Interview with Stephen Boucher - Democracy Innovators Podcast
Disclaimer: This is an automatic transcription and may contain errors.
Host: Alessandro Oppo
Guest: Stephen Boucher
Alessandro: Welcome to another episode of Democracy Innovators podcast. Our guest today is Stephen Boucher. Welcome, Stephen.
Stephen: Hi Alex, nice to meet you. Thank you for your time.
Alessandro: So from your LinkedIn description, I see that you help governments and civil servants become more creative thanks to collective intelligence. As a first question, I would like to ask you: what is collective intelligence for you and how can it be helpful?
Stephen: Sure, well, it's a pleasure. This is one of my favorite topics. So collective intelligence is the ability that groups have, under the right conditions, to develop better solutions and better decisions than individual members of the group would separately. So basically, it's a little bit like one plus one can be more than two, again under the right conditions.
Alessandro: How is this different compared to creative intelligence? Because I saw that sometimes I see it can be creative intelligence or collective intelligence - is it the same?
Stephen: Not necessarily, because creative intelligence can be at the individual level. Creativity is the ability to develop solutions or decisions that are not only adequate and useful, but also original in a given context. Actually, at Democracy, what we focus on - and this is our motto - is collective creativity for the common good. By this we mean the ability that groups can have, if we help them and they're in the right conditions, to develop solutions that are not only adequate and useful and original.
Alessandro: About Democracy, can you maybe say something about what it is?
Stephen: Sure. Democracy is a consultancy, so we help people when we get contracts with them to be more collectively creative and for the common good. That means to develop solutions to complex collective problems. So we work a lot with public authorities, we work with NGOs, we work with interest groups, sometimes political parties or politicians. Our harvest is to both understand politics and collective decision-making, as well as bring them methods to do this better - to be smarter together, to be more creative together.
Alessandro: Do you have some use cases, like some episodes related to this collective intelligence that was applied?
Stephen: Sure, yes we have tons. One example of a project that I liked that we did recently was to work with the Ministry for Social Housing of the Wallonia region of Belgium. The ministry invited us to convene a group of about sixty stakeholders who work on social housing and to get them to think over a period of a month with three days over that period of in-person meetings to think through the context, the issues, and to develop original policy solutions - new methods, new policies that the ministry could implement.
They came up with about twenty new approaches that the participants were very proud of because they said, "We're not used to meeting together across different disciplines and types of organizations, and we're not used to having specific approaches that boost our imagination and help us think outside the box." That's a case that we have many other ones of.
I can think of one of my first endeavors in this sector - and this is more participatory democracy as we call it. In 2007, I initiated and organized the first EU Citizens' Assembly. So this was 350 citizens drawn by lot, so representative of the diversity of Europe's population, and working together for two and a half days. At the time we talked about pensions and climate issues in Europe.
Alessandro: Democracy is a sort of network of people, the consultancy. I was wondering which kind of skills are important to have to do this?
Stephen: Well, I think what makes our team unique is that the people who work with us have both a very good understanding of how politics work and how decisions are made - the institutional system, but also political dynamics, political communication, the realities of working in public affairs and the political context. We combine this with skills related to the methods of creativity, convening, facilitating, thinking in groups, and designing processes and events that allow people to think better together.
You have lots of facilitators who are very good at doing that - for instance, to facilitate a board meeting of a company. On the other hand, you have lots of people who are very good at understanding political issues and who are public affairs advisors or whatever. We have both hats and try to be good at both.
Alessandro: I saw that your background is, I would say, hybrid in some way. Would you like to say something about that?
Stephen: Sure. Well, indeed, the activities that I described reflect what I did before, because I worked for about twenty-five years in politics in the broad sense. I was a public affairs and lobbying consultant in London and Brussels. I was an advisor in the Belgian government. I was co-head of a think tank and I did some local community organizing. I worked for foundations in various ways. I've always worked on public issues.
