If 1989 happens again, are we ready?
I’m pretty sure that 30 years ago, in April 1989, someone was sitting exactly where I am sitting, looking out the window in this East Berlin apartment at the quiet spring life unfolding in the cobbled street below. Let us say it was a young father, who most days worked in a Factory in the center of East Berlin, and today was watching out his window. In the space of 1 year, this young man’s entire world would be utterly transformed. I explore in this post what it might look like for this to happen again, to me. And I explain what me and a group of fellow explorers have been sensing might emerge if (or when) this does happen, focusing in particular on the democratic systems we currently use.
Our key question was “what would a democratic system which is adapted to the needs and capacities of the present and the future look like and how do we begin the shift towards this?”
Back to our young father 30 years ago. He watches out the window, seeing old ladies walking along the coblestoned pavement carrying groceries and stopping to chat briefly, somehow managing to transmit warmth to each other whilst only uttering a few grumpy words. Groups of young men teasing each other about their lives and complaining about their work. Young families carrying their babies into the warm spring sun.
This street, back then, was part of the German Democratic Republic or GDR, the communist state of East Germany, where power mainly lay with the Communist Party and the State Security apparatus or Stasi. Everyone’s life was in some way affected or controlled by these two institutions. Communication with the rest of the world was forbidden. Strict rules for equality and central decision-making led to ridiculous, Kafkaesque situations like factories producing things that nobody ever used, as well as (as some friends who grew up in East Germany point out) some beneficial elements such higher levels of female participation in the economy, or a certain social welfare system for even the poorest to somehow be cared for. However, dissent to the official government line was punished with prison or a whole variety of perverse strategies to break a person into submission: a subtle blend of social, psychological and physical torture as carefully planned out and executed as the Germans do most things (except build airports).
In April 1989, as the GDR prepared to celebrate 40 years of existence, almost everyone agreed, this state was here to stay. Due to Gorbachev and Glassnost, maybe some small changes might occur, some reforms or opening up, but in general, the system could not change.
Less than a year after this young father took these 10 minutes to watch out his window, musing about the state of this system he was stuck in, on the 9 November 1989, the entire system of the GDR burst apart. The Berlin Wall, which had separated Berliners for over 3 decades, opened up following a mistaken announcement by the East German government. Once opened, it could not be closed again. The Government and Stasi were torn between those who wanted to crack down and those who wanted to follow the popular will to greater openness and reform. The communist party in large part froze and then dissolved. Protests and opposition movements around the country morphed into political parties. East and West Germany were officially reunited a little under a year later in October 1990.
The lives of every single person this young father had watched was radically changed, from one day to the next. All the social agreements, norms and the balance of power they knew, morphed and changed. Uncertainty reigned. Stasi agents, once feared and treated as VIPs, were not allowed into their local pubs or “Kneipe” anymore. Government buildings were raided, top secret files made public, trials were run and investigations carried out into the atrocities carried out. The currency changed, the school system changed, the police changed, the form of decision making changed. Within a few years, nothing was the same. Was it better or worse? Was it worth it? Could it have gone differently? These were (and still are) open questions for many. But the change happened.
Today, I am a young father who works in a co-working space called the Factory in central (former East) Berlin, literally touching the “death strip” which used to be the Berlin Wall. I look out at the world below my appartment window in former East Berlin and at the systems we have created for ourselves, which affect every aspect of the lives of those walking on those same cobblestones. From education to health care, from unemployment benefits to politics, from entertainment and sports to the accepted social norms of how we connect and deal with each other in our everyday lives, from our financial systems to the use of our planets resources to the way we earn our livings, from the way we are to our children to the way we treat ourselves, feed ourselves, care for ourselves. All of these systems seem to be at breaking point. Some more than others, but all are strained in the face of the unimaginable complexity of today’s world.
