The Citizen Confidence Index and People-Inclusive Design with Jon Alexander

Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to The Future of Teamwork podcast. This is Dane Groeneveld, CEO of HUDDL3 group, and today I've got a really exciting guest, Jon Alexander. Jon's the author of Citizens and co- founder of the Citizenship Project. Citizens as a book was just recently named as one of the top five in the summer reading program by McKinsey. So he's up there in some pretty esteemed company, and it's going to be great to learn a little bit more about his area of passion and work. So welcome, Jon.

Jon Alexander: Thanks for having me, Dane. Good to meet you.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. So tell us a little bit more about how you came to be where you're at today, like life story, professional development, what brought you to be so excited about the future of citizenship?

Jon Alexander: Life story? Right, well let's start in... No, basically for a long time, all I wanted to do really was be a professional athlete and then it became clear that I wasn't quite going to make it. So I stumbled into the advertising industry kind of by accident, but with a fairly heavy competitive instinct from years of sport. And my first boss described my job to me by saying, " What you got to remember is that the average consumer sees something like 3, 000 commercial messages a day, and your job is to cut through that, you've got to make yours the best."

Dane Groeneveld: That's a-

Jon Alexander: And for a while, because I was this sports guy, I was pretty happy with the make yours the best thing. But over time I began to focus on the first part of the sentence like, 3, 000 commercial messages a day, and I began to ask deeper and deeper questions and start to go, "What are we doing to ourselves when that's the case?" And ultimately, by the way, the latest study's out, there was a study published a little while ago, a little investigation that suggests there was anything up to 10, 000 for certain cohorts at the moment. And so, what are we doing? Where I got to was really asking myself a question, which was, what are we doing to ourselves when we tell ourselves we're consumers 3, 000- odd times a day? I came to see all of these messages, actually, and it's not just advertising, it's also the way our media speak to us, the way our government speaks to us, the way charity speak to us. Every aspect of society starts to tell us this story that we're consumers, that our agency is limited to choosing between the options that someone else offers, assumes that we are lazy and self- interested and sort of projects that assumption onto us. And I came to realize that I was part of preaching this story that I thought was, frankly, pretty hateful. In many ways, I think it's a kind of species- level self- hatred complex. And so I went through a pretty dark time, to be honest, and then came out the other side and started to ask myself, what would it look like to put the same creative energy into involving people in the world, into inviting their participation not just selling them stuff? And founded this consulting firm, the New Citizenship Project, co- founded it with an old friend from Adland, actually. And yes, started experimenting and really now, and the reason for writing the book, which was published back in March this year, was really going, oh my God, this is getting super real. The diagnosis I would have of the moment in time we're now living in is that, through this lens of story, as I've come to think of it, I think most of the people in positions of power in our society can only see two stories, two options, two possible stories. They can see the consumer story that we've been in for the last 80 years or so, and then they can see rising, this, what I call the subject story, as in subjects of the king, the kind of the authoritarian story. And because they only see those two, they think their job is to protect us from the rise of authoritarianism by maintaining this consumer story. But actually, it's exactly that polarity and it's exactly the insistence on the consumer story that's pushing people into the arms of the subject. So, really what I'm doing in the book is going, " Guys, look, there is another way, there's another story, there's another idea of humanity." And putting out this idea that actually, the strategy that best fits the future and I think this matches very much with the spirit of HUDDL3 and what your kind of inquiry is at the moment. But what would it look like to step into a story where actually, we start from belief that all of us are smarter than any of us, that we do best by tapping into the ideas and energy and resources of everyone by treating everyone as fundamentally human, as capable of and wanting to get involved and participate and shape the world, not just as lazy and selfish sort of choice machines. So yeah, you asked life story, that was quite a lot of it. That was quite a lot of it.

Dane Groeneveld: I love it. No, I love it. And it's always fascinating to hear when that light bulb went off, when someone like you that's got this passion and this great direction for where people can be going has kind of found it. And coming out of Adland makes total sense. In fact, we were talking before the show about my good friend from university days, Alex Craven, he's working for Amazon these days. And whenever I sit down for a beer with him, I'm like, " Oh my gosh, I did not realize this is how this whole world worked, the data that we're collecting, the way that we're putting ads in front of people." And once upon a time, as a parent, you had to protect yourself when you were going through the checkout, the kids could see the toys and the lollies but now it's like all day, every day at any time of the day there's just stuff hitting kids, stuff hitting adults, it's nonstop.