My last position in that capacity was at the European Climate Foundation, a large foundation fighting climate change. That's when I really thought, "Well, I need to be better equipped to understand how we can help groups shift the conversation, work together more efficiently, and be more creative - come up with new solutions and get people behind them, get enthusiasm."
So for the past ten years, I've written a couple of books on political creativity and collective intelligence and democracy, and that's what I do now.
Alessandro: Yeah, I was thinking about your academic background that I see as sort of hybrid in some way. So how did you approach this? And when did you realize that in the political field there was a necessity to bring some creativity or more?
Stephen: I'd be curious to know where you think my academic background is hybrid. For me it's quite classic - I studied political science at Sciences Po in Paris, and then ten years later I did another master's degree in public administration at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. So I've always been in that field. What's more unusual is taking a turn towards creativity and innovation in politics.
Alessandro: Sorry, I was thinking when you first thought that creativity was missing in the political field.
Stephen: It was really when I was in this job at the European Climate Foundation. Actually, it was a little bit before - it was when I was at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where I was already interested in the political fight against climate change. I was struck by how in the curriculum of the Kennedy School there was nothing about...
What happened exactly was at the school we were allowed to take classes in other schools on the Harvard campus and around MIT, etc. So it was great - an amazing opportunity to learn things. So I looked at the courses offered at the business school, for instance, and at MIT, and there I saw that you have things like "Design Thinking for Innovation" and "Making Your Team More Innovative" and "Driving Success with Creative Thinking" - whatever the titles were, but that sort of thing.
I was struck by how we didn't have that at the school of public affairs and government. I got curious and I went to the library of Harvard, which is one of the largest in the world, and I typed the words "creativity" and "business" and there were hundreds, thousands of books about making your business successful with creativity techniques and developing innovative products, etc.
And I typed "creativity" and "politics" and I remember seeing four entries, including one about political theater in the Czech Republic in the Soviet era, etc. So I was amazed. I thought there's something missing here.
So that stayed with me. When I went to the European Climate Foundation and I saw how we were constantly facing a barrage of opposition and resistance, that people were struggling to get to grips with this challenge, I thought we need as a society to learn the way companies learned to come up with new solutions fast and get people enthusiastic about them and sell them. We need to do the same with solving large public problems. That was the process by which I got into this.
Alessandro: So you think that in some way politics is slower compared to business in adapting to new situations, technologies, and so on?
Stephen: Yes, of course. But a company's job is easy, you know. They sell a certain product, sometimes a single product, sometimes a range of products within a certain domain. So even if you're Dyson - the British guy who invented the bagless vacuum cleaner - okay, he's very inventive, but he's only trying to solve a very simple, very narrow problem.
Policymakers, civil public administration, politicians, choose whatever - they're trying to solve problems that are super complex with a huge variety of stakeholders, and it's incredibly more difficult. Solving climate change is much more difficult than improving vacuum cleaners, with all due respect to vacuum cleaner engineers.
Alessandro: Absolutely. How do you think, in relation to climate change, collective intelligence can help? Is collective intelligence more related to stakeholders, public administration, institutions, or also like, as you said before, more related to civic participation in some way? Like civic participation? How can it help? How do you see collective intelligence applied to such a big problem like climate change?
Stephen: That's a very vast question, so it's not easy to answer simply. One high-level answer is that a problem like climate change is that we need to change ways of producing and consuming that are entrenched in society. So basically we need to invent new ways of living and deciding together and organizing things. So that requires imagination. That requires the ability to imagine, to think of a different world - a world in which things are done differently - and to make that world come to reality. That is a process of imagination leading to innovation - things that happen in the real world.
The political system is not designed to nurture people's imagination all the way to creating and implementing innovations. It is designed to do all sorts of things, and some of them very legitimate - organizing people, organizing decisions, coming up with parties and representatives and people running for elections, and organizing stability in the system, and executing the decisions of governments and all sorts of things. It's not designed to foster imagination and nurture it all the way to things happening.
