Designing for Democracy 4.0

Creating systems for a new progressive era of increased complexity and disruption

Sander Dolder

Published in

Generation Shift

20 min readNov 15, 2019

Introduction — System Shock

Two years ago, I had a baby girl. My universe was permanently altered by this new nurturing force of feedings, walks and diaper changes. Similar to when I met my wife, when the iPhone was first showcased, when 9/11 happened, when I moved from Switzerland to the United States, or when I heard Nirvana’s Nevermind for the first time, my world changed.

With a few months of parental leave, I have had the rare opportunity to experience a moment when my personal life and society were changing rapidly. This was a unique chance to capture a transitional window of time where education, introspection, and growth became everyday phenomenons; this was my immersive summer at a seaside cottage and my intimate winter in a snowed-in cabin.

Over those summer months, I became a better parent, cook, and artist, bolstered my botanical ambitions, record collection, and wine enthusiasm, learned about Native American philosophy, the Stasi’ system of pattern recognition, and gravitational pulls, and further acquainted myself with Alexander von Humboldt, Jonas Salk, and Stanley Kubrick. It slowly became clearer that the sum of those endeavors became a work in itself: each experience provided an additional element that enriched my outlook on critical thinking and problem solving.

What started as undefined morsels of memories, beliefs, and theories became a manifesto of my perspectives on understanding the world, preparing for change, and adapting gracefully to what’s ahead. It became a personal toolkit to understanding and solving challenges. It’s a reflection of my pragmatic, curious, and moderating impulses that happen to juxtapose impeccably in today’s polarized transient Twitter society.

At the heart of it all lies my desire to understand how our society is changing and adapting, and how our planet is self-organizing in the age of AI and climate change.

Timeline of Major Trends and Events — 1750 to 2100. Created by Peter von Stackelberg

Part I — Density, Diversity, & Destiny

The last couple years have been challenging for society: A transitional period in time that feels like the murky dawn of something new and the wobbly end of an increasingly distant era. The anxiety of which path our future will take is still to be determined, but I’m increasingly optimistic. Nonetheless, the challenges ahead are nothing short of extreme, and will necessitate our full devoted global attention.

We are moving towards a critical point in society where we will enter uncharted territory. Climate change, ecological collapse, automation, AI, urbanization, and decentralization are driving some of the biggest expected shifts in the 21st century.

Paradigm Shift

“The pace of change, the ethos of individualism, the relentless dehumanization that capitalism abets, the constant moving and disruption, combined with a relatively small government and the absence of official religion, risked the construction of an overly atomized society, where everyone has to create his or her own meaning, and everyone feels alone.

What has happened in the past few decades is an accelerated waning of all these traditional American supports for a meaningful, collective life, and their replacement with various forms of cheap distraction. Addiction — to work, to food, to phones, to TV, to video games, to porn, to news, and to drugs — is all around us”.

Concurrently, in America, “As our government and corporate leaders continue to deconstruct rule of law and economic opportunity, the norms degrade and the space for transgression becomes bigger.” For much of the last two years, I have carried an anguish of being in uncharted waters. What was happening and what could be done? Everything felt like it was shifting which is why I have been feeling so unsettled, creating a certain lack of control and a sense of helplessness.

2016 US Presidential Election Map By County & Vote Share — An illustration how perception can overshadow reality (*Map created by* *Magog the Ogre*)

“Virtually all types of institutions, be it political, educational, or business, are exhausting their internal energy in dealing with contentious, and seemingly irreconcilable, differences in basic identities and values — what it means to be American,” he said in a subsequent email exchange. “In such an environment, identity trumps reason, ideology overwhelms politics, and moral convictions replace intellectual discourse.” — Eric X. Li, Washington Post.

We are currently witnessing a significant shift in America: the black lives matter movement, the #metoo movement, censorship on college campuses, school shootings, fake news & psychological warfare, gerrymandering, government shutdowns, and the digitalization of our physical world are displaying the limits of our democracy and our system of checks and balances built over the last three centuries.

We are at the crossroads of what will define America (and Western societies) in this century. How will our capitalistic democracy morph over the coming decades, and how do we prepare and adapt?

