The following is a transcript of a conversation between the Honourable Paul Martin, MP for La Salle Émard, and Thomas Homer-Dixon, the Director (at the time) of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto and author The Ingenuity Gap (Knopf, 2000).
“We probably should create a new ethic in terms of how MPs are going to communicate with Canadians.”
The “ingenuity gap” refers to the critical gap between our need for ideas to solve complex social problems and our actual supply of those ideas. The book argues that the gap arises in part because we suffer from “info-glut”: the human brain’s capacity to process information cannot keep up with the volume and speed at which this information is now delivered. We end up spending more of our time managing this information and less generating new and innovative ideas to tackle today’s pressing issues.
PAUL: It’s good of you to do this.
THOMAS: Well I’m very flattered that you’d be interested in some of these ideas.
PAUL: Well, I really am. In fact I’m very interested for a number of reasons. Number one, I think that your basic thesis strikes home in a number of ways. I’ll just tell you two and then I think what I’ll likely do is just turn this over to you. Certainly, on the whole, the complexity of the systems that you describe, the complexity of the systems that we’ve set up and how we interact, I can not help but agree with you. Although, they are nothing compared to the complexity of systems that nature has impressed upon us which we barely understand. So maybe it’s just a little bit of the maturation of man. The other thing, of course, that interests me considerably is you’re making what I think is probably the strongest argument for democratic reform and a less concentration of power, because a total concentration of power, it seems to me, can’t deal with the complexities that you talk about.
THOMAS: Right.
PAUL: But there is a slight digression that I would like to sort of pick up on. And that is your comment that the information revolution leads us to more of simply managing information than thinking it through. And I would be very interested in hearing you elaborate on that because, I must say, I think that there’s a lot in that point.
THOMAS: Right. Right. Well, basically what we’ve seen happen in the last several decades is just an astonishing increase in our capacity to generate and deliver information. And really no increase in our capacity to cognitively process that information because our brains are basically the same as they’ve always been. And so we have tidal waves of information piling up at the front doors of our cerebral cortexes— the way I put it. And I think this is especially true for people who are in decision-making positions— who have demands and streams of information converging on them from every direction. The average person in our society has a sense of being overwhelmed by this information. I am doing some research on this whole issue of “info glut” right now. And when people have too much information they tend to try to do more things and they tend to do them more superficially. They pay less attention to individual chunks of information because they try to move on as quickly as they can to the next one. They tend to overspecialize, or hyper-specialize, to focus in on particular things as a way of controlling the amount of information. And I think in terms of our public policy discourse, the discussions we are having in our society about our problems and how to solve them – whether we are talking about health care or climate change or what have you – paradoxically, the greater amount of information has actually reduced the quality of that conversation. One of the things that I did when I was researching The Ingenuity Gap was I got a research assistant to go out and look at Time Magazine cover stories and op eds in The New York Times and the major research articles in Scientific American and then to take a random selection of these back in 1970 and do the same in 2000 and count the words in each of these and average them. And in that 30 years, we saw a 40% decrease in the length of Time Magazine cover stories and a 25% decrease in the New York Times opinion pieces. So here we have a world that is more complex, requiring the management of more information, more subtle decision-making, and yet we are providing less opportunities for people to express complex ideas about those problems. I think it is an absolutely critical problem and I see it in lots of places. One thing that I find with my audiences when I am talking about the nature and the changes of our world is that I always strike home with the “info glut” point. Everyone is feeling completely swamped in information and they spend more time trying to find the bit of information that is relevant to them and trying to sort through all the stuff that is not relevant. And so ultimately we become less capable of generating new and interesting ideas because we are spending all our time just managing information. I imagine this makes sense (to you). I have talked to quite a few people who have been in senior levels of political life and this seems to ring home with the practical experience that they have had.
PAUL: That is probably the reason that so many economists try to reduce everything to an equation which is totally opaque, and for precisely the reason that you have given. I mean, what they are trying to look for in an equation is some ability to sort of penetrate everything and reduce it to something that they are capable of understanding, although nobody else is.