Jon Alexander: I hadn't really thought of it like that actually. Yeah, it's quite a powerful metaphor. Yeah, from sneaking the chocolate bar into the trolley at checkout to what messages are coming at you where. I mean, this whole thing... Amazon is a fascinating organization that it always makes me wonder what story of success, what kind of idea of what it is to be good in the world is someone like Jeff Bezos living in.

Dane Groeneveld: Yes.

Jon Alexander: Because I can't quite, a big part of the challenge of the work that I'm trying to do and the ideas that I'm holding is I am starting from a point of view that says people want to be good, they want to contribute, they want to make a mark in the world for the better. And that applies to those in positions of power as well. And yet the other part is, so sometimes the way I say it is I have two kind of fundamental beliefs about humanity. The first is that we're citizens by nature, that we are, as I say, collaborative, caring and creative. The second is that though that we are fundamentally storytelling and story dwelling creatures. We are fundamentally shaped, we need stories at this quite sort deep systemic level to tell us who to collaborate with, who to care for, what to create. And so thinking about people, like Bezos makes me wonder what's the story that he's living in? Because I think it's too simplistic to think like a load of people who I work with a lot of the time would just go, " Bezos is evil." And that, I think, is too simple and too simplistic.

Dane Groeneveld: No, I agree. And it's fascinating again with that theme of story, what story is driving someone at the top level, any big successful entrepreneur, business owner. Is the business that they're doing something that allowed them to create money so they can go and do what they feel excited about next? Has our culture, has our society made people believe that you had to work until you're in your fifties and sixties and had wealth before you could really start collaborating and making a difference in the community? I think that in some ways that has been part of the old world story that the boomers, the Gen Xs, when you look at Gen Z, they're waking up today and they're saying, " The first thing I want to do is go and make a difference in my community. I want to be supporting brands that do good for the environment. I want to be giving back." They're not waiting until they've amassed wealth or had success to make that impact. So it's interesting understanding what's driven those people to where they're at today and what's driving the new generations.

Jon Alexander: I think that's right. I mean, I think the other thing you got to remember is what the process of working your way up through the ranks does as well, right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Jon Alexander: I'm sure you've had this in your career, I know I did in my time in advertising, you make progress by knowing the answers, by being... And that in itself, the very idea of being a professional carries with it the idea that you know the answer rather than that you are really good at holding the space and holding the question and inviting other people to come up with it. And then when you get to a certain level of seniority, it sort of conditioned you to behave in that way to have a kind of... It's almost like we've designed a system that would maximize that kind of hero complex, which is then really problematic because it pushes everyone else out. And if you think, nowhere is that more true, and this I know isn't a politics podcast so we won't go there too much I'm sure, but nowhere is that more true than in our political systems. You have to be heroic, you have to be like the answer even to get elected as a local counselor, let alone a local member of parliament, let alone as a leader in a party. And then by the time you get there, you're the most arrogant fool in the world and all you can do-

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Jon Alexander: It's really messy. And this is one of the reasons why, the way I think about this stuff, what we're talking about is really a very fundamental shift. It's like what people call a paradigm shift, right? And that word is kind of banded around too much, it's like a paradigm shift in digital technology, a paradigm shift in drills. It's like fuck off. But this really is a paradigm shift, I think. And the nature of those real paradigm shifts is that because system stories evolve like processes and ways of working and ways of behaving, when a paradigm falls apart, there is a collapse phase. Because for a while people know that the story is broken, know that the system is broken, but the only processes and only structures and so forth that we have are all built in that story, even though we know it's broken. And we have to do the work of building the new systems and processes and structures while we're still living with the decline of the old. And personally, I find that a really helpful way to understand the time we're living in. It's like we all know this is busted, right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Jon Alexander: The moment we're honest with ourselves and we look each other in the eye and go, "You know it's screwed, don't you?" And it's like, "Uh-huh." But we also know that we have to go to work in the day and we have to keep doing what we were doing, and that's super hard. And the cognitive load, the emotional load of humanity right now is so heavy because of that.

