Before we start,
I want to introduce my grandma to you guys.
Here she is.
We call her mama.
This summer, we celebrated her 95th birthday,
so she’s been alive almost a century.
She’s seen commercial flights, TV, the internet,
so a lot of change,
as well as some incredibly inspiring social movements,
like gay rights, women’s rights, the environmental movement.
Now, I love a lot of things about my nan,
but one thing that perhaps amazes me most about her
is how over the years,
she’s managed to change her point of view on the world
as the world has changed.
So don’t get me wrong.
In lots of ways, she’s very, very traditional and conservative,
but there are other ways where her views are so nuanced.
So just recently, for instance, she supported a friend financially
so that they could have the surgery to have a gender transition,
which I think is amazing at 95 years old.
So she’s really open to change.
But something that hasn’t changed at all in my nan’s lifetime
is politics.
So every four years,
she still drives to her local village hall,
where without even having to show her ID,
she takes a piece of paper,
she puts it in the ballot box,
and from then on,
she outsources all of her decisions for the next four years to someone else.
So in an era where we have the technology
to crowdsource all of our collective decisions,
she still outsources her opinion on every issue to someone else,
and in 2017,
I think that’s mad.
So I want to do a little test on that in this room, OK?
We’re going to do a quick quiz.
We’re going to do a vote,
and we’re going to vote on our dress code, how we all dress, all right?
So you’re going to have two options.
Option one is you dress like a skater,
and option two is you wear a suit.
All right?
So we’ll start with a raise of hands for option one.
Who would like to dress like a skater?
OK.
And option two, to wear a suit?
Hmm.
I’m going to say there’s a 52-48 split
(Laughter)
in favor of dressing like a skater.
Now, you’re probably thinking this is ridiculous.
It’s particularly ridiculous
because you might have wanted to wear, let’s say, jeans and a jacket.
Like, you probably wanted to choose the items.
But the question was choose one thing and choose the whole thing,
and that’s how democracy today works.
We choose one ideology, and we adopt it wholesale.
So it strikes me
that everything has changed in my grandma’s lifetime,
everything except for democracy.
And so this used to be understandable, right?
We couldn’t vote on every issue
because the only technology we had was pen and paper and a box.
And so hierarchy was the only way you could scale participation,
but that doesn’t have to be that way anymore
because it’s 2017,
and in 2017, we have amazing technology.
From Wikipedia to our likes, our swipes,
these are already methods we use to crowdsource our collective opinions,
and so for the first time in history,
we now have the technology to create true democracy,
which we’ve never seen before.
And so, this will be a form of democracy that I think will be more engaging,
more effective or more efficient,
and ultimately just more democratic than anything we’ve seen before.
So how can I be so sure about this?
Well, I’m sure because it’s already happening.
It’s happening in companies.
So I help organizations to be run by their people.
Some people call them self-managed organizations.
And what we see is that organizations run by their people have happier people;
they have happier customers;
they’re more profitable;
and they’re more resilient to economic ups and downs.
So how is this?
Well, I think there are three principles that explain this pretty neatly.
The first is that these organizations are always evolving.
So rather than, let’s say,
take on huge projects or have a five-year business plan or manifesto,
what they’ll do is that they’ll put their work in small chunks,
and they’ll prototype very fast and iterate.
So they’re constantly changing what they do and how they do it.
A second important principle
is that they have, like, an obsession with the customer.
So rather than, let’s say, go up the hierarchy
to decide if a customer’s going to get a refund or not,
what they’ll do is they’ll let the person closest to the customer decide
because they trust that person
and they trust that organizing themselves around the customer
will bring them more success.
And then a third principle, but perhaps the most important,
is that these organizations don’t have powerful people.
They have really powerful processes.
So each team or each meeting would have a coach or a facilitator,
someone who’s totally neutral, who has no say in the decision.
Their job is to focus on the process, the process by which the decision is made.
Their job is to help the group decide.
And that’s what democracy is.
So once you’ve worked in this way,
working in an old-school organization just doesn’t really make sense.
It’s less human, and it’s far less effective.
So with this in mind, I started asking myself this question:
If companies work better when they’re run by people,
couldn’t we scale that using technology
so that at long last, countries can be run by citizens?
And the answer is yes.
And the answer is it’s already happening.
In small, innovative pockets around the planet,
it’s being built right now.
So let’s go through our principles and check this again.
Always evolving.
My friend Finner in Iceland
was a part of a group who crowdsourced the constitution of Iceland.
And the way they did it is every Friday,
they would publish a draft version of that constitution online
and get feedback from their citizens,
spending the whole following week adapting it for the world that we live in.
Second was customer focus.
Well, in Estonia,
their e-residency program asks users for feedback to such a degree
that they’ve changed numerous laws in just a few months,
a speed that you’d never see in another country
and which shows that they’re organizing their government around their people,
and not the other way around.
And then finally, powerful processes.
So I’m on the board of a tech-democracy movement called My Vote,
and what we’re doing is using blockchain technology
to create the first form of true direct democracy,
and the way we do that is that we have a robust process.
So, we start, as democracy should,
by asking the people what their will is
because that’s what we should enact.
And so we put this, on every issue, to a decision.
We ask, “What’s your will?”
Then, we have independent researchers give some key facts
so that people are informed in order to make that decision
rather than misinformed.
And based on those facts, if you choose to read them,
you can then choose between four options,
where you choose to support or not support.
In other words, we don’t come in and say,
“We have an ideology that solves all your problems.”
We ask what your will is and enact that
because that’s what democracy is.
And so this is what real democracy will look like.
It’ll be more engaging,
but it will also be safer because it’ll be distributed.
So no ins or outs, left or rights, red or blues.
This will be a case
of asking people to vote frequently on more nuanced, direct decisions
because when you do that,
it’s mathematically impossible for one ideology
to capture all votes on every decision.
So populism can hijack one decision every four years,
but it can’t hijack hundreds.
So this is really exciting for democracy.
This is why we’re speaking to the UN, governments on most continents,
to make this a reality.
So my question to you and my ask of us all
is that we change the conversation,
that we don’t just focus on being enraged with politics,
but we also become engaged in democracy itself.
Like, we don’t just talk about what decisions are being made
and that are in the media,
but we also talk on how those decisions are being made,
and importantly,
that we support these tech democracy movements around the world
who are focusing on redesigning the system itself.
Because democracy needs an upgrade for the 21st century.
When Tim Berners-Lee gave us the web, he said, “This is for everyone.”
And soon, I believe, we’ll be able to say that for democracy too.
Thanks.
(Applause)
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