So the system, on the contrary, has many elements that are nurturing what would be called path dependency - so things that were done in a certain way keep renewing themselves. They have a tendency to impact the future and shape the future. Our political system resists change more than it encourages it. And again, for very legitimate reasons - we have rule of law, we have respect for established laws and previous decisions, etc.
There are also not so great reasons, like political parties always seeking the safest way forward and members of political parties not being very imaginative at a personal level, etc. This is all very complex with lots of causes. But overall, climate change requires change on our part. If we don't change, it's the climate that changes. And the political system is not built around managing change fast and in that imaginative way.
Alessandro: So we have to change the way we live. I wonder if this is a sort of cultural problem. Maybe you have some thoughts about culture against policies. Now I don't want to say in some opposite way, but I'm thinking if the solution is, as you said, like changing the way we live and changing also maybe the design of how we take decisions and so on, or also changing the policies. So one is what I would say more bottom-up, but the other maybe more top-down.
Stephen: Well, certainly one thing that struck me - and maybe I was influenced here by the fact that I'm half French and half American - is how in France there's a certain culture of expecting that the state will solve things for you. There's a certain dependency on public institutions to take control and manage our lives, versus a certain culture of autonomy and self-management and political entrepreneurship in the U.S.
It strikes me that if we want as a society to be faster at creating new solutions to solve problems, we can't just rely on governments to think for us and solve things for us. It is a general culture of caring and thinking together. In the handbook of political creativity I wrote about ten years ago, in the conclusion I said something like: in France the motto is "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité" (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity). Well, we should add to this creativity - "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, Créativité" - because the first three are difficult to nourish and flourish in these difficult times if we're not also creative.
So I think there is a cultural aspect also, and therefore it also means helping kids be more creative at school. We have very non-creative ways of teaching in schools - very simplistic, very old-fashioned, even in many schools. So that cultural aspect of being more participatory in business, in teams, in corporations, in public administration is something I think we should do more.
Alessandro: About this kind of dependency on public institutions, I've seen how people often think that they do not have the power to change the world they're living in. Do you think this is because of school, or we're not used to being creative?
Stephen: I totally agree about changing the educational system. We have come to equate democracy with a system of delegation of our decision-making power to representatives. And many people don't feel they have what you described as agency - people don't feel they have agency. They don't have the ability to get involved, be heard, say things that are relevant and useful and contribute to public decision-making.
So indeed, a culture of the state and citizens coming together to be more creative and faster at solving public problems requires, on the part of decision-makers, the willingness to listen and share power. And on the part of citizens, the willingness to get involved, spend time, and trust that they can make a meaningful contribution. And the system - the political system - should make them feel confident that they can contribute.
There was an OECD study on trust in governments that came out in October last year (2024). You can find it online. It said that one of the first factors for trust in government is the perception that governments listen to us. I find this striking. If people perceive that governments are genuinely listening to them, they trust governments. It's not so surprising when you think of it, but actually when you look at the way governments function today, there's not such a huge investment in actually actively listening to citizens on many issues. They're often telling citizens what the topics should be and what the policies should be. It's very much top-down.
Alessandro: If we think about democracy now, we think about representative systems. Do you think that with collective intelligence and other kinds of intelligence - suddenly artificial intelligence - that could help? Maybe intelligence that could help collective intelligence emerge? In the future, will we see some other kind of system different from the representative one?
Stephen: Is your question specifically about artificial intelligence?
Alessandro: No, like do you have any thoughts about the future of democracy? I think we are seeing some technology that - I mean, thinking about AI is quite disruptive - so I wonder, in the future, what could change? And if the system that we have now will actually change or not, and if it could be very dangerous.
Stephen: Well, yes, I'd be surprised if in fifty years democracy looks like what it looked like for the past fifty years in Europe. I would be hard-pressed to guess what it will look like in fifty years, but one direction it can take - and that's what some people favor - is authoritarian regimes, and we lose the distinctive traits of liberal democracies.