THOMAS: Right. One of the things that happens is that people specialize. This kind of information overload tends to cause people to retreat into their narrow disciplines. So we take a problem like climate change or health care (and) you need people from a dozen different professional backgrounds and scientific disciplines involved in trying to understand these problems. And yet, the pressure is for us to focus more on just a small slice of it because we cannot manage the whole picture. So I think from the point of view of social decision-making, we need to think very carefully about how to find people who are good at large-scale understandings of problems and aggregating and synthesizing across lots of different disciplines – pulling together larger patterns, because, if anything, we are moving in the other direction right now.
PAUL: But that, ultimately, is the role of the person who has to prepare public policy and then express it. Is that not right?
THOMAS: Well, I think that it has been, but I am not so sure that it can be in the future. I think that we need to bring the citizen into this process more. We have hyper-empowered citizens now with vast amounts of information at their fingertips and an amazing ability to organize and mobilize themselves with communication technology. We need to get these people working for us in collective problem solving rather than sitting on the outside and simply complaining or not participating at all. I am really concerned that the people who are most connected or wired in our society, say the 20-something generation, are now voting at a 25% rate or something like that. It is an extraordinary disengagement from the political process, which is supposed to be a process of collective problem-solving – working out what our interests and values are, looking at all the facts and the different trade offs we have to make, the opportunity costs, and then coming up with a solution that is the best we can find. And so many people are simply checking out of that formal process and they are engaged in other things like non-governmental organizations and community activism and stuff. But somehow we have to get them engaged in the larger process, because there are some problems that can only be solved at larger scales, say, at the national or federal level, or even at the international level.
PAUL: Lets just separate this into the two kinds of issues. One of the points that you make (is) that nature interacts with itself. Number two, added to that (is) the way that nature interacts with itself and we begin to interfere with it.
THOMAS: Right.
PAUL: It is something that we obviously don’t understand and… whether it is predetermined or simply random chaos is something that none of us know. But, the fact is, we simply do not know how all of these various inputs are interacting one with the other. Now, if somebody, in terms of climate change, was able to take a much broader view than that (of) 20 different disciplines each in their individual silos, that is not, it seems to me, an issue (where) the citizen is going to be able to interact much. Whereas the citizen faced with the overall perspective brought by a group of people (that is) put in front of them (with the question) ‘what is the public policy result to deal with this?’ – that is where the citizen can get involved with it. Is that not true?
THOMAS: Well, I think so. I think you are right that most citizens won’t have the technical knowledge or the capacity to look at the whole problem and to come up with something. They don’t have the time or the resources. Even the ones that have the cognitive ability and the education to look at the whole thing won’t have the time or the resources to engage with the problem and understand it as a whole. So that has to be left to probably a smaller group of professionals. I think that we can do a better job at identifying those people who are particularly good at that and training them within our educational system. That is just a side point. I think that our citizens can help in a variety of ways and be much more engaged than they are now. I think that there are significant value issues and choices that have to be made here. When we are talking about something like climate change, there are some significant decisions about the way we structure our cities and how materially intensive our lives are going to be – what we understand as ‘the good life.’ And we don’t talk about those things together very much; we make private decisions. Well, maybe we should start talking about those more and try to come to some rough and ready consensus on where we are going as a society. I mean, it has very significant implications, for instance, on the density of our urban areas and what kind of lifestyle we want within those urban areas. There is not good institutional space right at the moment for people to get together to talk about what those values are and to bring them to the surface and then think about what the implications are. But, there is another part too, and this is much more pragmatic. I sort of always think about the old story that it is often the people working on the factory floor who know how to fix the production process best and have great ideas for tweaking things and making things work better. I think that nurses often have a lot to say about why the health care system is not working well. Or teachers have a lot to say about why the educational system is not working out well. We rarely listen to people in those professions, or citizens in general, about why they think that the political system is not working well. There (are) particular problems that they might have something to contribute to or have some good ideas about, yet those ideas rarely make their way into parliament, into the public formal decision-making process. And I would like to see us develop a mechanism whereby people get involved in practical problem-solving because I think that – you put your finger on it earlier in the conversation – as our world becomes more complex, it becomes less and less possible for a relatively small group of people at the centre of society to solve all the problems and manage everything. You have to distribute problem-solving through the system. You have to distribute the generation of ideas as much as possible through the system. I think that there are a tremendous number of very good ideas out there but they are not heard. Some of them might be small, some of them might be large, but they are not heard because our system is not set up for a vehicle to get those ideas into a place where we can consider them properly. I think the other thing is that if people can be involved in developing a consensus around a solution to a problem then the public in general can be involved in developing a consensus and participate in developing a solution to a problem. Then it is going to have a lot more support. It is going to be much easier to implement that solution because the public will regard it as more legitimate than (an idea put forward) by a bunch of remote people in Ottawa.