Dane Groeneveld: And I'm seeing that with friends in every field and every stage of life. We're out there having conversations, " How's the family, how's work? How's the community sports team?" And that load is very tangible. It's interesting. We were in Italy a couple of weeks ago working with Dr. Ernesto Sirolli and he does some great work on economic development, particularly in communities where they're just going out, there're looking for those innovators, those passionate people to come up and create new businesses. So we're out there talking to him and a few of the things that you touched on, Jon, he's all about, like the conformity that's created by our education and our career paths, that needing to be the knowledge holder where actually the real way we need to go is to democratize that knowledge, to invite more people in. And he talks about this story of a nine year old child, as a nine year old you are your more natural self. You haven't been exposed to all of the conformity that comes with peer pressure, and values, and workplace, and education. And he is like, " We need to help humans go back and find who they were at nine and be more that person now and going forwards." And I love that because if you think about a collapse, it's nice to then go back and think, well if we go back to our better selves, our more natural freer spirits, going back to your whole thesis on citizenship, what can we now start to create in communities that we haven't been allowed to before? So that's actually very, it's a nice shift from hateful to hopeful.

Jon Alexander: Right. I mean, that sort of framing makes me think of one of my favorite stories from the research for the book, which I'll just give you the very brief version of. You'll have to read the book for the full version listeners. But this is the Taiwanese government's response to the COVID crisis. They basically, their response was characterized by treating the whole nation as participants in it. So they actually never went into lockdown, but they did respond very quickly. But they basically, like I say, treated the whole nation as part of the team. So they did things like, because it's Taiwan and quite a high tech nation, they set challenge prizes to build apps that would track face mask availability and all this sort of stuff. And this is what you prompted with your reference to Dr. Sirolli, was it?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Jon Alexander: So they set up a phone line where any citizen could ring in with ideas for how the country's response could be better, and with a voicemail, I think, recorded by the president herself.

Dane Groeneveld: Wow.

Jon Alexander: So the story goes, a six year old boy, I think it was, rang up and said, " The boys in my class don't want to wear their face masks because they're pink and they think they're girly. So you need to do something to make pink face masks cool. And I think you should work with the baseball team because all the kids love baseball." And apparently three days later they had the little boy, the president, and half the Taiwanese baseball team on the televised...

Dane Groeneveld: Isn't that amazing. Yeah.

Jon Alexander: I think, Dr. Sirolli may be referring to it a little bit more loosely than that very direct interpretation. But you know what, who knows better how a little boy's brain works than another little boy, right? So if you're going to treat people as citizens then saying like, " Okay"... I remember in the UK during COVID, we had this weird thing where for some reason central government made an edict that you could go swimming but all swimming lanes had to be in clockwise rotation. Which actually basically means that you are getting closer to someone because you get... We've never done that because we always used to hit each other in our swimming club and it's like just leave us alone. It is that sort of-

Dane Groeneveld: Absurdity.

Jon Alexander: ...The absurdity of the idea that a central brain knows best. These are slightly silly examples, but silly examples help. But like that someone who's climbed the ranks at the department for sport or whatever, has been conditioned to believe that they should know and therefore... And it's like, just put some faith in people. Maybe that's the other thing I would draw out of the Taiwan thing, I interviewed the minister who led the Taiwanese COVID response, in the research for the book. And at one point I said, " People of Taiwan must really trust the government for you to be able to do this stuff and I can't imagine it." And the response was, " We don't want people to trust the government."

Dane Groeneveld: Wow, interesting.

Jon Alexander: "What we want is for government to trust people."

Dane Groeneveld: That's a great reverse. I like that.

Jon Alexander: And the same is true in business and charity. I think the whole thing of it's not just politics but also the consumer story isn't just business. I've done loads of work with big, big charities who come to see themselves as sort of competing for their donors and offering value for money propositions. It's like, no guys, you're in totally the wrong game. And treating the other people as beneficiaries and victims, and it's like, no, the key here has to be about recognizing that humans are creatures who need agency. And so what you're about has to be creating the conditions for them to find that.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, it is interesting, like you say, even in the not- for- profit world, the consumerism that's driven there, grants have always struck me as very odd. It's a way to get money, but grants are often written by governments in terminologies which are outdated. So let's talk autism for a minute. Autism in Australia, my home country, is still classed as a disability. Now that goes totally against the grain of how we're trying to educate people on neurodiversity, that autism can be a superpower, not a disability. But all of these organizations have to keep talking about disability because that's their only way to access the grant money. And so we're going about things in the wrong way.