Part II — The New Frontier

The concept of the Frontier thesis, first suggested by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, suggests that America was always a cultural platform to innovate:

“Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life”.

In the United States, it is my belief (and the belief of similar theories such as the Strauss-Howe Generational Theory) that we are at the tail end of a ~40 year conservative era and at the beginning of a new liberal era that will transform western democracies from politics to corporations, and ultimately redefine what capitalism means in the 21st century. We are in the process of writing the next generation of western liberal values.

Can political movements fit a similar pattern?

While this might seem overly simplistic, especially given the current cycles of breaking news, Peter Brown, of Princeton, observed that “a society under pressure is not necessarily a depressed or a rigid society”. Moreover, in the same article, James Fallows explains that the current stagnation in the U.S. Federal government “comes down to an inability to match a society’s resources to its biggest opportunities and needs”. Could this signal the end of one era and the beginning of a new one? While there are clear differences in what’s driving our optimism (or pessimism) for the future, there are underlying elements at play in today’s Western society:

According to documentary filmmaker, Adam Curtis, in an interview with the Economist: “in the 80s everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew that it wasn’t working, knew that it was corrupt, knew that the bosses were looting the system, knew that the politicians had no alternative vision. And they knew that the bosses knew they knew that. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal”. He argues in his documentary, HyperNormalisation, that today’s western societies are facing a similar pattern.
Author Yuval Noah Harari argues that “Humankind today faces three common problems that make a mockery of all national borders, and that can only be solved through global cooperation. These are nuclear war, climate change and technological disruption”
Increasing rates of innovation and global cooperation will become critical to remain competitive and to solve arising societal challenges. You can already see this with corporations, state and local governments.

The good news is that the current antagonistic faction in our society seems to be a last gasp of previous generations. The driving force will be the desire of the new majority generations to become more democratic and a desire to prepare its people for the disruptions of the 21st century. It isn’t a coincidence that the most democratic countries also have the happiest people; it’s the balance between embracing capitalism and building the proper social infrastructure. These movements often start at the local level. Currently, the states of California and Texas are competing for their version of America’s future. The 21st Century has also brought cities, such as New York, to the forefront, emerging as centers for diversity, innovation, social tolerance, and environmental sustainability. Moreover, mega-regions/ecosystems of economic activity are forming around those cities and regions that advocate for progressive values and long-term pragmatism, creating a more decentralized economic model than traditional nation states.

While the global middle class has seen significant income growth over the last few decades, quite the opposite has happened to the middle and lower classes in wealthy countries. Chart created by Branko Milanovic, senior scholar at the LIS Cross-National Data Center.

This, of course, clashes with the rising authoritarian regimes and anti-democratic movements across the world that are divisive, hierarchical, traditional, and reactionary. But those are mainly a reaction to globalization and the liberal order. At any point these two societal views become more polarized, there is an increased likelihood of unrest or worse. In the Growth incidence curves chart above, one can see that the lowest annual growth rates lie in the 80–90th percentile of the global income distribution range; this indicates that the middle class in Western countries have had the lowest prosperity growth rates globally, leading to the anti-globalization sentiments we see today.

More broadly, cultural spheres of influence play a vital role in shaping societies: Democracies create freedoms, Autocracies establish order, dynasties deliver stability, tribalism brings autonomy. Liberalism encourages diversity of thought, conservatism dictates a single vision for society. Each perspective has its advantages and disadvantages.

Our economic future will be primarily composed of mega-regions.

Part III — A New Economic Era

“Market positioning and the resource-based view — have dominated how we think about competitive advantage for 40 years. I think a more apt metaphor for these ecosystem firms may be the logic of the turnstile: They want to get as many players involved in their ecosystem as possible, and to get them interacting according to rules they have shaped”. Julian Birkinshaw — Ecosystem Businesses Are Changing the Rules of Strategy.

The evolution of the Media landscape — Graphic by Recode and Leichtman Research Group

The change in Western values, especially in the U.S., will also mark the onset of balancing industrial democracy with corporate authoritarianism, the rethinking of capitalism in a democratic state. It’s the reconfiguration of the workplace by creating a more equitable organization while optimizing the elements of capitalism that help fuel innovation and advancement. Movements such as B Corporation and Public benefit corporations begin to illustrate this shift from top-down profit-driven to a more holistic approach that includes its employees, local communities and environments into its corporate purpose, voice, and success. It’s also the increased sense of responsibility by corporations to take a position on societal matters during divisive and unpredictable times. Fundamentally, corporations are moving from linear to ecosystem-based business models.

