this relational, foundation of democracy, which is sometimes ignored, but is really, really important that you actually have the ability to cooperate with your fellow citizens. And The US is an extreme example at the moment where now about half of all Americans think their fellow Americans are bad, are morally evil. And if you have that kind of distrust, it's very hard to have democracy functioning. We then look at the extraordinary proliferation of innovation around the world. There are various, repositories or maps of these innovations showing thousands and thousands of experiments with budgeting or assemblies or digital, which are increasingly being being surveyed and analyzed, citizen juries, deliberative polls. There's many, many using AI like Polis to try and help group think and deliberate. And what we've tried then to do in the paper is in some ways a very simple idea, going back to your previous question, is let's not aim for a single big bang constitutional rupture where we change everything overnight. But let's use the analogy of what the world has done on climate change and net zero, where many, many countries, many cities, and many businesses around the world have developed ten, twenty, thirty year road maps to how they move from an entirely carbon based economy to a post carbon economy. And it involves lots of different things. You have to change your buildings, your transport, your energy. You can't do that overnight. It takes time. But if you have a ten, twenty, thirty year road map, you can transform your system very profoundly, and so long as everyone is bought into it. And I think we need something very similar for democracy. I haven't seen that done anywhere in the world, an equivalent to the net zero roadmap, which shows how to evolve these new tools, over time. And in a way, the single most important idea there is what we put in the title. We call this work in progress. And this simple idea is that democracy is never finished. It's always something living, something which has to, to evolve. And the opposite idea, which is quite common in America amongst some constitutional scholars, believe the constitution was defined in the seventeen seventies and eighties and should be seen as fixed in stone like a sacred book, which you have to try and work out what did they intend in 1776, and that should then guide decisions in 2026. To me, this is insane. This is an extreme, sort of misunderstanding of how democracy should work, which is much more as a a valued possession, something we care about, but we are guard... And we are guardians of, something which is always a work in progress needing to be adapted to new technologies, new tools, but also new tasks like like climate change or governance of AI, which was not in the mind of democratic designers in 1890 or 1780. And so, obviously, the answers will be different now. So I hope in this paper, which is quite long and has a lot of references, its aim is really just to give a framework for thinking of democracy as an assembly of multiple elements, as a work in progress, and as a learning system, as an alternative both to the extreme conservatism, which says nothing can be improved, nothing can be changed, but also the opposite view, which says that if only we replaced everything perhaps with sortition, you know, then democracy would would be perfect. And I'm skeptical of both extremes.
Alessandro Oppo11:35And the road map is very interesting because it is true that a of a lot of time I see that a lot of different possibilities using tools, using sortition, using other different ways in relation, not just representative democracy, But then it's very hard to give a sort of timeline, a sort of roadmap. And I was thinking that in the past we had some interesting experiment also in relation to political parties, the Five Star Movement, Podemos. And yeah. I wonder what could be a sort of roadmap that is very hard to say, like in ten years we will have this, I don't know, political system or the other one. But maybe it could be also that sort of collective intelligence process. So when there may be something that works in The UK, could work also in Italy. Yeah. What are your thoughts about these?
Sir Geoff Mulgan12:45So in paper, we say that we need roadmaps. We don't describe a particular roadmap for a particular place. We don't say in five years' time in Milan, this is what you should be doing. But this is the parallel with net zero. Each nation, each city has to design its own road map, but often using some common elements and some common ideas. As you say, there are lots of different ways you can organize political parties. Cinque Stelle in Italy experimented with various things. Podemos did the pirate party. And in the paper, we look at Team Mirai in Japan this year, which has done interesting things using AI. Now none of these are perfect because there will always be a tension between the members of the party, the most enthusiastic people, and maybe the wider public who may have different interests and views. So on its own, transforming the parties is not is one part of a road map, but not everything. Similarly, I think there are many ways parliaments could be doing much more to use citizen collective intelligence than they do now as a matter of course. And I think that could be quite easy for any parliamentary committee to open up to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people to offer commentary, ideas, and so on, and then use AI to analyze those, to group them. This this should be part of the working process of any elected parliament, city assembly, regional government right now. And then I think the road map probably will need some use of, say, things like citizens assemblies for big strategic questions, for big moral questions like assisted dying, which was the assembly in in France last year. There are probably better ways of coming to good decisions than just traditional party politics. And then PB, participatory budgeting, we now have hundreds of examples around the world. It works pretty well at a local level for decisions on public spaces. Paris has had a pretty good ten years using it for, about a €100, 000, 000 a year and also letting school kids have a bit of that money to to learn the habits of democracy. So these are all different blocks. It's like a mosaic or an assembly. But you can imagine Italy or Milan or Naples having some kind of roadmap to say, let's try this one out in 2027, and maybe let's prepare the way for some other ones in 2030. But always with the goal that together, these make citizens feel they have more control, more say over the decisions made in their name, but also that the governing system is better able to make use of collective intelligence. And one of the data points, which I've just been looking at this this week actually, is nearly half of people across Europe don't think they are represented by their representatives. So representative democracy depends on the idea that you feel represented by a political party. And at the moment, right across the Western world, a large minority and sometimes even a majority no longer feel adequately represented by the existing political parties. So we have to reform democracy in a way which gives people a feeling of agency, a feeling of control and power. And that is, at the moment missing. And the danger is when that's missing, people are probably more likely either to switch off entirely or to lurch to the opposite extreme and look to an autocratic leader to fix everything for them.