Jon Alexander: And these bits of language, New Citizenship Project's been doing some work on autism in the UK, it's fascinating, I totally agree. And the language is so heavy, maybe heavy is not the right word, it's like so deep, it carries these... Even if these organizations just sort of think that they're just doing it to do a thing, it's in there then and it's in your language. And one of the ways I talk about this sometimes like, the words we use aren't just in a objects that we can take and leave, they're more like the scaffolding or the brush strokes on a first sketch of a painting. They set the pattern for the whole thing. And this is true of the word consumer as well. In a business, if you talk about people as consumers, you are unconsciously in every meeting where you use that word, you're conditioning everyone in that conversation to have the assumption that people are lazy and selfish and that the only thing they can do is choose between options. It's really, words matter so much. I was involved in some social psychology research, one of them was a resource dilemma scenario. So the way it worked was we gave 2000 people a scenario, we said, " You're one of four households depending on a single well for your water supply. And the well's starting to run dry so you need to use less water." And then you're asked two questions, to what extent are you prepared to use less water and to what extent do you trust the other three households to use less water as well. And then the clever bit was for half the sample, we changed the word household for the word consumer so, " You're one of four consumers dependent", and where I'm going, right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Jon Alexander: For the people for whom the word is consumer, they're less willing to compromise and less likely to trust.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that makes total sense too. Those games are fascinating. I know there's a Dr. Jane McGonigal here in California who's done some cool Ted talks on the power of games. You're in Greece today, she talks back to early Grecian times and how in a time of drought they created games in order to keep people in the community working together through hardship. But it's fascinating what humans can do when they think of themselves as a collective versus as individuals that are pitted against each other. I think that's very empowering.

Jon Alexander: I think as well, we're seeing that idea of seeing yourself as part of a collective. And what's really important is, it's not about disappearing into that collective, it's about bringing the uniqueness to it. And I'm sure this resonates with your work, kind of building teams, the most effective teams have a shared purpose, have a shared goal, but still leave enough space for the individual to bring the best of themselves, to bring their agency to it. And this is playing through into some really interesting experiments. I do keep going back to the political world, but I'm really fascinated by the structural evolutions that are going on there. So in Paris, in France now, there's what's called a citizen's assembly. So 100 randomly selected Parisians, including refugees and migrants by the way, representative of the city population on various key demographics, age, gender, race, et cetera. And they're basically like an upper house of the city. I think this is right, they have a remit to hold the elected council to account. They decide the theme for a hundred million euros a year of participatory budgeting and they can commission up to, I think it's, four issue based citizens assemblies every year. Now what that does, because 100 people isn't that many but what it does is it carries a spirit, and a sense, and a story of what it means to be a citizen of Paris. And we won't see that massively transform that narrative immediately. But over time, as more people take their turn in that because it's rotating terms as well, the idea that selecting randomly and then expecting, and then knowing actually, that a random selection of 100 represented people will actually bring real wisdom and we'll be able to come together. Nick closer to you, and America's a deeply polarized nation at the moment, but in November 2019 they did a version of this kind of process just as a one off, where they got, I'm trying to remember exactly, I think it was like 500 odd, randomly selected Americans representative of the nation, so including republicans, democrats, QAnon all stuff in there. And they got them together in a conference suite in Dallas for four days and they split them up, whole loaded deliberation and they found that people came together dramatically.

Dane Groeneveld: Yes.

Jon Alexander: Some of the more left leaning moved right on couple of things that held on others that were really cool for them. Some of the right leaning moved left on a couple things. And the critical thing was what's called affective polarization, which basically means not just like... So there's issue polarization is where you disagree on something, affective polarization is where you read into that disagreement, the other person's an asshole. And they found that affective polarization decreased dramatically. So people still kind of disagree to an extent and it's four days, but they massively decreased their kind of hatred for each other, frankly. The really funny thing and my favorite thing about this whole thing is, apparently, someone was telling me that this whole project nearly didn't go ahead because they had the budget raised and they knew what they were going to do and then they got the insurance bill through and they couldn't afford it because the insurance company thought that people were going to kill each other.