The rate of innovation and the proliferation of AI is forcing organizations to continuously transform themselves, and workers to increasingly become lifelong learners (whether they would like to or not) in order to keep up with the pace of change, or face an uncertain future. According to a recent white paper by BCG, “reinventing the organization for the next decade will require embracing five imperatives: 1. Integrate technologies for seamless learning, 2. Migrate human cognition to new, higher-level activities, 3. Redesign the relationship between machines and humans, 4. Nurture broader ecosystems, and 5. Rethink management and leadership accordingly”.

Harvard Business Review — The Culture Factor, Jan/Feb 2018

Rethinking the value of apprenticeships, encouraging employee-owned cooperative organizations, holding corporate boards responsible, creating successful corporate sustainability models, integrating with innovation ecosystems, and understanding the global nature of today’s corporations are promising opportunities to seize on. As the new hire manual for Valve indicates, for these organizations to succeed, each worker needs to be empowered to become a driver of change.

Moreover, in an era where governmental action is stagnant and policies are outdated, corporations are becoming activists. Whether it’s A. leadership in addressing climate change as seen through the corporate coalition after the US pulled out of the Paris accord, B. Walmart and Dick’s sporting goods establishing stricter gun purchase rules, C. Google and Facebook offering extended parental leave opportunities, or D. Chick-fil-A and Equinox being boycotted due to their executives’ political beliefs, organizations are at the center of driving change in a democratic capitalistic society.

At its core, this transformation will be driven by the needs for inclusivity, equality, innovation, and sustainability. These needs reflect a world that is becoming increasingly interconnected, automated, diverse, climatically unpredictable, technologically decentralized, and resource scarce.

While many of these ideologies are alive in many European and Anglophone countries, the United States, due to its sheer size, diversity, and position of influence, will make them mainstream. Moreover, within the U.S. itself, individual states and cities act as incubators and lead the charge for change from climate change adaptation to progressive economic development to social justice.

Inclusivity — Mapping all the points

Bringing people together and breaking bread has been a unifying mechanism in societies across the world and across generations. Exposure to diversity of thought helps improve how we interact by integrating social adaptation with communication. Diversity of people brings a fuller representation of society by ingraining different cultures into the conversation. Diversity enables corporation to become more interdisciplinary. Inclusivity helps with diplomacy, and as a result, creates a smoother decision making process and a more reliable innovation pipeline. Our increasingly global society requires multi-lateral compromises and collaboration that can unify and bring together diverse set of cultures and perspectives; in today’ society, promoting chaos and divisiveness instead of collaboration and inclusiveness creates increasing polarization and further fragmentation.

Equality — Identifying the greatest levers for change

In the 20th century and prior to that, we mostly defined society in binary ways. As we’re evolving and further understanding our environment, we’re becoming more aware of who we are and our impact. Our current understanding of our world makes binary thinking increasingly obsolete and, in its place, a spectrum of possibilities each with its own set of characteristics.

Increasing equality and moderating hierarchy = increased diversity of thought

To optimize our decision making, we need to treat a range of options with the same level of consideration until clear favorable choices emerge. Instead of promptly eliminating, it is important to expose the problem at hand into different settings and levels of thinking (e.g. focus groups, meditating, white-boarding, explaining out loud). Patterns will eventually emerge which will allow the elimination of unfavorable options. To be effective, one needs to be “close to the action”, or have a very clear understanding of the details. In the 21st Century, for corporations to adapt to the increased rate of innovation and societal change, less hierarchy and more data-driven decision making at the front lines of the organization is key.

Innovation — Optimizing the design

“Inventing is a lot like surfing: you have to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right moment.” — Ray Kurzweil

From an advancement perspective, democracies permit disruptions and tend to leapfrog innovations while autocracies tend to build iterative innovations more rapidly. The Moon-landing race of the 1950s and 1960s represents this dichotomy quite well: Russia was better suited to improve their rockets to become the first country to send a human into space, but it was the leapfrogging and adaptive ingenuity of the U.S. to figure out how to land humans on the moon. The iphone vs. other smartphones in 2007 is a more recent example.

