What is “Transmediation” and why is it changing the game of “change”?

Written by Bright Simons.

Marx famously lamented that philosophers spend all their time interpreting the world when the point really is to change it. Tolstoy responds that everybody does in fact aim to change the world, when, really, they should be focusing on changing themselves.

But even if the ease with which the change mantra can be exploited makes you as skeptical as Anand Giridharadas, you cannot doubt the intensity of the will to change the world. The evidence is all around us. Never before have so many been seized by so vast an ambition to impact how the entire globe functions as we are witnessing today.

Yet, few have taken the time to analyse the true structure of this “worldchanging” and “worldmaking” phenomenon. Often, general ideas about the motives of “global elites”, “the Bilderberger set” and “one percenters” get tossed about amidst the scraps of analysis aiming to reinvent political economy fast enough to catch up with the many fascinating trends we are seeing on tik tok, among teenage climate movements, in the Pentecostal networks and in the bowels of the crypto underworld.

Whilst every model is only useful for the gaps it uncovers, the process of modelling can also distill significant distinctions among concepts often taken to be trivially similar.

My epiphany came when recently I tried to assess the role of “ecosystem builders” for a talk on “systems entrepreneurship”. Systems entrepreneurship itself is an attempt to grapple with the complexity of solutions to many modern problems where the notion of the heroic entrepreneur or entrepreneurial team simply does not apply. Systems truly capable of addressing the multifaceted problems confronting the planet like climate change, antibiotic resistance and rapid skills obsolescence, usually require many “stakeholders” working together in ways that traditional firms or organisations typically cannot coordinate.

It dawned on me as I rummaged through the many “multi-stakeholder” projects and initiatives I have been part of, how much commentators take for granted the ideas of “ecosystem builders”, “systems entrepreneurs” and their connection to “changemaking”.

“Changemaking” as used here is always positive, aiming for improvement in humanity’s conditions of existence. It follows the fashion in which Ashoka, for instance, uses the term. It is what the World Economic Forum means when it says its mission is: “improving the state of the world”.

History is surely replete with the stories of “reformers”; political, economic, and religious visionaries who have sought to propound metamodels of one kind or another in their quest to improve the major affairs in their contemporary social universe. The difference today is that the modern world has layered system upon system and multiplied the instruments, contexts, faultlines, dimensions and prospects of changemaking severalfold. It has also seen the triumph of liberality in word, even if not in deed.

We must nonetheless distinguish between this improving-the-world “changemaking” paradigm from the raw urge to reshape the world, which has always been with us relatively unchanged, by calling the latter, generic, will-to-change-the-world: “change as usual”.

1. “Transformative Changemaking”

In my decade and half experience of working closely with individuals and organisations that present themselves on the changemaking-to-improve-the-world side of the divide, I have come to the conclusion that there are five main strategies available to those who wish to signal their membership:

1. Movements

Eg. Black Lives Matters and the School Strike for Climate

2. Narratives

Eg. Africa Rising and the ONE Campaign

3. Multilaterals

Eg. SDGs and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

4. Social Entrepreneurship Ecosystems

Eg. Ashoka and the Skoll Foundation

5. Multi-stakeholder Platforms

Eg. The World Economic Forum and the The Aspen Network

In our modern context, any organization or individual that seeks to declare a public commitment to positive change must commit to one of these 5 strategies. They must then adopt one of three main archetypes to operationalize the identity. These are:

1. Social entrepreneurs

2. Systems thinkers and multilateralists

3. Transmediaries

Regardless of which identity they adopt, their primary philosophy becomes one of “polycentrism”, which is the deliberate favouring of instruments of change that decentralize power, as against the “monocentrism” of the Change-as-Usual crowd.

Little in the analysis above is particularly controversial. The only potentially aggressive claim I would make here is that of the three identities I listed above — social entrepreneurs, systems thinkers & multilateralists, and transmediaries — it is the least known of them, the transmediaries, who also embody the evolutionary struggle of changemaking.

All the other classes of changemakers are shifting to the use of “transmediation” as their primary tool. Transmediation is one of two major competing instruments for building change capacity in a densely interpenetrated and interdependent (or, what I call, “hyperintegrated”) world. The other is “intermediation”, the basic means of acquiring power in the Change-as-Usual world.

2. Change as Usual

So how then do supranational agencies, multinational corporations, imperial powers, religious hierarchies, and large academic networks drive change, considering how much effort and resources these powerful forces all invest in trying to reshape the world?

As already hinted, these primary Change-as-Usual agents deploy three (or four) main strategies:

1. Business domination

2. Geopolitical/ideological domination

3. Technocratic Domination

The character of all these strategies is monocentric, and the primary mode of action is intermediation. In this class of actors, three principal archetypes are discernible:

1. Gatekeepers — intermediate between the elite and the masses. “Elite” here could also be supernatural in character, such as any number of deities.[1]

2. Connectors — intermediate between emerging systems and established systems, or across other gaps in traditional ecosystems.

3. Conventional Entrepreneurs — intermediate between production and consumption.

[1]And whilst in the case of religious movements pressing for change on a global scale, many will insist that their strategy should be classified as “ideological domination”, the truth is that in every instance, their global reshaping logic manifests geopolitically or not at all.

Fig. 1. The 5 Strategies of Global Changemaking vs the 3/4 Strategies of “Change as Usual”.

Most business leaders, politicians, religious officials, so-called “thought leaders”, and international bureaucrats fall squarely in this camp, though the realization that they need to mix some of the five strategies of changemaking discussed in the previous section has been growing intense over the last two decades and various degrees of effort are being made towards that end.

It also goes without saying that many actors in “Changemaking for good” camp stray constantly into strategies perfected by the Change as Usual domain. In fact, it is safe to say that many institutions wear cloaks of one style and operate almost entirely in the other style. Where this is the case though it is not too difficult to see through the facade.

So, to be clear, this metamodel is not about some absolute Manichean universe of good and evil, but a simple typography of strategic models. There are no pure exemplars, merely broad archetypes.

Which brings us to both the conclusion and meat of this matter: apart from the examples listed earlier on in this essay, what more can we say about transmediation and what distinguishes these transmediaries who are steadily inheriting the mantle of change in this world, even if they still have quite a ways to go before they can catch up with their Change as Usual contemporaries in the level of their structural impact?

As already postulated true transmediaries employ methods that are in substantive contrast to the intermediation approach which, nevertheless, in today’s complex, interlocking, global social universe, still enables the consolidation of substantial change-inducing power. In the table below, we delve deeper into the critical distinctions.