Dane Groeneveld: That's a pretty sad reflection of what our risk and actuary folks have come to believe of the world. That's nuts. It's funny, you've talked earlier about agency. Agency is a really interesting word. I've been thinking for some time, even pre COVID, that there was a need to create more agency for employees and teams and workforce because there is a... This isn't taking a socialist view of, hey employees should have control of all of the resources and go forth, do whatever they want. But it is more empowering people to bring, I like the word you use, bring their uniqueness, not feel that they can only work for this one company or they can only work in this one profession, but they can be who they are and actually be recognized for who they are outside of conventional career parts and job titles and whatever else it is out there. Are you seeing, through your research, any examples of good agency and in teams within the private business world or other organizations outside of government?

Jon Alexander: Yeah, I mean, it is something I would love to look into more, to be honest. So one of the things I'm working on at the moment is, in the early stages but of a project we're calling the Citizen Confidence Index. The idea of which is basically, you may have heard of the Consumer Confidence Index, which is this sort of quite long established measure. See I have one idea, Dane. It's basically, I just beat it in every aspect.

Dane Groeneveld: Smash it.

Jon Alexander: The Consumer Confidence Index basically asks people, how's your economic circumstance and are you going to buy more stuff? So the corollary, the Citizen Confidence Index would go like, to what extent do you feel trusted and empowered and do you intend to participate? It needs some honing but it's basically asking rather than do you intend to consume, do you have agency and trying to figure a way of measuring that. And really interestingly, we sort of started in societal space, but increasingly we are heading towards trying to build this by working with companies for exactly the reason you elide to. Because there is already a pretty good body of evidence that where, I mean, it's come up through the language of employee engagement. It's like if employees are engaged then they're more productive, which is a truism and kind of helpful. But what this, I think, does is it helps you get beneath the truism of that and go, " Why though?" And it's not just because employees are engaged, it's because people inside an organization feel they have agency to shape the organization and that's when they're more productive. Because they contribute ideas and they help make the organization better, they become citizens of the organization, not just consumers of jobs. The problem we need to start talking about private sector clients and work is that they don't want you to say it publicly.

Dane Groeneveld: That's right. Yeah, you got to hold back on that.

Jon Alexander: Yeah, exactly. We're working with a very large multinational... But we've started piloting some stuff and offering some of these interventions, like bring together a random selection of the team to represent the team and be part of the governance discussions. And that's making a difference, very simple. I mean, we know it from things like Walmart, right. One of the things Sam Walton did was have idea boxes everywhere and the line, tell Sam. And it's like everyone has a direct line to the CEO is a transformative thing. So some of this stuff is kind of established wisdom, but I think focusing in on the concept of agency is making us go, actually this is a different, we can go deeper and richer and be more conscious of it if we understand what's driving the things that we sort of knew were working anyway.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I think-

Jon Alexander: It's like not trying to max out on the efficiency of our staff, but instead trying to invest in the contribution they can make. It's like you say, it's not a bleeding heart gig, it's actually, no, this is just a really good way of doing things.

Dane Groeneveld: It works. I think this-

Jon Alexander: So I think it's really fascinating that the experiments with basic income or guaranteed income that are spreading around the States in particular. And you're just going, well, people are just contributing more to their organizations, to every aspect of life because they aren't terrified all the time.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. That fear of separation's a huge one. I mean, we talk about psychological safety with most guests that come on and I like those interventions that you're talking about. I would imagine that the Citizen Confidence Index of most companies is pretty low. I mean, there's a stat going round right now that says 74% of people in a meeting that have a good idea for the benefit of the business won't raise their hand and say anything, which is pretty scary.

Jon Alexander: Wow.

Dane Groeneveld: Really scary.

Jon Alexander: Really?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's real. And so you talk about basic income, income guarantees, part of that is just trying to give people the sense that your job's not at risk, that you're not going to-

Jon Alexander: And if it is, your life isn't a risk, right?

Dane Groeneveld: Well, that's another big one. Yeah, you're right. Because today, thousands of years ago, we were worried if a tiger walked into the camp. But now 14 hours a day, we're living with financial and social stresses and strains. So it does feel like you're, you're going to die when you're feeling like I'm going to lose my job or this family relationship's gone the wrong way or whatever it is. I'm now an outcast in my community, that stuff, it still triggers the same chemicals.

Jon Alexander: I have to say though, I'm just still sitting with that 74%.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. It's terrible.