And yet, in most people’s minds, these are the systems we are stuck with: “We cannot change these systems. They have taken so long to create, and so much is invested in keeping them this way. What can one person do? Who says anything we come up with next would be better? Better to stay with the crappy system we know. A lot of people are idiots, we can’t trust them with too much power.” These are the sorts things I regularly read or hear, and certainly can read from the behaviors and choices that most of us make on a daily basis.
The questions I believe it is crucial to ask today are: What if we are on the cusp of as radical a shift as our young father and all those in the streets of East Berlin experienced 30 years ago? What if, when I look out this window in 1 year, everything has changed? And if it has, how would we want it to look or work after it has changed?
Upgrading Democracy
This is what I and a number of fellow curious Berliners and Bruxelois have been exploring over the past months with our initiative Upgrading Democracy. In December 2018, we joined almost 350 teams from around the world focusing on changing different “systems” from education to governance, health to environment, as part of the Societal Transformation Lab run by MIT’s Presencing Institute. This Lab accompanies participating teams to go through a deep reflection, embodyiement and prototyping process to sense the highest potential future of the systems they are working to change.
Where many of us had spent years discussing, thinking and even writing about how democratic systems need to change, our aim here was to test the possibility that new solutions and ways of engaging people could emerge by using more than our intellectual capacities (mind): integrating these with our emotional capacities (heart) and body intelligence (will). Theory U (see graphic below) is a process which, inter alia, enables people and groups to access and integrate these 3 levels of intelligence.
One key assumption behind Theory U is that our conscious, rational mind is very powerful for certain tasks and levels of reflection, and that only using this part of ourselves is not using our full potential. Instead, that by using the experiences, connections and memories of whichever situation or system we are working on which are sensed on an emotional level and in our bodies, we can tap a whole unused set of knowledge and capacity to create healthier, more holistic solutions to the major issues we face today. In essence, the integration of these three intelligences enables us to increase our levels of consciousness.
Taking the democratic system, for example, I know I experienced viscerally (i.e. deep in my body) the key political moments in my life. The day I first voted in a referendum in Switzerland, I emotionally felt proud, confident, seen, and a sense of belonging. Physically, I remember my chest was open, I stood straight, and I smiled. The day Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigned, I cried of joy, felt hope deep in me, and connection to all those in Egypt and around the world who were making change happen. The day after Donald Trump was elected, I felt physically exhausted, cold, tight and shaky.
These emotional and physical signals are the tips of the iceberg which I can bring to my conscious mind quite easily, but our emotions and bodies are constantly registering every interaction we have. Usually this information is not used much, as our intellectual, rational mind seems to deal with things just fine. This emotional and physical information makes up much of what people sometimes refer to as “intuition” or “gut feeling” or “what my heart says”. Research increasingly shows that, even what we believe we are deciding based on rational, intellectually sound reflections, is often much more influenced by our emotions and bodies that we imagine.
As there are hundreds or thousands of initiatives worldwide working to improve democratic systems in different ways, our theory was that to identify how our initiative could bring something unique, we would address the questions “what would a democratic system which is adapted to the needs and capacities of the present and the future look like?” and “how do we begin the shift towards this?” integrating our 3 levels of intelligence and binding them together with others in a funky and unpredictable experiment of collective intelligence.
We believe this would allow us to sense what the highest future potential of our democratic systems is and for us to start working towards bringing this potential to life, so that if 1989 happened again, we’d be ready.
Traveling through the U Process
The “U” process shown above began with a “Co-Sensing” session in February 2019. Co-Sensing again refers to the intention to go further than reflecting intellectually, but really using our emotions and bodies (in this case hands) to collectively sense and make sense of the system we are considering.
Using a method called 3D mapping, we created a model of the democratic systems we currently have. We then collectively felt into this system with questions such as “how does it make us feel?”, “what conflicts do we feel here?”, “what is dying and what is emerging in this system?”. The resulting model showed a system focused on maintaining a status quo and the interest of the few and powerful interest groups rather than serving the needs of the majority, the marginalised, the future generations, nor the natural world. It was a system full of anger, frustration, fear, discontent and mistrust. It was a brittle and disfunctional.
