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Gyorgyi Galik, PhD, Vlad Afanasiev, Ryan Bellinson, Indy Johar
“At its heart, governance is about the framework of decision making; identifying who has the power to make and enforce decisions, and how that power should be exercised and accountable. The ‘how’ is focused on the process of decision making and the ‘who’ is about identifying where the power to make and enforce a decision–or not–lies.”—Scottish Land Commission, 2023 (1)
The 21st century will be defined by society's ability to respond together to the entangled crises we currently face. From pandemics and inflation to the cost of living crisis and environmental breakdown, private organisations or public institutions but to society in general, interconnected crises demand nuanced, systemic and thoughtful questions and responses:
How do people and society understand the world and what problems there are to understand?
How does society make collective decisions about those problems, and what are the appropriate governance frameworks to make those decisions? How might we redesign our societal decision-making processes and systems of governance?
How do we recognise societal assets and soft infrastructures as vital in a time of crises, and how do we invest into and build those future infrastructures?
Such a nuanced response would require building an intangible yet indispensable scaffold for our society, which we call soft infrastructure. This includes the skills, capabilities, capacities, institutions, networks, and processes (2) needed to make wise, collective decisions amidst the complexity and unpredictability of our planetary condition.
When we talk about capabilities we refer to the concept of dynamic capabilities. These are “the specific abilities embedded in routines that enable organisations to adapt their resources, processes, and skills in response to an evolving strategic environment, and to utilise competence to address a rapidly changing environment”. (3) However, in our case, we are applying dynamic capabilities not to private organisations or public institutions but to society in general.
By sensemaking capabilities, we refer to the process of understanding the empirical world, interpreting reality, and attributing meaning to the information we encounter. And decision-making capabilities are how this information is then assessed and informs the execution of decision-making processes, choices, and practical actions of individuals and society at large, its ability to find compromise and make at times difficult, collective choices. This might include the established frameworks, technological tools, policy implementation effectiveness, and communication channels that enable society to make and implement decisions.
Society's capacity for sensemaking and decision-making encompasses several critical questions. Does the societal standard of living and mental health allow it to focus on collective challenges? Do we have trustworthy media institutions?
The rising complexity within everyday life produces a cognitively and emotionally overwhelming stream of information, which is often exploited to numb and disorient citizens through techniques of disinformation and the creation of polarised narratives. This complexity impairs individuals’ capacity for sensemaking, and fosters antagonistic politics and dialogues that deem it wrong to disagree with institutional decisions—decisions that people are deeply sceptical of. These factors have, in part, led to the rise of polarisation, distrust, and incivility within our democratic systems—including a breakdown of infrastructural support that could, by default, allow for or engender more sustainable social practices, norms, and behaviours—thereby creating newfound opportunities for authoritarianism.
Our Western democracies largely fail to grapple with complex crises and often deliberately avoid taking action, which results in preserving the status quo.
This begs the question, how might we work in opposition to the dangers inherent in the current polarisation of societal values; emphasising the need for plurality, ongoing discourse, open dialogue, and mutual learning?
Achieving this will require a profound shift in how we invest in, govern, and nurture the decision-making and sensemaking capabilities and capacities of society to meet the needs of the present and anticipate the demands of the future. These will be key to developing infrastructures that focus on the services and systems supporting the well-being, productivity, and governance of a society in our dynamic and uncertain era.
A potential pathway that could help us structure our response strategy and shift our governance architecture is three-fold:
1. Recognising that building the collective capacity and capabilities for sensemaking and societal decision-making is a critical structural challenge and an opportunity to operate in a world of complexity, uncertainty, disinformation and information overload, and tendency toward polarisation and declining civility;
2. Designing the pathways to invest in those capabilities and collective capacity;
3. Achieving the first two prompts in practice requires governance innovation and interventions in the intricate architecture of soft infrastructure, rethinking its codes, processes, and institutions;
The absence of different, more diverse, and nuanced storytelling around complex political, social, and environmental matters, coupled with deliberate misinformation (i.e. disinformation) driven by vested interests continues to lead to a breakdown of security, civility, and humaneness towards one another. Major media outlets often employ binary and reductionist messaging, provoking polarisation and severe antagonism toward ‘the other’.
The multifaceted crises that society currently faces — whether related to climate, biodiversity, housing, healthcare or food and water security — also stem from structural and systemic inequities and exploitation, exacerbated by our economic model that solely focuses on profitability and the financialisation of every sector.
Moreover, our economic system externalises the true cost of a product or service’s impacts by only pricing in the economic costs. Externalising these costs is an economic practice in which companies do not account for the full societal or environmental impact of their products or services. In addition, the misleading practice of 'paltered' accounting—masterfully used in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting and other public and private institutional reports—tells only part of the truth while omitting important details.
These tactics are impeding structural changes to address the multitude of crises we currently face and also raising regulatory and data questions such as what corporate data reporting needs to be gathered and accounted for to build trust with investors who are now (often still performatively) demanding change, transparency, and thorough risk analyses?