Jon Alexander: Imagine what the world could be like already if half of those people had contributed their ideas.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, absolutely.

Jon Alexander: It's crazy.

Dane Groeneveld: There's an article which I read years ago, it was in the Atlantic, it was called the 9. 9 Percent. It was a great article and it talked about most professions, most businesses have always had this protectionist approach, " We'll make it hard for you to become a lawyer. We'll make it hard for you to become a doctor. We'll make it hard for you to get a job in the port because we want to protect." Because there's this scarcity mindset of, well, there's only so many jobs, there's only so many houses in the nice neighborhood, so we're going to protect each other. And the way the 9. 9% came up is it said 0.1% of the world is the Jeff Bezoses, Bill Gates, the crazy rich. Then there's 9. 9% of the world who have the real, they have the agency, let's stick with the word agency, because they've got access to good networks, access to good education, internet, banking, you name it, good legal systems. And then you've got the 90% of the world that's kind of locked out because they don't have any of those resources available to them. And again, that really hit me, it was a really impactful article to read because to your point, and maybe that correlates with this 74% number too in a microcosm of a workplace, to your point, we are leaving so much value just out there because we're not inviting people into the problem solving like the Taiwanese government.

Jon Alexander: Yeah. And it's just the wisdom and so forth that's just being left at home as a result of that or being squashed worse. It really came alive for me... The day that I really committed to writing the book was during the pandemic and the UK government had reacted slowly initially and then did their" Stay at home, do as you're told" thing, which was kind of needed and whatever. But what was fascinating was that what was actually going on and what had started before government even responded was that mutual aid groups started springing up everywhere and street WhatsApp groups. And then the government started this thing called the NHS First Responder Scheme, National Health Service volunteer auxiliary kind of thing. And they built the website for 250,000 people to sign up in three weeks and 750, 000 signed up in 36 hours and crashed the website. And then they had to shut it. And it was like, what? And in that time, from February to May 2020, the proportion of the population who agreed that Britain's a place where people look out for each other went from 19% to 63%, unheard of.

Dane Groeneveld: That's huge. Yeah.

Jon Alexander: And then the message then changed because stuff was going wrong and people were dying because the government had reacted too late and da da da. And what they changed it to was... I sort of think of the Taiwan thing, I'm like, imagine if they changed it to, " Let's do this. You guys are doing great. Amazing that there's 5, 000 mutual aid groups. Let's see if we can get to 10,000." And like, " Amazing that 750, 000 people signed up, actually let's give the software that was doing the signups to local hospitals and let them coordinate it because you guys are clearly on it." And then imagine the explosion that could have happened.

Dane Groeneveld: Would've been-

Jon Alexander: And what they did instead was they changed the message to stay alert, control the virus. And they basically did a whole thing of go back to your lives, go back to normal, councils go back to providing services. And we even had this campaign called Eat Out to Help Out, where people were given money to go to restaurants. And it's like what the-

Dane Groeneveld: We just flipped all the good work into the wrong direction.

Jon Alexander: But in a way, this is the thing, right. What's so interesting about that, what's so fascinating about that moment is that the space opened. And I think there's this thing that, I think, that people like you and I need to ruminate on a lot more of like, so what is it that opens those spaces and how can we be ready if that opens again? Because I mean Florida right now, these moments where actually everyone is in it together are going to come again and people will... We need to be ready because we're expecting, because we know that what's going to happen actually is that people, rather there being some who are, like you say kind of 0. 1% who are whatever, 9. 9 who are probably going to be fine and 90% who are kind of precarious. In those moments where something really big happens, 99. 9% are going, " Jesus, we've got to help each other." They're not going to go, " I'm going to climb on top of the other." They're going to go, " We've got to help each other." And so what can we do to design to be ready for that moment, I think, is a really big part of the challenge of living in this time. Going back to what I was saying before, we know we're in collapse, just cut the crap and we know it. So that means that there's going to be breakages and openings. And I quoted in the book, it's a little bit cheesy, but the Leonard Cohen thing, " There's a crack and everything, that's where the light gets in."

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I love that.

Jon Alexander: It's like, what is it to be ready for that moment and how can we do that in teams, and organizations, and in towns, and communities, and in whole societies because it's going to be all those scales.