Alessandro Oppo17:08Yeah. Make me think about the Agentic State Initiative, where they say basically the state is quite slow compared to companies. And so people also... Basically, if the state will not become fast as, let's say private companies, the state, I mean, citizen will trust more companies than the state. I I didn't explain it in the best way, but I think this was interesting as a concept. And then I wanted to ask you if you think that something like Team Mirai could happen in Europe? Because I see, as an example, the five star movement and Podemos, they, I mean, they didn't change the institution. They did a sort of, let's say, private experiment inside the party. And so I was wondering between these, let's say, experiment and innovation inside political parties or inside the institutions that is maybe it's a different kind of approach.
Sir Geoff Mulgan18:35It is. And Team Mirai, one of the things they did this year in some ways is quite simple, using AI chatbots to talk to people, then to gather ideas, and then to synthesize them. I think I could easily imagine many political parties doing a version of that. They'd be very unwise if they turn that directly into their platform or their manifesto. I think you still need humans to make use their judgment to decide how to synthesize ideas into a coherent form. Pure liquid democracy, I'm quite skeptical of. I never thought that was very smart, but it... But in combination with, yeah, a party leadership who are elected, it can work well in opening things up. And as you say, that's outside the formal system, and that's different from how decisions are then made within the state or within parliaments. And here the agentic move, which you mentioned, is very, obviously, very interesting. So we have enormous investment in agents in in business, a trillion dollars probably this year at least being invested. Governments have been very slow to develop agentic state ideas, though there are many examples of how you can use agents to handle problem solving or to deal with requests and so on. I've long been arg... I've argued for governments providing citizens with helpful agents to guide difficult decisions on issues like health or pensions or work. I still think this is what the public services of the future should look more agentic. But many of the advocates of the agentic state didn't quite notice, and maybe it's very obvious now, that agents in the hands of citizens and businesses will overwhelm governments as they make claims for payments, as they challenge decisions. It's called this agentic flooding is a very live problem in many countries. And then states try to develop their own agents to counter the agentic flooding or to triage and so on. And it's fascinating. Even two years ago, the advocates of the agentic state almost completely missed what was in fact the biggest, you know, change of ubiquitous agents. And in a way, that's just a reminder we are in a period of such rapid technological change that I can't predict where we will be in even one or two years time. And that's why we need our systems to have extraordinary agility to respond to unforeseen problems as well as to have a degree of stability at their core, as you said earlier. And that's why every state needs a very strong AI, competent capability right at its heart to make sense of things like the arms race of agentic citizens of the agentic state, all the problems of safety, which are now obviously so visible with OpenAI and and others, all the problems of vulnerability. So in The UK last week, you know, many of our utilities and banks stopped functioning because of a cyber problem in a single data center. So we have new vulnerabilities in our systems, which, again, were probably not so visible to the more optimistic views of an agentic state two or three years ago.