It is also important to acknowledge that all of us, in one way or another, are part of following our own self-interests, even with the best intentions. Understanding how we support the current status quo and how we can take shared responsibility, rather than continuing with pushing the responsibility onto others, will be key in enabling collective action and shared accountability.
"Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.”— Marshall McLuhan, 1969 (4)
People's sensemaking capacity is impaired when they are inundated with information—rendering them unable to process information and interpret complex information. When inundated with information, people lose their ability to recognise patterns, and consequently, they become vulnerable to simply adopting patterns that are created for them by those with vested interests. These pattern narrative structures or frameworks are easily exploited, hijacking our comprehension of how we make sense of the world.
Political figures use deliberate tactics to overload people with information, disorienting and rendering them numb and paralysed. Initially applied by authoritarian regimes, these strategies deliberately create and popularise multiple opposing narratives transforming political landscape into a spectacle and engender cynicism in society.(5) We need to reconsider and expand the scope of regulatory and governance frameworks necessary to address these hijacking mechanisms.
Overtime, our storytelling and communication methods have grown increasingly sophisticated, persuasive, and attention grabbing. So perhaps our challenge with narratives is not only about creating better communication and storytelling but also about creating different ones.
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (2002) talk about examples for great storytelling, however harmful, when describing the phenomena of ‘manufacturing consent’. Manufacturing consent is the process by which the mass media, often in collusion with political and corporate interests, manipulates public opinion to align with those interests. Key elements of this include propaganda models, agenda setting, framing, selective reporting, and normalisation.
The stories told to everyday people in the mainstream media are often told in a way that provides a sense of safety, meant to create a delicate veneer that they and their families will not be directly impacted by the ‘crises of the day’, both now and in the future. This leads to dinner conversations often glossing over challenging future scenarios, priming people to label climate scientists, social activists, and student movements as overly dramatic, trivialising danger , and projecting the root of all threats onto ‘the other’.
Moreover, the lack of spaces designed for meaningful deliberation paired with out-dated, reactive governance models worsen society’s ability to respond to the crises we face.
These types of surface-level, binary narratives and one-off solutions threaten the very foundation of authentic, transformational change. The recognition of these vulnerabilities is crucial, prompting the imperative to encourage questioning and critical thinking about who benefits from maintaining the status quo, while also prioritising empathy, mutual understanding, and the evolution of collective perspectives.
Principles for improving decision-making capability
Equitably addressing today’s grand challenges requires the creation of new soft infrastructures with capabilities, capacities, networks, and principles that differ from the usual theories and practices of 'othering' and 'inducing fear’. How might we shift towards practices of 'operating with care, justice, and relationality,' 'turning towards one another with moral and intellectual humility,' 'appreciating plurality rather than forcing consensus,' 'understanding the evolution of each other’s positions and innermost drivers,' and 'understanding security as entanglement and interconnectedness,' rather than viewing it through a geographical, boundary-edged concept.
Although the implementation of these principles may seem subtle, their effects are profound and can have a significant impact. They can help us be more prepared for the challenges yet to come.
The philosophical underpinnings and practical implementations necessary for fostering a robust, pluralistic society capable of navigating the complexities of the 21st century underscores the importance of creating inclusive deliberative spaces that transcend mere ideological divides to maintain societal health and vitality.
The goal is not to bias, coerce, or influence decisions towards a particular ideological spectrum but to cultivate a space where diverse societal perspectives can deliberate, learn from one another, and evolve. Together.
a. embracing plurality
Any spaces and frameworks that would improve our capabilities and collective capacity for sensemaking and societal decision-making would aim to move towards a more nuanced understanding of plurality and individual positionality, and the diverse range of human experiences. Such a framework(s) would inherently respect and value the multiplicity of perspectives, facilitating a plurality of decision spaces essential for a thriving society.
In these dimensions and environments, it's crucial not to operate through a theory of ‘othering’. Instead, it's about recognising the value in, and embracing, different positionalities.
An example of how governments can systematically create space for embracing plurality and engaging with different societal perspectives comes from Ostbelgien, Belgium. The small 80,000 person German speaking region permanently established a Citizens’ Council in 2019 as a formalised ‘mini-publics’ democratic institution, intended to raise politically contentious issues on the agenda of the regional parliament. Overtime, the Citizens’ Council engages every voting age resident of Ostbelgien and invites them to participate in the mini-public deliberations that centre on selecting politically contentious topic that the residents believe need to be addressed, make recommendations on how to solve the issues they select and provide those recommendations to the regional parliament who either accept the recommendation or must come up with their own solutions. This process ensures the diversity of perspectives of residents of the region are recognised and formally considered by the regional parliament, regardless of how sensitive an issue might be.
b. learning from and amplifying uncommon logics and wisdom in currently marginalised practices
While being mindful about appropriation (6) amplifying uncommon logics and the wisdom in currently marginalised practices is important for several reasons: these perspectives often represent unique viewpoints and ways of thinking that are not typically part of mainstream discourse yet incredibly valuable and inspiring.