In the 21st Century race for AI dominance and sustainable living, democracies, and those who reside within them, will need to become more holistic in their problem solving, foster tolerant creative environments through diversity and transparency, build modular solutions, balance short-term needs with long-term benefits, and bring together top-down quantitative decision-making with bottom-up subjective input.

Despite of this, we must also balance and regulate our rate of innovation with the social tolerance to advance society; we are in an age where we need to moderate man-made evolution into order to ensure our survival as a species: Too much progress too fast, and we risk to make mistakes and alienate part of the population, resulting in a lasting backlash. It seems as if biological evolution and sociological evolution tend to happen at a slower rate than technological evolution.

Each individual is driven by one type of control. Pairing individuals of different types creates an amplification effect

We need to spend more time understanding who we are. Whether it’s fame, power, or authenticity that we seek, we all have internal desires driving our external actions. If we understand our place in society, the more likely we’ll succeed and make an impact.

Similarly, having the ability to better understand the impact of new technologies can help prevent unintentional consequences or even the potential for abuse. Under democratic rule, one would expect a series of checks and balances to prevent such a scenario. Under authoritarian regimes, however, there is a clear path in sight for a future where people are increasingly managed digitally and structurally from the top down. The accelerated rate of innovation has made it a necessity to have a societal framework of checks and balances in order to continue and improve upon the innovation marvels from the 20th century into the 21st century. It also has become crucial that governments and organizations become more agile and experimental, adopting many of the successful product development methodologies from the tech sector.

Sustainability — Adapting for longevity

Will being on the verge of an ecological collapse lead humans to change their ways?

There is an existing battle in approaches to creating a sustainable tomorrow. Can the planet, and humans, survive once we hit 10 Billion people in 2050? On one side, there is a school of thought based on conservation and using natural methods to solve our growing world. On the other side, there is the belief that technology and innovation will solve all our future problems and needs. The former approach requires discipline but is proven, while the latter is potentially more transformative and effective but also undoubtedly risky.

In both cases, nothing is absolute and everything should be viewed on a time-traveling spectrum. On this spectrum, the progressive extreme predicts the future causes of concern, while the conservative extreme advocates for a return to more traditional values. For instance, Dark green NGOs, such as Greenpeace, are on one end, radically sounding the alarms for environmentalism while fundamentalist religious organizations, on the right, pressure a return to the societal values of their worshiped prophets.

Systems can be completely transformed — Tipping into the Future

Similar to a continuous wave, the complex nature of society requires a constant balancing act to adapt to change as it occurs or commit to outright renewal (e.g. Preventing climate catastrophe vs. migrating to Mars). It’s the shift from linear thinking to systems thinking.

21st Century democratic societies need to balance capitalism with socialism, have a healthy swing between liberalism and conservatism, and plan for the long-term.

It’s the act of balancing structure vs. chaos: Too much chaos leads to less trust in the system and the desire for more structure and hierarchy. Too much structure leads to more trust in the system but less equality and novelty.

Barneys the Dinosaur — New York Magazine

Whether it’s a new technology, ideology, or outbreak, the earth has been changing for millions of years, constantly finding a new equilibrium for everything to function. When some things grow, other things diminish. With each disruption, humanity has learned and adapted, yet Artificial Intelligence and Climate Change are posing our greatest challenges yet.

The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil — A countdown to when “human life will be irreversibly transformed” can be plotted by adding major world events on a logarithmic scale.

Part IV — The Polymath Century

“Most transformation programs satisfy themselves with shifting the same old furniture about in the same old room. Some seek to throw some of the furniture away. But real transformation requires that we redesign the room itself. Perhaps even blow up the old room. It requires that we change the thinking behind our thinking — literally, that we learn to rewire our corporate brains.” Danah Zohar (1997)

While it’s easy to get caught up in the moment where the splitting of society seem to be everywhere, our world is actually becoming more integrated. The reduction of barriers to connectivity, free movement, and trade have enabled this. While there are countless benefits to integration, there are also added complexities ranging from increased competition to a more robust set of ideological beliefs. This requires us to be more comprehensive, holistic, and adaptable in our decision making and problem solving:

Comprehensive — Complexity is driving the need to be more thorough and planned in our decision making. Systems thinking is a framework that allows for the distilling of such complexity.
Holistic — Complexity is driving the need to be more multidisciplinary in understanding issues. Collaborative innovation, human-centered design, and promoting diversity of thought are methods to achieve this.
Adaptable — More moving pieces creates a system that is harder to control, therefore the need for flexibility is essential. Creating distributed solutions and agile modular designs will allow modifications along the way.