But there are signs that we could invent a new system that is more deeply democratic, with more ways of involving citizens and engaging with society in its different shapes and groups. For that, the book that I coordinated that came out a couple of years ago - "The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intelligence for Democracy and Governance" (long title) - gives all sorts of examples. There are thirty-six case studies from around the world, from the use of prediction markets to smart crowdsourcing to AI combined with deliberative democracy, to hybrids and mixed forums where politicians, civil servants, and citizens come together, and the use of theater and different approaches to help lower-class or less educated people express their opinions and grievances if necessary with civil servants.
There's a vast amount of new approaches to governance that is much more democratic and open, but that doesn't necessarily hit the media headlines. We hear a lot about the populists of this world who are very good at communicating and seizing the public agenda, but we don't hear so much about these democratic innovations, as we call them in the political jargon.
Alessandro: You are saying that this kind of experiment does not hit the media headlines. I was wondering if it is just because the media has to sell, so maybe they want something catchier - maybe talking about an experiment related to democracy is not so interesting for readers that are also customers - or if there are other kinds of reasons.
Stephen: It's interesting because we're actually initiating - I hope with the support of a foundation in the near future - a research project on this, because it's really striking how there are some amazing democratic innovations out there. More than experiments, some of them have been really established and repeated many times and have proven their value, but they don't get much, if any, coverage at all.
This is a concern because all people hear about when it comes to democracy is problems and crisis and negative news. So we really feel it's important that they hear that there are some people out there doing good things and trying different approaches based on the principles of collective intelligence.
So I don't know the exact answer. I've heard from journalists that they're trained to look for problems more than solutions. I heard a journalist once tell me, "We were told in journalism school: if it's positive, it's advertising. You're not here to say so-and-so did some amazing stuff." You're more here to identify problems.
But on the other hand, the same journalists told me how there is an increasing recognition that negative content feeds anxiety and negative dynamics in society, and how journalists need to be more constructive. But I don't know the root causes of this, and I hope we'll have an idea soon.
Alessandro: In relation to the possibility that there will be some authoritarian regimes, I think about the previous century. I think maybe when we talk about authoritarian regimes, we can talk about a sort of collective stupidity. I know that it's hard to think about a solution, and I think that collective intelligence and creative intelligence can of course maybe find a solution to this. How do you expect that people can build something that is different from an authoritarian regime?
Stephen: This is also a very vast question, and indeed something that I've been trying to tackle. So first of all, yes, people are very good at collective stupidity. Yes, we're very good at that. We can - history has shown how collectively we can make often bad decisions. But it also shows how, even in situations of crisis and difficulty, we come up with much better decisions.
It's not a question of mental capacity, so to speak. It's a question of how we organize our institutions and our political culture. So I think the key issue for the coming months and years is certainly to resist the temptation of populism. Populism is a great way for some policymakers to gain votes. They argue that they speak on behalf of the people and are the true voice of the people, with simple solutions that look very much like common sense.
Donald Trump, who says "put all the tough guys in Alcatraz" - well, that sounds tough and he's listening to people who are concerned about safety on the street. But on the other hand, what are the solutions in front of this that would be more appealing to people, more effective, that deliver fast? That's not easy, right? So he's probably not going to reopen the Alcatraz prison - it's probably more for posting and media headlines.
Those who are serious about politics need to be better, not only in terms of solutions and delivering results, but also communication and appealing to people's emotions, etc. And again, that's where creativity can help. Creativity can help us generate faster, better decisions that are more appealing.
I'm currently writing an essay on six examples of such policies. For instance, Sweden, which in the 2000s decided and announced that it was going to go for zero deaths on roads. So very appealing, very strong message: "We no longer tolerate that when you get in your car - the most dangerous activity you can get involved with - when you get in your car, you should be safe and get to your destination without being seriously harmed or killed."
