It’s time for a new kind of discussion.
Towards the end of a grainy recording of an Oxford Union debate from 2008, hidden away in the depths of YouTube, Jonathan Zittrain makes a savage indictment of our democratic system. The essence of democracy, he observes, is binary. It’s yes or no. It is “doors to pass through every so often to indicate your preference for one of two insipid choices.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqXg9BGWPHY
The internet, he pointed out back then, promised something much more sophisticated: the possibility of rejecting the binary, in favour of a more nuanced consensus. Our existing democratic structures are hard-wired to limit our options to two, but now we have invented a technology that unshackles us from those and opens up a thousand new possibilities.
He wasn’t the first to point out the limits of the binary choice, and the possibilities that might lie beyond. One alternative, a meeting structure called “The Six Thinking Hats,” a meeting format that guides a whole group to consider a topic from more perspectives, was described by its inventor, Edward de Bono in 1973 as: something that “may well be the most important change in human thinking for the past 2,300 years.”
And yet, these past few years, we seem more than ever to have defined ourself by exclusive, limiting, binary choices. In or Out, Gammon or Snowflake, Freedom or Equality. Edward De Bono’s vision, like Zittrain’s, was exhilarating, but 50 years after its conception, the promise of a society that embraces complexity, that seeks out the balance of consensus, possibility and compromise, seems to to have eluded us entirely.
On the contrary, we’ve doubled down on the dangerous habit of proactively ignoring other people’s perspectives. Whether it be filibusters in the senate or the chanted three-word slogans outside it; deflective corporate messaging or pointless interviews containing nothing but question-dodging; misinformation spread online or the passive-aggressive use of the ‘😂’ emoji in a comments thread, they all amount to the same thing: our democratic checks and balances are failing us.
It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that for all the possibility it has opened up, the powerful technology we have in our hands today serves only to increase the distance between the two doors of the debating chamber, and to make it much more echoey.
Meanwhile, according to Forbes, the corporate world is frustrated. Up to 50% of executives’ time is spent on meetings. And yet many agree that those meetings are unproductive. Our business leaders are spending their time in ways that they themselves think doesn’t make sense.
Matthew Syed explains the reason for this in his book, Rebel Ideas: “At most meetings... communication is dysfunctional. Many people are silent. Status rigs the discourse. People don’t want to say what they think but what they think the leader wants to hear. And they fail to share crucial information because they don’t realise other people lack it.”
I suppose it’s natural to have an eye on understanding the door the leader wants to walk through, but with the connection we now have at our fingertips, we’re capable of so much more. In Zittrain’s words: “we have a chance to make the internet the greatest force for community, for liberty, for human rights; I’d even say for humanity, at a time when this is desperately needed.”
I believe it's time to take a step in that direction.
ShuffleThink is a side project that attempts to start to solve some of these problems: an online application that aims to move us past groupthink and back towards the superpower that has driven human progress: thinking as a group.
Please give it a try. All perspectives welcome.
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