Alessandro Oppo22:34Yeah. I was thinking about... It's very true that everything is is evolving so fast that, I mean, nowadays, it's possible to do what it would with AI, what it was possible to do maybe one year ago in one week, and maybe one year before in one month. And so I also have some difficulty in imagining the future because there could be an AI that is so smart, also you will know Harari, the Israeli historian, was talking about AI in the future will be so smart, and because we are simple humans, we will not understand maybe some choices that AI could suggest. And so another things that I think it's very important is to, let's say, to avoid the black box black box concept so that everything is explainable. And and... Yeah. Because you said it is very hard to give a sort of roadmap or timeline because we don't know what it will happen in a couple of years. But I wonder if you have, let's say, a sort of desire of how it could go maybe. Or
Sir Geoff Mulgan24:11I think with any road map, it needs... You set out your direction and your targets and your milestones, but you know you'll have to change it. Nothing is ever perfectly predictable. So I think it's feasible to have a road map and to recognize technology will change, geopolitics will change, and you'll have to adapt it. They are not alternatives. You can have both direction, strategy, and agility. And let me give you just two or three examples. So you mentioned the black box issue with AI. I'm... The EU has tried to legislate for explainability of algorithmic decisions, and, clearly, that's a good thing that if you're... A decision is being made about your finance or your job or your health, that you can understand it. But the truth is that so many people in the midst of the frontier labs, they don't really understand their own technologies. So my my guess is that will become ever more difficult to achieve genuine explainability. It's desirable, but but difficult. But what we can do maybe more easily is protect ourselves from deliberate manipulation by AI, which is trained on all of human psychology. So the Brazilian election has been a very interesting case study. During the election, an extraordinary array of AI generated fakes spread on Brazilian media. Some showed, you know, lula hand in hand with various, criminal gangs. One had a fake CNN journalist interviewing Lula where he said he would annul the election if he lost. And these were then spread on all the networks, And it's quite clear, I think, that Meta used its power to favor Bolsonaro against Lula, perhaps under instruction from the American government. We we don't know. So I think we have a very urgent need to better protect democracy from subversion by deepfakes. I've published quite a detailed design for what we called electoral integrity institutions, which could use collective intelligence and AI to protect elections during these periods when a deepfake can circulate very rapidly and with huge impact on an election. And it worries me that no country yet has an institution with that power or that capability. So we're very vulnerable to AI, which is smart about humans and can manipulate us in very dangerous ways. So that's point one. We need our democratic roadmap has to include defenses against deliberate subversion, some of it from Russia, some from China, some from Elon Musk, some from Meta, you know, for many, many, many people want to use AI to distort, democracy. But then we also need to cultivate the positive side of AI, which, again, we set out in this paper and show how almost any group from a local community meeting to a parliament to a national conversation can use AI to help, show relevant knowledge, relevant evidence, where there may be trade offs between different goals, to help translate between different groups who may use different terms for the same thing, and to help towards synthesis and consensus rather than towards polarization. So again, this this requires action. It requires a road map even though the detailed tools may look very different in three years' time or five years' time from, in the present. Our problem is that the trillion or so being invested in AI this year is being invested primarily for, obviously, commercial purposes or to help advertising. Almost none of it is being invested to improve democracy. And that's why we risk AI advancing much faster as a threat to democracy than as an aid to support democracy. And
Alessandro Oppo28:55and what is democracy for you?
Sir Geoff Mulgan28:59Democracy at its heart is very simple. It's ruled by the people. And I I think this is part of every human community throughout history and prehistory. People have wanted to have some degree of freedom, and there's always been resistance to a single person, usually a man being the chief or the king or the emperor. And that's why you find versions of democracy in every part of the world, from Aboriginal Australia we write about to the Amazon, to the Buddhist republics of Northern India two thousand years ago, or Persia, as well as Greece and, the more familiar Athenian variants. So that's the underlying desire, rule by the people. It's what the word democracy means. Its expression can take lots of different forms. It can be a a council. It could be like in ancient Athens, the, you know, decision by lot. It can be elected parliaments. It can be, you know, municipalities. And in the future, it may be everything from digital parliaments to one of the projects I'm involved in now, is the Global Citizens Assembly, which is a representative sample of the entire world population being brought together to deliberate on questions like food security, climate change, and now AI. Now that would never have been in the mind of someone in Athens or Northern India, but that's what... That is an expression of the idea of democracy, but made real in the late twenty twenties for a very interconnected planet where we need new ways as humanity to talk with each other, to spot threats, to make decisions, and hopefully to solve some of the big challenges like climate instability.
Alessandro Oppo31:07And I really like the concept of citizen assembly. And I was thinking that, I mean, citizen assembly could happen like in, let's say, the normal way or like with some devices that maybe record, transcribe, and help finding maybe some common ground. And I was thinking like in the second case, so if we use technology to support the process, and then before we say that there are a lot of new AI agents because citizens maybe use, I don't know, ChatGPT, Claude, whatever, instead of going on the website of an institution. And soon, but already now there are, let's say AI agents from institutions. So I wonder, because citizen assembly right now, most of the times are, let's say, organized by an association, an institution. Usually, are not spontaneous or self organized, but they see that the technology now could allow people, let's say, I don't know, I'm part of the young vegetarians or young Christian. I could organize, let's say, sitting as an assembly inside my community or political group. And so I wonder like, I mean, and this is in way going back to the roadmap that we don't know, we cannot know. But do you see the future... I don't know. Because it could be like a sort of direct democracy in some way, representative democracy. Like, there could be agents that take decision for us based on the knowledge that they have about us. So there are really a lot of new things. And I also tried myself, like recently with... I tried to give like a lot of, let's say, polarizing questions the AI that I use usually, and they say, okay, reply to those questions as if it was me. Like, say, if I agree, disagree. And in some cases, I will say that the AI had enough information to, let's say, vote instead of me regarding a specific statement. Yeah. So I wonder, like, if you think that... Yeah. How How it will evolve? Let's say, do you think that in twenty years we will all vote from home, let's say, in a sort of direct democracy? We will have our personal agents that...