People and their communities who are marginalised often have practices, strategies, and capabilities for dealing with adversity. These practices develop over time through the need to survive and thrive, without joining the status quo or being deliberately excluded from it—in a world that at best ignores them and at worst is actively hostile to them. Their diverse logics and practices provide a more comprehensive understanding of human experiences and societal dynamics beyond dominant perspectives, challenging systemic biases and power imbalances and moving toward creating a more just and equitable world.
Listening to and genuinely understanding these voices can be the first step in learning from their practices and applying them more widely to help societal resilience at large. Most importantly, including these voices through various participatory approaches will not be enough. Any intervention must ensure and bring about actual changes in the health and well-being of communities, moving beyond tokenistic extraction of ideas and one-off engagements with no follow-through.
Common dimensions of just transitions, including recognition, distributive, procedural, and restorative justices, are inseparable and can guide us in our transition processes. Interventions need to consider all these layers of means and ends, with a genuine recognition of historical and structural inequities, leading to just distributive outcomes.
Following deforestation, heavy rainfall and devastating mudslides, Freetown, Sierra Leone created a new initiative called Freetown the Treetown, with the highline aim of planting a million trees in low-income parts of the city. The Freetown the Treetown initiative addresses multiple objectives – climate adaptation and resilience, poverty alleviation, community development – because of its approach and use of blending sources of finance and digital innovations. The initiative established an economic value for planting and care for each tree planted. An initial public investment was then used to mobilise private investment into the initiative, recognising the value generated from the newly planted trees. Residents of communities where trees were meant to be planted could then be paid for planting and maintaining the trees through a digital app and payment system, verifying each saplings planted and tracking its growth overtime. Freetown the Treetown has created many benefits – carbon sequestration, reduction in urban heat, improved water management, greening of vulnerable communities, provision of meaningful employment, flood protection and erosion prevention – by trying to tackle urban challenges through a creative lens.
c. demonstrating complexity, questioning what’s offered to us, and not trusting the process
In our current social climate, there is a tendency to take sides without deeply listening to and understanding others' positionality and experiences when engaging in conversations. Taking a pause before choosing sides can be a useful practice.
The declining complexity in arguments also leads to a growing mismatch between the simple, one-off solutions offered by partisan politicians and other actors and the real complexity of the problems themselves. For instance, replacing one technology with another—as seen with the fascination and uptake around private electric vehicles—is not a transformational solution. Understanding the trade-offs and the political and economic drivers behind different technological interventions will be key to avoiding investments in solutions that perpetuate the status quo.
The West Oakland neighbourhood in California’s Bay Area is a systematically vulnerable community. A racist planning system and historically exclusionary housing practices (i.e. ‘redlining’) have disproportionately exposed West Oakland residents to air pollution and toxins from unregulated sources. In 2018, the environmental justice group West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WOEIP) partnered with environmental regulators to co-lead the development of an air quality strategy, in collaboration with local private and community sector stakeholders. The ‘Owning Our Air’ strategy was adopted by WOEIP and state regulators in 2019. The strategy’s development process put residents, ‘experts,’ and public decision-makers in equal positions of power, building shared responsibility across compelling, actionable priorities. Their co-productive model and strategy enabled over a dozen private and public sector organisations to commit to taking 89 clearly-defined actions to meaningfully improve air quality, and overcome the complexity of historic systemic discrimination.
d. creating ‘brave’ spaces for genuine transformation—towards radical curiosity and kindness
Creating ‘brave spaces, as well as, ‘safe’ spaces, is essential for genuine transformation because it fosters an environment where individuals feel empowered to take risks, share bold ideas, and challenge the status quo. Open-mindedness, radical curiosity, and critical reflections are prioritised and welcomed—especially from those in leadership positions, encouraging team members to venture beyond their comfort zones and engage in honest, sometimes uncomfortable, dialogues. This openness to diverse perspectives and unconventional thinking can lead to breakthrough ideas.
Healthy friction, a key element of a progressive team, thrives in such settings as it stimulates debate and ensures that ideas are rigorously tested and refined. In brave spaces, individuals are encouraged to voice constructive criticism without fear of retribution, blaming, or shaming; facilitating a continuous loop of improvement, learning, and growth. These environments also foster loyalty and motivation in the long run.
Brave spaces allow us to practise and develop the muscle or capability for sensemaking and critical thinking, as people are continually challenged to analyse, interpret, and synthesise diverse perspectives and co-design accordingly.
e. challenging our own blindspots, judgments, and biases
When designing and implementing interventions, being cautious of our own biases, worldviews, and assumptions about the world will be key in avoiding reiterating current norms and practices. Ramia Mazé talks about how designers need to be careful when “mobilising particular ideals of the future” and keep reflecting on the role they may have in “reproducing already existing practices and norms in society”. (7)
We don’t only need to study the systems that surround us; we also need to acknowledge that our way of looking at and interacting with those systems can influence and change them. Explicitly acknowledging or stating our viewpoints and positionality will be key when inducing any change process.
The Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) has created a governance framework for managing the implementation of its climate action strategy—the 5-Year Environment Plan—in a way that enables civil servants and political leader’s perspectives to be continuously challenged and expanded. GMCA created an integrated governance framework for the 5-Year Environment Plan where public, private and third sector stakeholders oversee and lead implementation efforts through ‘Challenge Groups.’ As the name would suggest, the Challenge Groups are intended to bring diverse stakeholders together to work toward a shared goal but in a space where members are encouraged to disagree, challenge each other's assumption and interrogate weaknesses. This governance model’s critical and challenging ethos can slow the process of implementation down, but ensures GMCA doesn’t make mistakes due to the inherent blindspots, biases and preconceived ideas of those who created the 5-Year Environment Plan—fallibilities that all individuals and small groups have.
Moving towards care and mutual thriving
The mental health of a society serves as an equally important foundational capacity. When we create mental fragility, we simultaneously diminish society's ability to navigate uncertainty and prevent individuals from avoiding falling into theories of fear, which render them vulnerable in dealing with complex, risk-oriented decisions.
This holistic approach to societal health necessitates a reevaluation of how we understand and address the various elements that contribute to collective mental wellbeing. There is an intricate interplay between emotional, environmental, nutritional, financial, and social stressors, and their cumulative impact on societal resilience and capacity for effective sensemaking and decision-making in the face of uncertainty.
We're living in a vicious cycle where stress, climate breakdown, energy price increases, and food system disruptions make it increasingly difficult for families to survive, let alone to thrive. This situation leads to increased incidents of domestic violence, heightened household tensions, inadequate nutrition, extended work hours, and a pervasive or overwhelming sense of fear, ultimately contributing to a decline in mental health and civility.
Investing in the cornerstone capabilities and capacities of society
Over time, our capabilities and collective capacity for sensemaking and societal decision-making have not only been overlooked and underinvested in but have also eroded due to factors such as a lack of transparency surrounding decision-making processes, citizen engagement processes that are often tokenistic and susceptible to capture by special interests, leaving the public feeling a lack of agency to influence democratic institutions.
Currently, we fail to recognise the more intangible but indispensable capabilities and capacities of society. So, what would it mean to include these as a new form of balance sheet or part of existing balance sheets, recognising them as foundational assets? How do we invest in and grow these capabilities and collective capacities as a foundational investment for society to deal with and operationalise itself in moments of large-scale uncertainty and risk, where decisions must be made in often hostile environments?
Only by recognising these as foundational pieces and indispensable assets of a functional society will we invest in them and acknowledge their vast societal spillover effects, aligning with the complex realities of the 21st century, fostering spaces and environments that are just, resilient, dynamic, and inclusive.
We have worked with and studied dozens of case studies across the globe—like the ones included in this chapter—where deliberative participatory and citizen engagement approaches have intentionally been paired with governance innovations and institutional, infrastructural, and structural change. These are instances where collective action and new partnerships were well-orchestrated and sustained, and the culture of organisations and the mindsets of various stakeholders shifted to prioritise mutual thriving and support, rather than narrow individual self-interest.
Whilst the challenges facing society that we explore in this piece are present, and will be enormously difficult to overcome, we have also seen that through tenacity and courage—from Freetown, Greater Manchester, West Oakland, and beyond—the seeds of sensemaking and societal decision-making are being sown, giving us hope that change is indeed possible.
Footnotes
This chapter is based on and inspired by dozens of conversations with our team and colleagues at Dark Matter Labs. Originally published by Media Evolution 2024 in The Mesh We're In.
“At its heart, governance is about the framework of decision making; identifying who has the power to make and enforce decisions, and how that power should be exercised and accountable. The ‘how’ is focused on the process of decision making and the ‘who’ is about identifying where the power to make and enforce a decision–or not–lies.”—Scottish Land Commission, 2023 (1)
The 21st century will be defined by society's ability to respond together to the entangled crises we currently face. From pandemics and inflation to the cost of living crisis and environmental breakdown, private organisations or public institutions but to society in general, interconnected crises demand nuanced, systemic and thoughtful questions and responses:
How do people and society understand the world and what problems there are to understand?
How does society make collective decisions about those problems, and what are the appropriate governance frameworks to make those decisions? How might we redesign our societal decision-making processes and systems of governance?
How do we recognise societal assets and soft infrastructures as vital in a time of crises, and how do we invest into and build those future infrastructures?
Such a nuanced response would require building an intangible yet indispensable scaffold for our society, which we call soft infrastructure. This includes the skills, capabilities, capacities, institutions, networks, and processes (2) needed to make wise, collective decisions amidst the complexity and unpredictability of our planetary condition.