PAUL: But, in the end, is that the role of parliament?
THOMAS: Well, I have not worked out all of the details yet, but I think that we need to start thinking about how we are going to integrate parliament with more of an electronic democracy – using information technology to promote democracy and make it work better. We have a highly wired population in Canada. There has been lots of discussion about e-democracy and how that might work. The problem is turning it into more than just a place where people can complain about their particular concerns and how much they hate politicians.
PAUL: Let me just challenge you for a minute. But before I do, I just want to segment our conversation. (Regarding) the point that (you made about) why don’t we talk to the nurses or why don’t we talk to the teachers when we are looking at the education system – if, in fact, that does not happen, then that is a failure of those whom we ask to look at something. In other words, if we say ‘let’s set up a commission to look at the educational system,’ then the most logical thing is that at some point they are going to talk to the teachers.
THOMAS: Right.
PAUL: If Roy Romanow is going to do a commission on health care, at some point he is going to talk to the frontline health care providers. Now, if that is not happening, then that is a severe condemnation of whatever the commission or the study happens to be. So one should expect that (type of consultation) is going to happen (with a commission). The second thing involved in what you are talking about is our failure to understand the grid system by which power is shared throughout North America, which leads to a black out. Or our failure to understand how something like SARS can appear one day on a farm in China and the next day in New York. So, all of that which I just raised is something at some point that I would very much like to talk to you about, because I think that (we need to go) into far greater depth. But I just want to set that aside (for the moment). Let’s bring the conversation back to where we were in terms of citizenship engagement. And this is where I guess I am going to challenge you – if you do not have the face-to-face interaction of citizens arguing their own perspective…
THOMAS: Right…
PAUL: …and you rely on electronic town halls, which seems to me is a whole bunch of people off in their own little silos simply putting in their information…
THOMAS: Yup…
PAUL: …then I don’t think that you are going to accomplish what it is that you are trying to accomplish.
THOMAS: Well, you may be right. I hope you’re not, because more and more engagement between people in our society is in electronic form now. And people like Bob Putnam at Harvard have been very concerned about this and they think that this is contributing to a decline in what he calls “social capital” – the kind of trust and networks of reciprocity that develop in society because you meet people face to face and you meet them in local groups, maybe just sports groups or religious groups or town hall meetings, or what have you, and you learn to work with them. I think that there is a lot to that. I think that there is a lot to the idea of face-to-face interaction. The problem is our societies are very big and very complex now and have to deal with problems that affect everybody in some dimension or another, and you can’t get everyone into a room to have that kind of face-to-face interaction. Ideally that would be best. But I also think that the devil is in the details in terms of how you set up some kind of electronic democratic process. And what I was suggesting was a front end to the parliamentary committees – a way in which they could engage thoroughly and in an exciting way and actively with the public. I think a lot depends on how you design the process. There are things that you have to do, for instance, to make sure that the process is not hijacked by the most pestiferous and best-wired groups within the Canadian public, so that quieter groups that may also have an interest in the issue will also have a chance to have their say. You have to work out ways by which you don’t just get a hundred ideas all scattered across the map, but that you actually get some accumulation over time and some winnowing out of the best ones. Now I think that this is a tractable problem. As in any institution, whether it works effectively or not depends critically on the details. I think that we should be investing a lot of thought in how we can do this and make it work. Now, I agree with you: if we could have a democratic process that would involve a lot of face-to-face interaction, that would be best. But in the absence of that, and in the presence of all these very large, complex and fast-moving problems, and given the fact that everyone is already wired together and that is the way they are increasingly interacting with each other, I think that we have to make a virtue of the situation and try to make it work on behalf of a democracy. I see this kind of technology, e-democracy technology, as being plugged into and serving the interest of the existing parliamentary system.
PAUL: Let me give you a practical problem and tell me then what your reaction to it is. I am heading up a UN commission on how you get local small business going in the most impoverished countries in the world.
THOMAS: Right.