Sir Geoff Mulgan34:21Oh, you're you're you're covering a lot of different things there. I mean, first of all, on citizens' assemblies, I think there's a big difference between a citizens' assembly, which is self organized within a social movement. So let's say the vegans of Milan have a citizen's assembly. That's that's fine. But that's different from, it being part of state power, legitimate formal power, like the citizen's assemblies created in in Ireland or by the city of Brussels and so on. There's... Have some similar methods, but one is in a sense an expression of the polis, in the traditional sense, and therefore legitimate power, which may be power to pass a law, a power to take money from you for taxation, that's very different from a bottom up social movement expression. But they may intersect, at some points. And you can imagine the same in a workplace. You know, a a worker assembly in a big company is, you know, a new way of organizing, workers, which was not there twenty, thirty, forty years ago and may... Makes it much easier for everyone to take part. I think we will experiment with Bound To with agents. Agents sometimes given authority to act on our behalf. I've also tried to experiment with the idea that each of us might want multiple different agents to guide our decisions because we are not singular things as human beings. So my simple idea was maybe in the future, you'll have one agent which will say how might you vote or express your views depending on your immediate material self interest. Another might say, you know, what would you do based on your values? A third might say, what would you do if you really wanted to use your vote for the interests of your children and your grandchildren? Or perhaps another might say, what if you wanted to represent the interests of the planet? We are... We contain multitudes, all of us, as individuals. And I think what would be really interesting is an agentic process which flushes out that complexity, not a single agent which just represents you as if you, Alessandro, are singular, but can actually make visible to us our own complexity, own richness. You may then still, you know, give instructions to an agent to speak on your behalf or vote on your behalf. Though, of course, we'll have to be very, very safe. We'll have to be very, very confident that the systems cannot be hacked, cannot be manipulated by the many powers who will definitely want to manipulate any agentic process. So part of me thinks that probably democracy, a little bit like what's happening in universities right now, will both lean into AI and use it for all that it can. But paradoxically, the more we have AI widely used, the more we will return to very, very face to face discussion, deliberation, and decision. So like in MIT is a good example as a university, perhaps the most... One of the most advanced technological universities. They have announced in the last few months that they will go much more back to oral examination, oral group work of students, because everything else can be manipulated or hacked. So if I had to guess in twenty years' time, some of our democracy will look almost identical perhaps to ancient Greece, the nineteenth century, alongside some which is very tech enabled. And that a purely tech enabled democracy simply won't be resilient and robust enough. It will be too easy to manipulate and therefore not trustworthy at all. That is my guess. I don't know.
Alessandro Oppo38:48Yeah. A lot of open questions, but I also like the idea of being of discussing in person with other people and have technology that support instead of having us to always deal with technology with a chatbot or something else. And and before, you you were mentioning, like, the... Let's say, the the student movement that... Like, right now in the... In these days, there are a lot of protests. And I wonder like, I mean, of course, students are, let's say young people, and in some years they will be like adults and they will be part of society as they are now, but like more in a more like, I don't know, maybe they will have a role institution in a job. Maybe they can... Yeah. I wonder like what could be the role of who is protesting now also in relation to the changes that we discussed? Because I see young people, so people that are used to use technology, sometimes they also use technology, but I don't know, maybe a Facebook group or Telegram group or WhatsApp group. So not really specific for civic tech, political tech. But I can imagine that in the future, maybe this will happen because also nowadays it's very easy to build new tools. And so maybe we can see new kind of organization that could emerge from those groups.