When we talk about capabilities we refer to the concept of dynamic capabilities. These are “the specific abilities embedded in routines that enable organisations to adapt their resources, processes, and skills in response to an evolving strategic environment, and to utilise competence to address a rapidly changing environment”. (3) However, in our case, we are applying dynamic capabilities not to private organisations or public institutions but to society in general.
By sensemaking capabilities, we refer to the process of understanding the empirical world, interpreting reality, and attributing meaning to the information we encounter. And decision-making capabilities are how this information is then assessed and informs the execution of decision-making processes, choices, and practical actions of individuals and society at large, its ability to find compromise and make at times difficult, collective choices. This might include the established frameworks, technological tools, policy implementation effectiveness, and communication channels that enable society to make and implement decisions.
Society's capacity for sensemaking and decision-making encompasses several critical questions. Does the societal standard of living and mental health allow it to focus on collective challenges? Do we have trustworthy media institutions?
The rising complexity within everyday life produces a cognitively and emotionally overwhelming stream of information, which is often exploited to numb and disorient citizens through techniques of disinformation and the creation of polarised narratives. This complexity impairs individuals’ capacity for sensemaking, and fosters antagonistic politics and dialogues that deem it wrong to disagree with institutional decisions—decisions that people are deeply sceptical of. These factors have, in part, led to the rise of polarisation, distrust, and incivility within our democratic systems—including a breakdown of infrastructural support that could, by default, allow for or engender more sustainable social practices, norms, and behaviours—thereby creating newfound opportunities for authoritarianism.
Our Western democracies largely fail to grapple with complex crises and often deliberately avoid taking action, which results in preserving the status quo.
This begs the question, how might we work in opposition to the dangers inherent in the current polarisation of societal values; emphasising the need for plurality, ongoing discourse, open dialogue, and mutual learning?
Achieving this will require a profound shift in how we invest in, govern, and nurture the decision-making and sensemaking capabilities and capacities of society to meet the needs of the present and anticipate the demands of the future. These will be key to developing infrastructures that focus on the services and systems supporting the well-being, productivity, and governance of a society in our dynamic and uncertain era.
A potential pathway that could help us structure our response strategy and shift our governance architecture is three-fold:
1. Recognising that building the collective capacity and capabilities for sensemaking and societal decision-making is a critical structural challenge and an opportunity to operate in a world of complexity, uncertainty, disinformation and information overload, and tendency toward polarisation and declining civility;
2. Designing the pathways to invest in those capabilities and collective capacity;
3. Achieving the first two prompts in practice requires governance innovation and interventions in the intricate architecture of soft infrastructure, rethinking its codes, processes, and institutions;
The absence of different, more diverse, and nuanced storytelling around complex political, social, and environmental matters, coupled with deliberate misinformation (i.e. disinformation) driven by vested interests continues to lead to a breakdown of security, civility, and humaneness towards one another. Major media outlets often employ binary and reductionist messaging, provoking polarisation and severe antagonism toward ‘the other’.
The multifaceted crises that society currently faces — whether related to climate, biodiversity, housing, healthcare or food and water security — also stem from structural and systemic inequities and exploitation, exacerbated by our economic model that solely focuses on profitability and the financialisation of every sector.
Moreover, our economic system externalises the true cost of a product or service’s impacts by only pricing in the economic costs. Externalising these costs is an economic practice in which companies do not account for the full societal or environmental impact of their products or services. In addition, the misleading practice of 'paltered' accounting—masterfully used in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting and other public and private institutional reports—tells only part of the truth while omitting important details.
These tactics are impeding structural changes to address the multitude of crises we currently face and also raising regulatory and data questions such as what corporate data reporting needs to be gathered and accounted for to build trust with investors who are now (often still performatively) demanding change, transparency, and thorough risk analyses?
It is also important to acknowledge that all of us, in one way or another, are part of following our own self-interests, even with the best intentions. Understanding how we support the current status quo and how we can take shared responsibility, rather than continuing with pushing the responsibility onto others, will be key in enabling collective action and shared accountability.
"Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.”— Marshall McLuhan, 1969 (4)
People's sensemaking capacity is impaired when they are inundated with information—rendering them unable to process information and interpret complex information. When inundated with information, people lose their ability to recognise patterns, and consequently, they become vulnerable to simply adopting patterns that are created for them by those with vested interests. These pattern narrative structures or frameworks are easily exploited, hijacking our comprehension of how we make sense of the world.
Political figures use deliberate tactics to overload people with information, disorienting and rendering them numb and paralysed. Initially applied by authoritarian regimes, these strategies deliberately create and popularise multiple opposing narratives transforming political landscape into a spectacle and engender cynicism in society.(5) We need to reconsider and expand the scope of regulatory and governance frameworks necessary to address these hijacking mechanisms.
Overtime, our storytelling and communication methods have grown increasingly sophisticated, persuasive, and attention grabbing. So perhaps our challenge with narratives is not only about creating better communication and storytelling but also about creating different ones.