PAUL: And one of the things that I had thought about was to create some kind of global chat room to basically go out to the world.
THOMAS: Yes.
PAUL: The question really is, am I going to get flooded with a whole bunch of opinions that I am not going to be able to go back to and react to? And is it going to be as fruitful as doing what we have done, which is call together 20 experts from around the world, all of whom have got their own networks…
THOMAS: Right….
PAUL: …put them into a room and say we are going to take a day and argue this out so that we react immediately, face-to-face, to the other person’s idea.
THOMAS: I don’t see the two things as mutually exclusive. One of the problems is that the average person just does not have the technical information at his or her disposal to really participate in the debate effectively. So any kind of process, like the one I was talking about, would have to have an interaction with experts and there would have to be an expert component to it. I have travelled around talking to people all over Europe and North America. I have a good deal of expertise in certain fields of political science, but I find that, inevitably, I learn something from listening to people who are on the outside. You can get so close to these things after a while that you don’t see some important possibilities, maybe some lacuna that hasn’t been explored before. Or maybe you are losing sight of some overarching values that need to be better articulated. And I think that from the point of view of not just solving the problem, but actually creating a workable democracy, we are seeing this divergence between an expert elite and the average person within society, and that is very dangerous over the long term. It undermines the legitimacy of the process. People feel they don’t have a role, they can’t participate, they have no say. So what I am trying to think through is how can we make sure that they feel that they do have a role and that they have something to say and that it is actually sometimes listened to. And that was a feature of some of the more ideal forms of democracy, say the town hall types of democracy in earlier days, and it is something that has really been lost now. If we move to a kind of elite expert system, we may come up with generally the best solutions but we will lose the support of the public over time and that is essential to a well-functioning democracy. I am really concerned about the drop in voter participation in elections. That is a canary in a coalmine as far as I can see.
PAUL: I don’t disagree with you, but fundamentally if you don’t make parliament work, if parliament is not functioning, and if parliament is not regarded as the ultimate forum in the country where views are exchanged and debates are taking place and decisions are finally made, then how can anything else that we do…
THOMAS: I don’t see anything that I am suggesting as replacing or an alternative to parliament.
PAUL: So what you are suggesting is this is how we are going to make parliament work better?
THOMAS: Well, I see this in terms of a funnel. The big open end of the funnel would be facing to the Canadian public and their ideas could be funneled – and again a lot depends on the architecture of that funnel on how the winnowing process works, how the accumulation and improvement of those ideas works as they work their way along that funnel – but they would be funneled towards the committee system, and then the committee system and parliament itself would have to go through the tough political choices and the budgetary issues, their financial issues, political trade-off, their issues of provincial versus federal jurisdiction – there are a host of factors that have to be considered independent of those that would probably be considered by the general public. But I would like to get those nurses and teachers involved in the process and I think that we might be surprised by how innovative sometimes they are and how aware they are of the larger political constraints and the strategic constraints that parliament faces too.
PAUL: I don’t disagree with you, but the question is, who should get those nurses and teachers involved?
THOMAS: Well, we are going to run a couple of small experiments at the University of Toronto over the next year or so to try to resolve some of these architectural issues for a process of social decision-making on the internet. But, if you were to work out the mechanisms so that they were effective, I could see that hundreds of thousands of people could participate in this process around any one particular problem.
PAUL: Who is going to get those hundreds of thousands of people involved?
THOMAS: I think if you provide them with the forum and it’s credible and not just tokenism, I think they’ll come on their own accord.
PAUL: But nonetheless, somebody has to do this.
THOMAS: Well, I mean, it has to be the federal government.
PAUL: And is it going to be an individual member of parliament? Is it going to be a minister, is it going to be a department of government? Who is it going to be?