By treating this with a lot of rigor and in a systemic way, and actually a lot of creativity, etc., they managed to drastically reduce the level of injuries and deaths on roads. Sweden has been copied by other Scandinavian countries, relative to countries that didn't have that same level of ambition. So it's appealing to the heart - zero deaths on roads, I get that - and it's appealing to the mind, and it gets the mind working.
So the easy way forward for a politician is to be a demagogue and a populist and come up with simplistic solutions. The only way forward for democracy is to be very smart collective thinking politicians, I think.
Alessandro: Yeah, I agree. I think about what you said about school and the educational system. Many times I thought that at school we used to learn how to compete instead of learning how to collaborate. I wonder if you have some thoughts related to school or maybe some memories from when you were a child.
Stephen: Well, yeah. I have two daughters - one who's finishing high school this year and the other one is now at university. I've witnessed how they were taught, and the schools were good and the teachers were well-intentioned, but indeed it's striking: ninety percent of assignments were, you know, on your own. Ninety-five percent of evaluations were for work done on your own, in front of your piece of paper, and virtually no collaborative work, no learning of how to work as a team, and no education in terms of group interaction, collective thinking, etc.
So this science of collective intelligence, which is deep and very well documented now, is not in the curriculum. So it's great to learn history and it's great to learn mathematics on your own in front of the teacher, but it's not sufficient. Plus the competitive spirit - you still have teachers who hand over the grades from the top to the bottom, so the guy or the girl at the bottom feels absolutely hopeless about studying, and the one at the top is competitive, and it's horrible. It's really silly. It's quite primitive.
Alessandro: Absolutely. Last question - not the question, but a sort of message to the people that are working on finding new ways to decide, to brainstorm, like people that are searching for new solutions for new kinds of collaboration between people.
Stephen: Well, yes, I would have a simple piece of advice: dare to be creative, dare to change the way groups work, and allow imagination to come in. You know, as a consultancy, I've had that in my life - every time I was a consultant, I often realize that you help groups do some pretty common sense, basic stuff.
When I was a lobbying consultant, the common sense thing was: think of your audience, don't think of what you want to say, think of what they need to hear, what they need, what they want to hear, etc. And people always forgot that.
Now as a creativity consultant, the common sense basic service we provide to groups is: challenge your group interactions. The group interactions are totally unimaginative and the same across all institutions that we work with. People have meetings - people have meetings that are usually one hour, where there is at best an agenda, and where people talk without any sense of time, and they do not have any idea of the dynamics of a group, of what creates the right conditions for a group to think together. It's really, with all due respect, very primitive.
So my advice is: allow yourself to challenge those formats, to be reflective on how to conduct your group interactions, whether in-person or in the jargon "asynchronous" when you're not together, and to organize it. Be mindful of what will create the right conditions for a smarter group.
Maybe just as a finishing note, as this is important: the conditions to make a group smarter are essentially the following. First, if you can make the group larger, do so. Collective intelligence has the word "collective" in it. If there's two of you, it's great, it's better than one. But if you're ten, you're likely to be smarter than two. But if the ten all look the same, have the same ideas, come from the same background, it won't be as good as if you have ten people who are very different in experience, skills, etc.
Then allow these ten people, or however many, to deliberate well. And that means information, that means time to reflect, that means the ability to listen to one another. So psychological safety - you probably need a facilitator to make sure everybody gets to talk, everybody feels free to disagree, etc.
And then you need a way to capture what's being said. You could have ten people who are diverse who deliberate well, but if you don't have a way to capture the data that they produce, the decisions they suggest - whether it's voting systems or other mechanisms - you need to aggregate.
These are some of the key conditions that you need. So if you challenge the way you do things with these criteria in mind, you can invite a lot more intelligence and imagination in your interactions, and that can help maybe save the world or your problems.
Alessandro: Thank you, Stephen.
Stephen: You're welcome, Alex.