Dane Groeneveld: It is. And it is designing for... I like that open space that you use, because very visual. It's designing for that open space, but not around a hurricane or a pandemic, but just around a series of small projects. Because then it creates, I always like to use the word muscle memory for sportsman like you, I think once you get that muscle memory, it's so much easier to just get up and do it. So we've got to create lots and lots of small designed open spaces for these people to come together. And it's not just in their day jobs, it is in the community. And I think that's the future of teamwork. I think that's something that I'd be excited for my kids to be a part of for sure.

Jon Alexander: Yeah. I guess what I'm, maybe, most hoping to offer with the book and with my work really is, we actually can have this be a time when we do look forward to our kids living in something better than we live in. I don't want to say that lightly because I think it can come across as pollyannaish in the context that we're living in of climate emergency. I'm not denying any of that stuff. But actually, when you resee this moment not as inevitable decline and the playoff of these two stories of subject and consumer and will we be able to sustain what the life we have now in the face of authoritarianism. But instead you go, can we evolve into this deeper, richer story of humanity? And I keep going back, you've really got me fixated on that 74% stat. You're like, " Well imagine if we had all of those ideas on the table." If we could put all of those ideas that are currently suppressed to bear on climate, on poverty... Humans are, great. We can do it but we just have to not tell ourselves that we're lazy, selfish, because then we won't.

Dane Groeneveld: No, that's it. And I like, again, your use of the word evolution. I think evolution is where we need to go. We don't want to go revolution, that's going to be too painful. I mean, you talk about collapse, you talk about some of the things, we've been talking about the great resignation. I wouldn't call that a revolution, I would say there's some people thinking differently about the way that they work. But I think we're actually evolving. I think that'll just be a blip on the radar. We're evolving into far more empowered environment for teams, partly because of the need, partly because technology makes it easier right now. And I agree, mean, going back to being hopeful, the abundance theorists out there tend to be more focused on hardware and software. It's very technology driven. They're not thinking about the human, where actually I'm more inclined to think that the technology will exist, but it's the humans that are going to build it and deploy it. And that's where we've got to focus more of our time and attention.

Jon Alexander: I think that's really true. Maybe two things that I would say. One is on this thing about revolution and evolution and collapse. So firstly, I agree with revolution is not what we want. And just look at the revolutions of 2011. Look at the so- called Arab Spring and so forth. Revolution without a new story, without a without shift, just the collapse, tends to just create a vacuum that then sucks even worse stuff into it, right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Jon Alexander: I mean, that's a huge generalization, I don't want to project too much, I shouldn't have specifically... But that is what happens in revolution, in collapse violence gets sucked in general. Equally though, there is breaking down and there is quite fundamental change. The thing I worry about with the language of evolution is that it feels like it's going to be sort of a seamless kind of, it's going to be fine, like we're heading in the right direction and we are not. There are some things that need to fall.

Dane Groeneveld: It's still a struggle. It's still a struggle.

Jon Alexander: It's a struggle, man. Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Jon Alexander: So yeah, there's that. There's something else I wanted to say but I've forgotten it, so you'll have to ask me something else.

Dane Groeneveld: We were talking abundance theory and the two heavy focus on technology verus humans.

Jon Alexander: Oh the technology thing, yeah. No I agree. The tech thing I think is really interesting. Sometimes people say to me, " Cool, what you're saying is really aligned with Web3. And so the technology's just going to mean that everyone owns everything instead of just a few people owning it." It's like, no, it's not what's going to happen.

Dane Groeneveld: It's funny, I nearly went to Web3 with you. I was like, so how does Web3 align with your work? And then now I know and I like it.

Jon Alexander: I mean the short version is just like, I'm really a massive Marshall McLuhan fan, the Canadian philosopher, he had this-

Dane Groeneveld: No, I don't.

Jon Alexander: Do you not?

Dane Groeneveld: No.

Jon Alexander: Oh, you'll love this. McLuhan was like a'60s mid- century media philosophy. He was mad as anything. You said I was in Greece, I should tell people I'm on a day's holiday after being at a conference and so on. I keep finding myself inclined to swear and talk badly instead of being in professional mode. But McLuhan was crazy in a lot of ways, but he was deeply insightful, way ahead of the internet, way ahead of anything. And he tended to issue forth his philosophy and aphorisms.

Dane Groeneveld: Wow.