THOMAS: Well, my guess is that would be ultimately in your bailiwick – how it’s split between departments, how it’s going to work. I can’t say at this point. But it seems to me that fundamentally it’s a federal responsibility if we are talking about a collective action problem here. We have a lot of people in the country who have ideas and are keen to participate in one way or another but they are having trouble organizing themselves to do that. Government is principally about solving collective actions problems. And essentially, the federal government is about solving macro-collective action problems that are about the whole country. And so it falls to the federal government, it falls to cabinet, on how those federal responsibilities are divided across different departments. I wouldn’t know which department would be best capable of handling something like this. But I’d want to stress that if it were to be done, it has to be done right and a lot of the experimentation would have to be done in advance. And I want to stress this idea of experimentation. I mean Mel Cappe used to say that we need to be comfortable with experimentation and “creative failure,” as he calls it. And I really agree with that. I think the process of trying to develop this architecture of e-democracy is one where we have to do a lot of experiments. That’s something that could perhaps be supported by the federal government – the research process of doing that. And then once the system is set up, it has to encourage within it – if we are dealing with a problem like health care or climate change or what have you – a willingness to take risks, creative experiments and the possibility of “creative failure.” One of the things I see happening within public services across Canada is that they’ve become incredibly risk-adverse. And I think that this idea I’m suggesting could also help educate Canadians to the fact that if we’re really going to be nimble in response to a lot of these complex problems we face, we have to be experimenting all the time. We have to learn from our failures.
PAUL: Again, I agree with a great deal of what you are saying. That governments have become incredibly risk-adverse I think is absolutely correct. Part of the reason is the insecurity that arises out of not having to talk to people enough so that governments don’t feel that they have built the kind of consensus that will allow them to take the chances that they should have taken.
THOMAS: Right
PAUL: But again, with respect, I think you’re avoiding the question of how do we do this. Let me just give you an example. If you want to get to those who are on the front lines and the most knowledgeable. . .
THOMAS: Right…
PAUL: … then, when in the preparation of policy, it’s up to the executive branch of government – the bureaucracy, for instance, within government – to get out and to speak to these people as much as it is (up) to the elected members of parliament…
THOMAS: Right…
PAUL: Now, at the same time, (there are) people who should be ensuring that this takes place – (that’s) the elected member of parliament – so that when the bureaucracy comes up with their ideas, and the interaction occurs between parliament and the executive branch of government, they can say either (they’ve) been talking to the frontline health care workers or (MPs have).
THOMAS: Yup…
PAUL: How do you ensure that this happens? And who has the responsibility to ensure that it happens and how do you make sure that that responsibility is discharged?
THOMAS: A lot of the difficult problems we have now cut across several departments. So we are not going to be able to say Health Canada is solely responsible for creating this dialogue with Canadians. It may have to be interdepartmental. They might be a lead department, but there is going to have to be some interdepartmental arrangement, probably in a lot of cases. I don’t want to see MPs sidelined. I think they do play a very important role. But they are suffering from the very same kind of information overload that we started this conversation with. And so, I think they are less and less able to actually be conduits for ideas and to articulate the pulse of the population on a particular issue because, you know, they’ve only got 24 hours in a day and there are a millions things going on around them, and they’ve got hundreds of constituents jabbering away all vying to get their attention. So, I would say that it’s probably going to be largely up to the bureaucracy. And to set up a process, it would have to be advertised across the country (saying) we are looking for your ideas and opinions. And I think a very important thing here is the tone. What I’m suggesting is that Canadians are engaged actively and pragmatically in problem-solving. They are actually participating in the problem-solving. They are not the final step in the process, because that happens in parliament. But they’re not just being consulted in a sort of passive way, and they just voice their opinions and then people go off and try to make sense of all those opinions and find optimal solutions. Instead, they are more intimately involved in trying to figure out what the best solution is. Because all of these problems we are talking about, there is no magic bullet for any of them. They are complex problems, they require complex solutions. Components of those solutions will be micro-components, things that are done, as I said before, on the shop floor – changes in the classroom, changes within the hospital ward. You do a lot of those things and they can accumulate and add up to have very significant macro effects. But we need lots of ideas coming in through that funnel. And I’d like to see Canadians engaged as problem-solvers, because that’s where they want to be. I think that would make them, in a sense, proud to be participants in the democratic process. Not just as people who are expressing their opinions and values and then aren’t talked to again, but are actually engaged in the process. And I think how this is done depends fundamentally on a change in mindset within the federal bureaucracy. There has to be a willingness to really listen and to provide space for Canadians to participate. And there is going to have to be advertising. And there is going to have to be a change of the culture within many of the bureaucracies and the departments in order to encourage them to listen to Canadians.