Jonas Salk, developer of the Polio Vaccine, stated that humans have the ability to think, generate ideas, and collaborate in ways other species cannot. He calls this phenomenon, Metabiological adaptation. Collectively, we as a species will be able to generate solutions to our greatest challenges that we face ahead. The Kardashev scale concept proposes that humans need to work collectively to evolve beyond our planet, and eventually, our galaxy. Without shifting our current thinking into new realms, we are unlikely to succeed. Bringing together the best practical and ideological elements of capitalism, socialism, technology, and sustainability will lead us to finding the secret formula to our future survival. Salk further believes that society will increasingly require interdependence, balance, sustainability, and long-term thinking vs. the current construct of consumption, excess, independence, and short-term thinking.

Nurture vs. Nature

On a personal level, to deal with society’s complex adaptive system, we need to adopt an increasingly polymath mindset. This process begins with the need to recondition our critical thinking and problem solving skills. In breaking down current political conditions globally, Paul Miller, associate director of the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas, stated “we are driven by our perception of self-interest as shaped and defined by our deeper presuppositions and beliefs — which is to say, our ideology or religion”. However, we need to be cognizant that social evolution moves at a far faster rate than biological evolution; we are still programmed in many ways to fight for our own survival like cavemen did a million years ago. If you measure the amount of progress humans have achieved since the industrial revolution compared to our overall history, we have significantly accelerated our technological progress in a short period of time. Consequently, it is likely that our upbringing is not the only factor determining our views on the world, but biology also plays a significant role.

Metro 4Cs : Critical Thinking, Communication, Collaboration, and Creativity

“Explain your terms, identify your assumptions, admit the possibility that you could change your mind. It all sounds familiar, because it’s plain old critical thinking, exactly what universities have been claiming to teach students all along. Clearly we need to do better — and it won’t be easy, because those skills are not easy to teach or to master. But they remain the best tools to help students cultivate the blend of self-knowledge and intellectual humility that our world desperately needs”. — Molly Worthen, NYTimes

Board Games, Gastronomy, & Gravitational Pulls

According to mind-mapping expert Tony Buzan, creative intelligence is becoming particularly significant in the new change-oriented and information-based 21st Century. The World Economic Forum lists critical thinking & problem solving as two main characteristics needed by employees in 2030.

Enriching our critical thinking and problem solving starts with the individual, and his/her ability to hone their understanding of the world, conceptualize, and implement solutions that utilize the greatest levers of change, and ensure lasting success for an era of increased complexity and disruption.

The upcoming series will explore this framework, touching upon concepts in the journey from searching to conceptualizing to realizing to adapting:

Critical thinking and problem solving in the 21st Century

Understanding the opportunities and challenges by looking at the present conditions, and moving from linear to systems thinking. It’s the process of determining the best path forward by understanding what is happening (what are the challenges and opportunities), forecasting what could happen, and determining the levers with the greatest levels of change.

Designing our short and long-term vision to transform current conditions by embracing tolerance, science, and multiculturalism. It’s the process of picking the best solution by keeping your finger close to the pulse.

Building our efforts in real-time by scaling and diversifying our portfolio of solutions. It’s the process of creating the overall solution.

Sustaining a solution’s lifespan by looking backwards and summarizing, reflecting, and reacting to future change by growing, merging, reducing, stabilizing, or sun-setting our efforts. It’s the process of maintaining and balancing the solution.

Each phase represents a step in the wave of change. Every year, planet earth faces similar continuous patterns from the stillness of winter to the birth of spring into the productivity of summer, and the eventual metamorphosis of fall. This pattern repeats itself until complete change is inevitable. Organizations, people, products, or ideas aren’t that much different.