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (2002) talk about examples for great storytelling, however harmful, when describing the phenomena of ‘manufacturing consent’. Manufacturing consent is the process by which the mass media, often in collusion with political and corporate interests, manipulates public opinion to align with those interests. Key elements of this include propaganda models, agenda setting, framing, selective reporting, and normalisation.
The stories told to everyday people in the mainstream media are often told in a way that provides a sense of safety, meant to create a delicate veneer that they and their families will not be directly impacted by the ‘crises of the day’, both now and in the future. This leads to dinner conversations often glossing over challenging future scenarios, priming people to label climate scientists, social activists, and student movements as overly dramatic, trivialising danger , and projecting the root of all threats onto ‘the other’.
Moreover, the lack of spaces designed for meaningful deliberation paired with out-dated, reactive governance models worsen society’s ability to respond to the crises we face.
These types of surface-level, binary narratives and one-off solutions threaten the very foundation of authentic, transformational change. The recognition of these vulnerabilities is crucial, prompting the imperative to encourage questioning and critical thinking about who benefits from maintaining the status quo, while also prioritising empathy, mutual understanding, and the evolution of collective perspectives.
Principles for improving decision-making capability
Equitably addressing today’s grand challenges requires the creation of new soft infrastructures with capabilities, capacities, networks, and principles that differ from the usual theories and practices of 'othering' and 'inducing fear’. How might we shift towards practices of 'operating with care, justice, and relationality,' 'turning towards one another with moral and intellectual humility,' 'appreciating plurality rather than forcing consensus,' 'understanding the evolution of each other’s positions and innermost drivers,' and 'understanding security as entanglement and interconnectedness,' rather than viewing it through a geographical, boundary-edged concept.
Although the implementation of these principles may seem subtle, their effects are profound and can have a significant impact. They can help us be more prepared for the challenges yet to come.
The philosophical underpinnings and practical implementations necessary for fostering a robust, pluralistic society capable of navigating the complexities of the 21st century underscores the importance of creating inclusive deliberative spaces that transcend mere ideological divides to maintain societal health and vitality.
The goal is not to bias, coerce, or influence decisions towards a particular ideological spectrum but to cultivate a space where diverse societal perspectives can deliberate, learn from one another, and evolve. Together.
a. embracing plurality
Any spaces and frameworks that would improve our capabilities and collective capacity for sensemaking and societal decision-making would aim to move towards a more nuanced understanding of plurality and individual positionality, and the diverse range of human experiences. Such a framework(s) would inherently respect and value the multiplicity of perspectives, facilitating a plurality of decision spaces essential for a thriving society.
In these dimensions and environments, it's crucial not to operate through a theory of ‘othering’. Instead, it's about recognising the value in, and embracing, different positionalities.
An example of how governments can systematically create space for embracing plurality and engaging with different societal perspectives comes from Ostbelgien, Belgium. The small 80,000 person German speaking region permanently established a Citizens’ Council in 2019 as a formalised ‘mini-publics’ democratic institution, intended to raise politically contentious issues on the agenda of the regional parliament. Overtime, the Citizens’ Council engages every voting age resident of Ostbelgien and invites them to participate in the mini-public deliberations that centre on selecting politically contentious topic that the residents believe need to be addressed, make recommendations on how to solve the issues they select and provide those recommendations to the regional parliament who either accept the recommendation or must come up with their own solutions. This process ensures the diversity of perspectives of residents of the region are recognised and formally considered by the regional parliament, regardless of how sensitive an issue might be.
b. learning from and amplifying uncommon logics and wisdom in currently marginalised practices
While being mindful about appropriation (6) amplifying uncommon logics and the wisdom in currently marginalised practices is important for several reasons: these perspectives often represent unique viewpoints and ways of thinking that are not typically part of mainstream discourse yet incredibly valuable and inspiring.
People and their communities who are marginalised often have practices, strategies, and capabilities for dealing with adversity. These practices develop over time through the need to survive and thrive, without joining the status quo or being deliberately excluded from it—in a world that at best ignores them and at worst is actively hostile to them. Their diverse logics and practices provide a more comprehensive understanding of human experiences and societal dynamics beyond dominant perspectives, challenging systemic biases and power imbalances and moving toward creating a more just and equitable world.
Listening to and genuinely understanding these voices can be the first step in learning from their practices and applying them more widely to help societal resilience at large. Most importantly, including these voices through various participatory approaches will not be enough. Any intervention must ensure and bring about actual changes in the health and well-being of communities, moving beyond tokenistic extraction of ideas and one-off engagements with no follow-through.
Common dimensions of just transitions, including recognition, distributive, procedural, and restorative justices, are inseparable and can guide us in our transition processes. Interventions need to consider all these layers of means and ends, with a genuine recognition of historical and structural inequities, leading to just distributive outcomes.