PAUL: I agree with your basic thesis very, very much. I’m not sure I agree with your choice of the mechanism. And I happen to think that the choice of the mechanism is going to be crucial if you are going to succeed. Let me just explain. Both the bureaucracy and individual MPs are both going to seek out elite opinion…
THOMAS: Um-hum…
PAUL: …and they are both going to seek out conversation with Canadians. The issue is: who is going to do which better? And it would be my judgment call that if you look at the nature of the role of a member of parliament, that member of parliament is more likely than the bureaucrat … to seek out the views of Canadians. There is a tendency for the bureaucrat to seek out … elite opinion.
THOMAS: Right, I agree. Right.
PAUL: So if that’s the case, it seems to me that you might want to make the argument that what we really should be doing is giving members of parliament far greater tools so that they can, in fact, do exactly what you want them to do.
THOMAS: Well, this comes back to the parliamentary committees then, I suppose, and maybe this should be a responsibility of the committees. They should be funded to create this dialogue, a problem solving space with Canadians rather than individual departments.
PAUL: Or, maybe it should be given to individual MPs, and maybe it should be made part of the understanding that MPs should be using these tools and this is the way to go at it.
THOMAS: Right.
PAUL: That we probably should create a new ethic in terms of how MPs are going to communicate with Canadians.
THOMAS: I want to just come back to the second issue that you put on the side for a moment because I think it’s also relevant here. You’ve been mentioning that a lot of the challenges that we face have what I call “unknown-unknowns” – basically, there are unexpected developments. These systems have become so complex they are opaque to us.
PAUL: Before you do that, could I just ask you one other question?
THOMAS: Sure.
PAUL: Okay, I really do want to come back to that. I just want to ask you one other question. When you go out using all of the means of e-technology to ask (people) their views, you’re not worried that if you go out to vast numbers that all you are really going to be getting is a sophisticated polling?
THOMAS: Right…
PAUL: …as opposed to going out to a much smaller group where you could engage in dialogue?
THOMAS: Well, this might not work, but I think it is worth a try. And again, I think a lot depends on the architecture of the system. But I just want to note something that you said just now. You said we go out and use this e-technology to ask their views. I think what we really should be doing is asking them for help, co-opting them into the process. It is not just that we want their views – we want assistance. That makes them participants in the problem-solving process. Now, how we do that and not have just chaos, electronic chaos, or electronic cacophony is – I mean I’m not going to downplay how difficult that is going to be. It is going to be tricky but I think that … it can be done. And I think some of the evidence that it can be done is that there are now very complex problems being solved on the internet – technical problems – through this open-source problem solving approach that we are seeing, for instance, with the development of the Linux software and the Apache webserver. And these are situations where everybody participates. Now, they’re very technical problems, and there is a certain level or threshold of expertise you have to have before you can even begin to get involved. But I’ve seen analyses of the structure of these problem-solving approaches and I don’t think there is any reason in principle why you couldn’t take that kind of problem-solving approach and apply it to other kinds of problems. In fact, people are starting to think in those kinds of terms now. How can you create open-source problem-solving? Not just for creating software, but for solving a whole range of problems. And there are certain things about the way the system is set up that keeps it from becoming chaos. You have to have decision makers along the way. You have to have some groups or people who say, ‘Okay, at this point we are going to take these 10 ideas and we are going to leave the other 90 behind. And we are going to work on these 10’. How you make that kind of winnowing process legitimate so that everybody thinks it’s fair is tricky, but I don’t think it’s impossible. And my guess is that these are basically tractable problems. But we need to do research here and I think it is a fairly pressing matter. I would like to see some serious thought given to this. There are people sort of poking at the issue in various places. I’ve been collecting information and talking to people about it in various places in Europe and the United States, but most of them have been looking at creating fora or chat-rooms that I think would be vulnerable to exactly the kind of thing that you’re concerned about, which is, you know, you just get a million points of view and everybody get frustrated because nobody is really being listened to.
PAUL: Okay, I interrupted you because we are coming close to the end, although I would like to do this again. But let me just go back when I interrupted you and you wanted to go onto the other topic.