Jon Alexander: Like the sort of Delphic Oracle or something. The most famous one he said, " The medium is the message."

Dane Groeneveld: I've heard that.

Jon Alexander: And what he meant by the medium is the message is that the dominant medium of a society comes to shape... Are you still with me? Sorry you're freezing a little bit.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, no, I'm still here.

Jon Alexander: Yeah. The dominant medium versus society comes to shape the whole of how a society operates. So in a society dominated by print, there's very few producers and a lot of people just getting whatever they get, which is the sort of the subject society. In a society dominated by television, there's quite a lot more producers and there's a lot of channels, and we can choose between things. And so we have the power to choose but not any more than that. In a society dominated by the internet, at least potentially and certainly in Web3, there's at least the potential for us to be citizens because it's a many to many medium so we can have a many to many society. So to that extent, I'm a sort of tech optimist. But then the other McLuhanism, which I love even more, he said, " First we shape our tools and then our tools shape us." And what I read into that is we shape the internet as a marketplace, the business form of everything...

Dane Groeneveld: We created the consumer trap. Yeah, absolutely. We totally did.

Jon Alexander: And the so- called sharing economy, I remember when it was called the sharing economy instead of just the gig economy. That was space to save us as well. But because the values that were embedded in it were transactional values, even though it could have... The great promise was that Airbnb and Uber would turn every transaction into a relationship and they didn't.

Dane Groeneveld: No chance.

Jon Alexander: They turned every relationship into a transaction. We just became consumers of each other, not just consumers of businesses. Sorry, long way around to say though that the technology won't save us, right?

Dane Groeneveld: No.

Jon Alexander: It will give us opportunities and tools, and if we design what I would citizen values into technology, if we design technologies from within the citizen story, then it'll really help. Because we'll shape our tools and then our tools will shape us. We'll shape our tools as citizens, and our tools will shape us back as citizens. And the potential is there but if we keep building... Like Elon Musk is building Web3, Dogecoin. Like Dogecoin is the global reserve currency, is not a kind of citizen dream, right?

Dane Groeneveld: No.

Jon Alexander: Anyway, yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: No, I'm with you on that. And I think Elon Musk is one of my favorite people to talk about as well, because I always wonder what's going inside his mind.

Jon Alexander: It's back to Bezos, right. What story are you living in, my friend?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, totally. But what you say about the technology, we shape it and then it shapes us, it's entirely true. And I've fascinated by Web3, I'm not a technologist, but what you said is what I thought you might say, which is, we've got to be careful we don't make it about transactions. It's got to be about the human values. And this concept of designing with citizen values, that excites me. I think that's something that teams and technologies can really benefit from. So I'm definitely going to go and read the book and probably give you a call back, Jon, and say, " Hey, Jon, I'm trying to build this. How can you help me?"

Jon Alexander: Well, we should try and figure out this Citizen Confidence Index organization level together.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I'm in.

Jon Alexander: That could be some fun for a start.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that sounds really fun. Well, Jon, it's been great today. Thanks for taking time while you're in Greece on your day off. I heard so many great soundbites, but that concept of the government saying, we don't want the people to trust the government, we want to trust the people, that's huge. I think that's a big part of teamwork. I love the words matter piece where we talked about just the way it creates the brush strokes, the way that it scaffolds what you're going to be doing and how you're going to be doing it together. This whole concept of intervention to invite people to participate as citizens and bring their uniqueness is a huge theme too. And then without going into the Web3 depths, the creating open spaces and maybe how we use technologies and get people around these open spaces to build that muscle memory, there were some great takeaways for me and no doubt for the listeners.

Jon Alexander: Thank you very much, man. No, it's nice to play back. That's a good idea. I like it.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. And if the listeners want to reach out to you and either be part of this Citizenship Confidence Index, or maybe have the Citizenship Project come in and do some work with them, how do they best find you?

Jon Alexander: So you can find me at jonalexander. net, no H in Jon. You can find New Citizenship Project in newcitizenship. org. uk. I'm on LinkedIn and Twitter. I'm terrible at anything beyond those because I feel like my life has already sucked into them too much. But yeah, come find me. I think something's really building with this, so yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, it is. No, you're onto it. Thanks, Jon. I appreciate you sharing it with us.

Jon Alexander: Thank you very much for having me, Dan. Good to talk.

Dane Groeneveld: You bet.