From this sense making, we then collectively transformed the current system into the highest future potential we could foresee for democratic systems. The result, as you can see, is chaotic, vibrant and full of life. It is fragile, yet adaptable. It is focused on future generations, on the natural world and on inclusion of all. Powerful interests are monitored and held to account, the emotions and experience of all stakeholders are allowed and integrated, and the collective consciousness of all participants is central to keeping democracy functioning and alive.
Crucially, we saw how it is less important how the democratic system works, than how people are with each other.
In our second “co-inspiring” session, the group again created two models (a current and highest future potential) of the democratic system, however rather than doing it with our hands and lego, this time we did embodied the different stakeholders in the system — in a 4D mapping exercise which borrows from constellation work and theater. The stakeholders, which included “politicians”, “youth and children”, “corporations and lobbyists”, or “mother nature” (in the form of a potted plant), created a first model — each taking a place in the system. Then, after feeling how it was in this initial system, moving slowly into a healthier and higher potential future system.
From these two mapping exercises emerged the following key questions, focusing on particular stakeholder relationships and leverage points:
- How can people marginalised by the current system (migrants, poor, rural, aged, disillusioned) be empowered by children and youth?
- How can the voice of children and youth be elevated to the same level as politicians?
- What are the signals from/ pain felt by marginalised people which will trigger change in the whole democratic system?
- What would support people working to change democracy to carry the burden of making change happen?
- What would be needed to learn from how nature works to upgrade the way our democracies work?
- What if we focus on how we and others interact and are with each other (political discourse, capacity to dialogue, disagree and move forwards, etc) rather than focusing on the democratic system itself?
- What would be needed to support corporates & lobbyists to find a role and place in an upgraded democracy?
- What is needed to ensure media shifts from being a distraction to holding power to account & helping us see the whole system?
- What would be needed to ensure that an upgraded democracy is fun, vibrant, creative and adaptable?
These questions could lead us in a thousand different directions, and whole movements may be required to bring such shifts to our democratic systems. Nevertheless, our third session aimed to get us strarted along this path, move us into action: Prototyping. Through a group reflection on the above insights, and then a guided journaling exercise, we developed two concrete prototypes to explore. These are not finalised ideas which we believe will shift the entire system, they are first steps or concrete actions which we feel excited to pursue and which begin to address some of these leverage points.
The first prototype aims to support people from different world-views to see each other as humans worthy of respect and to be able to find solutions together — key abilities required for a population to successfully democraticaly governan itself. This prototype uses the leverage point of children and youth empowering marginalised people. We considered bringing together children from families with different background and world views (for example migrants and people who are against migration). At first, we would do theater with these children where they learned to act out different world views, followed by discussion and exchange about these views. The same process could then be done with the adults, with them each embodying the perspectives and world-view of others.
The second prototype focuses on how to invite presence and engagement in public spaces, using the leverage point of focusing more on how people are with each other rather than on how the actual democratic system works. We considered going on public transport here in Berlin and engaging people with the concrete offer of doing a “check in” (i.e. sharing how they are doing and feeling, what is important for them right now, without judgement), just to see how people react and if it opens the space to more presence and engagement.
Our group will test these prototypes (or aspects of them) in the coming weeks before the next Upgrading Democracy session, later in May. What is interesting for me is how much resistance and hesitation I feel as soon as we get to this “actually doing something” part. And I believe this is key, as we often feel resistance and hesitation when change is needed, when we go into uncertainty, when the unexpected happens.
And this is the point where our two 30 year old factory working fathers may part ways, and hopefully where our experience of 1989 and of 2019 will also part ways: we are increasingly ready for the change that is needed. Everywhere, initiatives are arrising connecting people, connecting ideas, building community, creating new ways of being together, developing solutions to live more sustainable and even generative lives. I am convinced that, when the next global shift such as the one we saw in 1989 happens, we will be ready. Not 100% ready, but 80%, which is enough to put the prototype out there, get feedback and iterate. Let the shift begin!