THOMAS: Well, the thing that we are finding now is – I use an analogy of a car engine. I used to work on cars a lot when I was a kid and, you know, back in the ‘60s car engines were pretty simple: you could see all the parts and work on them pretty effectively. Now you open up the hood of any modern car and it is completely incomprehensible, with all the wires and tubes and modules, and you can’t even find the basic things, like timing chains and distributor caps and things like that. Everything is so complex that even some of the people that work on these cars don’t understand them and their details now. And they fail in unexpected ways. These complex systems fail in ways that we have not anticipated. You see this in software all the time, you see it in electrical systems, where you can’t anticipate all the possible interactions between the parts. And so you get unexpected failures that can really be devastating sometimes. I think that the kind of decision-making process that I am suggesting could help us move towards a faster response to that kind of “unknown unknown.” When something happens that is a surprise, you need lots of heads involved rather than just a few people at the centre. What you find with systems that are very nimble, economic systems, ecologies that are very nimble in responding to complex problems, is that problem-solving is distributed within the system. There are lots of different actors engaged in trying to crack the problem. And so, I think that we need to move in this direction if we are going to have adaptive societies. We need to move away from hierarchical and centralized decision-making, towards distributed non-hierarchical decision-making, if we are going to deal with the kinds of problems that we have in the world today.
PAUL: There is no doubt in the necessity of moving away from hierarchical problem-solving. You have to get much more horizontal. I have always believed this. But ultimately, someone has to make the final decision.
THOMAS: That is right. You find that in the open-source architectures that I was talking about, there is always a final decision-maker, but you have lots more input into the process. And there is a constant kind of churning of ideas and there is a lot of micro-experimentation going on. You know markets are excellent examples of what are called complex adaptive systems. There is all this creative destruction going on and they are unbelievably adaptive in response to change. The problem with markets is they are optimized to produce wealth and maximizing profits, and within societies we want to optimize other things. But the general analogy of a marketplace of ideas, of the experimentation going on, the low risk-adversity within a market, I think all of those are important ideas that we need to try to build into this new system, this new social decision-making system that we would be creating.
PAUL: I agree with you about the incredible superiority of the market in allocating resources. But, it is not only limited to the market. You know, this concept of the social economy – if you build the right incentives then you can use the market system within a community, whether it is how do you take care of physically disabled children or how do you deal with unemployment. Within a small community, you can, I think, provide market incentives to accomplish social goals.
THOMAS: Yeah, and that’s close to the kind of thing I’m thinking of. What you find within open-source problem-solving architecture is a kind of market incentive. There’s no payments to the people who contribute good ideas, but there are incredible psychological kudos that come with it – the sense of having contributed a solution to a problem that was holding a lot of other people up, and making the common good better. And when you read the analysis of something like the Linux software development process, you find that those psychological incentives are really important and they work. They really work. I think … all kinds of people would be keen to participate in a kind of ideas economy, or an ideas market, where there would be a fairly explicit Darwinistic evolutionary process, where the best ideas move on and the worst ones are weeded out. But I think that people would still find that it’s a very rewarding thing to participate in.
PAUL: I agree with you. I really do. That’s where I go back to this idea where you have market incentives to this social economy. It is not a market incentive to make money; it’s a market incentive to basically say ‘I’m going to weed out the bad ideas to pursue the good ideas.’ I think that is dead on.
THOMAS: I’ve talked to a few departments in Ottawa about this with mixed success, and in Toronto where I’ve said ‘Think through about how you might create this kind of environment within your department.’ And sometimes I get blank expressions, sometimes I get very interesting ideas coming back. I think a lot depends on departmental culture. Many of the departments are exemplary of hierarchical decision-making.
PAUL: But if you want to turn that declining voter participation ratio around…
THOMAS: Yeah…
PAUL: …I think before you focus on government departments you have to focus on parliament.
THOMAS: Yup, I would agree with that, now that we’ve talked about it.
PAUL: I have really enjoyed this and I think that … we’ve barely scratched the surface. I’d like to do this again.
THOMAS: Sure, anytime. It’s delightful and, to be frank, I’m really thrilled that you would have this kind of expansive interest in the workings of our democracy. I think there are some real problems that have to be addressed at this point. We have a world that has changed dramatically in the last 50 years, especially in the last couple of decades, in terms of the power of our citizens, and we are still basically with institutions that evolved in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is time we updated them.
PAUL: Well, that’s my view and that’s why … I think what we’ve really got to talk about, and we should get a lot more people talking about, is just how do we do that. So let’s just do this again.