Following deforestation, heavy rainfall and devastating mudslides, Freetown, Sierra Leone created a new initiative called Freetown the Treetown, with the highline aim of planting a million trees in low-income parts of the city. The Freetown the Treetown initiative addresses multiple objectives – climate adaptation and resilience, poverty alleviation, community development – because of its approach and use of blending sources of finance and digital innovations. The initiative established an economic value for planting and care for each tree planted. An initial public investment was then used to mobilise private investment into the initiative, recognising the value generated from the newly planted trees. Residents of communities where trees were meant to be planted could then be paid for planting and maintaining the trees through a digital app and payment system, verifying each saplings planted and tracking its growth overtime. Freetown the Treetown has created many benefits – carbon sequestration, reduction in urban heat, improved water management, greening of vulnerable communities, provision of meaningful employment, flood protection and erosion prevention – by trying to tackle urban challenges through a creative lens.
c. demonstrating complexity, questioning what’s offered to us, and not trusting the process
In our current social climate, there is a tendency to take sides without deeply listening to and understanding others' positionality and experiences when engaging in conversations. Taking a pause before choosing sides can be a useful practice.
The declining complexity in arguments also leads to a growing mismatch between the simple, one-off solutions offered by partisan politicians and other actors and the real complexity of the problems themselves. For instance, replacing one technology with another—as seen with the fascination and uptake around private electric vehicles—is not a transformational solution. Understanding the trade-offs and the political and economic drivers behind different technological interventions will be key to avoiding investments in solutions that perpetuate the status quo.
The West Oakland neighbourhood in California’s Bay Area is a systematically vulnerable community. A racist planning system and historically exclusionary housing practices (i.e. ‘redlining’) have disproportionately exposed West Oakland residents to air pollution and toxins from unregulated sources. In 2018, the environmental justice group West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WOEIP) partnered with environmental regulators to co-lead the development of an air quality strategy, in collaboration with local private and community sector stakeholders. The ‘Owning Our Air’ strategy was adopted by WOEIP and state regulators in 2019. The strategy’s development process put residents, ‘experts,’ and public decision-makers in equal positions of power, building shared responsibility across compelling, actionable priorities. Their co-productive model and strategy enabled over a dozen private and public sector organisations to commit to taking 89 clearly-defined actions to meaningfully improve air quality, and overcome the complexity of historic systemic discrimination.
d. creating ‘brave’ spaces for genuine transformation—towards radical curiosity and kindness
Creating ‘brave spaces, as well as, ‘safe’ spaces, is essential for genuine transformation because it fosters an environment where individuals feel empowered to take risks, share bold ideas, and challenge the status quo. Open-mindedness, radical curiosity, and critical reflections are prioritised and welcomed—especially from those in leadership positions, encouraging team members to venture beyond their comfort zones and engage in honest, sometimes uncomfortable, dialogues. This openness to diverse perspectives and unconventional thinking can lead to breakthrough ideas.
Healthy friction, a key element of a progressive team, thrives in such settings as it stimulates debate and ensures that ideas are rigorously tested and refined. In brave spaces, individuals are encouraged to voice constructive criticism without fear of retribution, blaming, or shaming; facilitating a continuous loop of improvement, learning, and growth. These environments also foster loyalty and motivation in the long run.
Brave spaces allow us to practise and develop the muscle or capability for sensemaking and critical thinking, as people are continually challenged to analyse, interpret, and synthesise diverse perspectives and co-design accordingly.
e. challenging our own blindspots, judgments, and biases
When designing and implementing interventions, being cautious of our own biases, worldviews, and assumptions about the world will be key in avoiding reiterating current norms and practices. Ramia Mazé talks about how designers need to be careful when “mobilising particular ideals of the future” and keep reflecting on the role they may have in “reproducing already existing practices and norms in society”. (7)
We don’t only need to study the systems that surround us; we also need to acknowledge that our way of looking at and interacting with those systems can influence and change them. Explicitly acknowledging or stating our viewpoints and positionality will be key when inducing any change process.
The Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) has created a governance framework for managing the implementation of its climate action strategy—the 5-Year Environment Plan—in a way that enables civil servants and political leader’s perspectives to be continuously challenged and expanded. GMCA created an integrated governance framework for the 5-Year Environment Plan where public, private and third sector stakeholders oversee and lead implementation efforts through ‘Challenge Groups.’ As the name would suggest, the Challenge Groups are intended to bring diverse stakeholders together to work toward a shared goal but in a space where members are encouraged to disagree, challenge each other's assumption and interrogate weaknesses. This governance model’s critical and challenging ethos can slow the process of implementation down, but ensures GMCA doesn’t make mistakes due to the inherent blindspots, biases and preconceived ideas of those who created the 5-Year Environment Plan—fallibilities that all individuals and small groups have.
Moving towards care and mutual thriving
The mental health of a society serves as an equally important foundational capacity. When we create mental fragility, we simultaneously diminish society's ability to navigate uncertainty and prevent individuals from avoiding falling into theories of fear, which render them vulnerable in dealing with complex, risk-oriented decisions.