Sir Geoff Mulgan40:40So I think there's a very, very important set of lessons from history for anyone involved in student protests right now. So student protests can be very powerful in mobilizing people onto the streets, getting rid of a bad government like in in Serbia, in Belgrade, this this week, and sometimes in initiating change. But what often they're very bad at is the organization needed to then take over state power and actually embed change. So one of the negative patterns of the last twenty years is when a grassroots social movement gets rid of a bad regime but then completely fails the next stage. So that happened in much of The Middle East after the, the Arab Spring, using all these social media tools for the mobilization, but no plans for after. It happened to a degree in Chile where a student leader became president and tried to bring in a new constitution, and it then completely fell apart. It happened in Madagascar last year where, again, they were very good at mobilizing to overthrow the old but didn't have the means to put in place its replacement. So one of my obsessions in a way has been how do we do better at social imagination, both the creative work on a zero carbon economy, radically reformed democracy, equality, but turning that into policies and programs and agendas for change. I think we still lack that in much of our political system. We either have very, say, oppositional movements or we have very incremental conservative incumbents. And what we need is something which is neither of those, but which is creative, imaginative, but also practical about what I call the poetry, the prose, and the plumbing of change, where it's great to have the poetry of the big speech in the city square, but the prose is the policies, what you actually do with industry or taxation or health. And then the plumbing is the machinery of the state which will deliver that. And my fear, I think in Belgrade, they sound like they're pretty smart, the student leaders. And in some countries like in Nepal, where what was a student movement is now in power and appears to be very canny, very, very, very wise, they're the good models, but there be... There are more examples where that youth dynamism does not translate into lasting change. And in a way, there are many examples like in 1968, which was probably the biggest example in recent history of where all over the world there was a huge youth movement in France and in Paris, even also a revolution, the same in The US with the anti Vietnam war movements. It's worth remembering 1968 was the year when de Gaulle, the conservative president, got his biggest ever landslide and when Richard Nixon got his big landslide in The US. And, again, it's because the radicals did not have an adequate plan for how to turn the energy of opposition into energy for lasting change. And so that would be my my encouragement to anyone involved in a grassroots bottom up movement. Learn the lessons of all of those examples and don't repeat their mistakes.
Alessandro Oppo44:46Yeah. This is very true what you say. That is... You also need, like, a... That is still the governance issue. Like, what what do you do after? Because then... Or you replicate the system that you overthrown basically, or you have to create a new system, and this is very difficult.
Sir Geoff Mulgan45:10In a way, it goes back to what you said before. If you try and make everything new, most of it won't work. That's what Lenin did. That's what Pol Pot did in Cambodia. And weirdly, it's what the Americans did when they overthrew Saddam Hussein. They got rid of all the government, all the police, all the army. And then what you get then is usually chaos. So the smart revolutionary leaders keep some bits of the old system. They don't try and change everything overnight. But they have a direction of travel so they can steadily grow the new alternatives alongside the old. But if you have a sort of a year zero idea that everything will be transformed, as I say, we have many, many examples where that has been tried, and it usually leads to horrible results. Millions of people suffering either from violence or hunger. And this is such a clear lesson of history that even if you are a revolutionary, understand the pace of change of different parts of the system and don't try to change everything overnight because that never works.
Alessandro Oppo46:28Thank you. And if you have any message, but this also was a very interesting message because usually the last question is if you have a message for the people that are trying to innovate in different ways in regards to democracy, governance, but I think that what you said could be a very good advice, but maybe you have another one.
Sir Geoff Mulgan46:53Well, maybe one other one, which in a way is the same, and one advantage of I've been around a few decades. I've worked in many countries around the world, and I always observe that people overestimate how much they can change short term. They think they can change everything in a year sometimes, but they nearly always underestimate how much can be changed over ten, twenty, or thirty years. And that's why I am a believer in these radical roadmaps, like for net zero and for democracy. They don't try and change literally everything overnight, but they bring the forces, the focus, the energy, the imagination to transform whole systems within the life of generation. And that's what I would encourage any innovator to do. Don't lose your energy, your hope, your imagination, but realize your work is probably a twenty or thirty year project, not a one or two year project. And that way, you're much more likely to succeed.
Alessandro Oppo47:59Another very quick question. Like, when you started... Because you you said that you had this long career. So you had in mind a sort of possible... How did you call it? A road map, and then you changed it. How did it happen like that you got interested in this
Sir Geoff Mulgan48:22I didn't I didn't have a road map for myself at all. It was pure chance where I ended up in activism, civil society, the British government, the Australian government, Europe, Africa. So, yeah, I I believe a little bit in serendipity. You go where you find the energy and just try to be useful. That's always what I say to people. Try to be useful.
Alessandro Oppo48:50Thank you a lot, really.
Sir Geoff Mulgan48:52Thank you, Alessandro, and good luck to everyone in trying to reform, reimagine, innovate the democracy, which is one of the most valuable things we have that we have inherited from the past, and we need to hand it on in a better state to the future.
Alessandro Oppo49:11Thank you again.
Discussion
Continue the conversation
Loading comments…