Deep Democracy as a disruptive innovation

In the wake of the recent G20 in Toronto, my friend Annahid and I were talking about the state of social change movements today. Annahid has been on the front lines of social change her whole life, and is founder and senior partner of Anima Leadership Institute in Toronto, which offers leadership programs for individuals, teams and organizations in support of transformative change, so she’s got a pretty good perspective on the movement. She was disheartened by what she saw as the same old divisive rhetoric, and the tendency to “battle might with right.” In an email exchange, she wrote, “the complexity of our current environments and systems means that no one individual or group can possibly have all the answers required. Our strategies and solutions instead must innovate in their ability to integrate different perspectives and knowledge.”

Annahid is hosting a series of talks on Animating Social Change, and asked me to speak about Deep Democracy. What social change innovation does Deep Democracy offer, she asked? Not so easy to say as I first thought, I discovered. Is it the creative techniques for working with conflict? The teleological view of disturbance and conflict? The embrace of non-consensual experiences? The way it views marginalization as both an inner and outer process? All yes, but something else, something’s missing. Then it occurred to me, Deep Democracy is not just an innovation, but a disruptive innovation. Clayton M. Christensen, in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, differentiated between sustaining and disruptive innovations. He describes disruptive innovations as ones that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect. Deep Democracy is disruptive because it puts individual development back in the center of the conversation on systemic change. The split between inner and outer, personal and political is radically revisioned in Deep Democracy. Here’s how I see Deep Democracy’s disruptive innovation:

1. It works with shades of gray, not just black and white. Truths can co-exist; the truth or reality of one side or position does not negate the truth of another, opposing positions. Each issue is multi-faceted, and each facet is a truth, an essential piece that needs to be considered, respected and heard

2. Politics is often a winner-take-all, zero sum affair, where change depends on winning. While winning is good, it’s not good enough because it doesn’t make the other side go away. In an interconnected universe, change that is sustainable must absorb some of the motives, needs, and issues of both sides of an issue. There are hidden forces, invisible influences, historical dramas, and big unknowns behind every issue. And these must be investigated, explored, and worked with, not just overcome.

3. Deep Democracy values facts and feelings. Most debates are a slugfest of facts. We bludgeon each other with data, statistics, polls, and logic to win the argument. Whether debating health care, globalization, or summer vacation plans, most debates center on logic, reason, and material facts. Here is a fact I like: facts don’t change minds. No fact can change a mind that is already made up. Not only do facts rarely change minds, when faced with information contrary to their beliefs, people either reject the information or interpret it in a way that allows them to hold onto their beliefs

Deep Democracy recognizes that feelings drive facts and not only acknowledges and works with the emotional level of a conflict, but sees feelings as the leverage point. It understands that the more entrenched we are in our position, the more likely there is history to it. Its methods are designed to tunnel underneath the debate to explore people’s experiences, stories and life events that give rise to their ideas and beliefs. Hearing people’s stories and experiences allows the debate and conflict to get past sound bites and polarizations, and reach its transformational potential.

4. Deep Democracy disrupts traditional thinking about diversity. Diversity in Deep Democracy is more than socio-cultural competence and inclusion. It’s a psychological, as well as social principle. In addition to people, positions and voices that are marginal or excluded in a group, Deep Democracy includes states of mind: subjective feelings, states of consciousness, emotions, moods, history, ancestors, dreams and spiritual experiences that have a profound influence on group life. We have way more within us, way more difference and variation than we know, or than we are trained to trust. We are conditioned to leave out our full selves when we enter groups. And that means that our movements are missing vast amounts of capacity. Bringing all of our inner diversity into groups and organization can produce extraordinary change and engagement.

5. Deep democracy is a way of being in the world. Democracy has to be as much behavior and form of consciousness as mechanism for government. But there is a jet lag between the forms of government we have created and the individual consciousness needed to populate those governments. Foucault once wrote that “we need… a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty. We need to cut off the King’s head: in political theory that has still to be done.” We still live under a King, still stuck in feudal behavior by looking to leaders to blame or to have solutions. Both criticism and attack are forms of worship – they place the locus of action and potential for solution on the leadership role, inflating it with special power. To really nail democracy, we not only have to perfect our systems and structures of government, but we’ve got to look inside, to advance the personal skills and abilities that Deep Democracy emphasizes: working with difference, stepping into eldership, embracing the unknown, valuing dissident and using power to the benefit of the whole – whether in ourselves, our families, or our social groups.

These are my thoughts on the innovation of Deep Democracy – what would you add?