This holistic approach to societal health necessitates a reevaluation of how we understand and address the various elements that contribute to collective mental wellbeing. There is an intricate interplay between emotional, environmental, nutritional, financial, and social stressors, and their cumulative impact on societal resilience and capacity for effective sensemaking and decision-making in the face of uncertainty.
We're living in a vicious cycle where stress, climate breakdown, energy price increases, and food system disruptions make it increasingly difficult for families to survive, let alone to thrive. This situation leads to increased incidents of domestic violence, heightened household tensions, inadequate nutrition, extended work hours, and a pervasive or overwhelming sense of fear, ultimately contributing to a decline in mental health and civility.
Investing in the cornerstone capabilities and capacities of society
Over time, our capabilities and collective capacity for sensemaking and societal decision-making have not only been overlooked and underinvested in but have also eroded due to factors such as a lack of transparency surrounding decision-making processes, citizen engagement processes that are often tokenistic and susceptible to capture by special interests, leaving the public feeling a lack of agency to influence democratic institutions.
Currently, we fail to recognise the more intangible but indispensable capabilities and capacities of society. So, what would it mean to include these as a new form of balance sheet or part of existing balance sheets, recognising them as foundational assets? How do we invest in and grow these capabilities and collective capacities as a foundational investment for society to deal with and operationalise itself in moments of large-scale uncertainty and risk, where decisions must be made in often hostile environments?
Only by recognising these as foundational pieces and indispensable assets of a functional society will we invest in them and acknowledge their vast societal spillover effects, aligning with the complex realities of the 21st century, fostering spaces and environments that are just, resilient, dynamic, and inclusive.
We have worked with and studied dozens of case studies across the globe—like the ones included in this chapter—where deliberative participatory and citizen engagement approaches have intentionally been paired with governance innovations and institutional, infrastructural, and structural change. These are instances where collective action and new partnerships were well-orchestrated and sustained, and the culture of organisations and the mindsets of various stakeholders shifted to prioritise mutual thriving and support, rather than narrow individual self-interest.
Whilst the challenges facing society that we explore in this piece are present, and will be enormously difficult to overcome, we have also seen that through tenacity and courage—from Freetown, Greater Manchester, West Oakland, and beyond—the seeds of sensemaking and societal decision-making are being sown, giving us hope that change is indeed possible.
Footnotes
This chapter is based on and inspired by dozens of conversations with our team and colleagues at Dark Matter Labs. Originally published by Media Evolution 2024 in The Mesh We're In.
Gyorgyi Galik is a socio-ecological systems designer. She is the City Transitions Co-Holder at Dark Matter Labs. Previously she worked as the Head of Strategic Partnerships at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and as a Lead Advisor at Design Council. She has seventeen years of experience in policy, service, and innovation design. Her specialisation spans design, behavioural and environmental sciences, with a strong understanding of the built and natural environment.
Vlad Afanasiev is a strategic designer and researcher. He works at Dark Matter Labs where he focuses on governance and foresight at bioregional and planetary scales.
Ryan Bellinson is an action-oriented researcher, policy advisor and public sector innovator. He has advised cities on participative approaches to climate action and published widely on place-based approaches to innovation and community empowerment. Ryan is currently the Community Innovation Strategist at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and Visiting Senior Research Fellow in Cities, Climate and Innovation at University College London Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.
Gyorgyi Galik, PhD, Vlad Afanasiev, Ryan Bellinson, Indy Johar
“At its heart, governance is about the framework of decision making; identifying who has the power to make and enforce decisions, and how that power should be exercised and accountable. The ‘how’ is focused on the process of decision making and the ‘who’ is about identifying where the power to make and enforce a decision–or not–lies.”—Scottish Land Commission, 2023 (1)
The 21st century will be defined by society's ability to respond together to the entangled crises we currently face. From pandemics and inflation to the cost of living crisis and environmental breakdown, private organisations or public institutions but to society in general, interconnected crises demand nuanced, systemic and thoughtful questions and responses:
How do people and society understand the world and what problems there are to understand?
How does society make collective decisions about those problems, and what are the appropriate governance frameworks to make those decisions? How might we redesign our societal decision-making processes and systems of governance?
How do we recognise societal assets and soft infrastructures as vital in a time of crises, and how do we invest into and build those future infrastructures?
Such a nuanced response would require building an intangible yet indispensable scaffold for our society, which we call soft infrastructure. This includes the skills, capabilities, capacities, institutions, networks, and processes (2) needed to make wise, collective decisions amidst the complexity and unpredictability of our planetary condition.
When we talk about capabilities we refer to the concept of dynamic capabilities. These are “the specific abilities embedded in routines that enable organisations to adapt their resources, processes, and skills in response to an evolving strategic environment, and to utilise competence to address a rapidly changing environment”. (3) However, in our case, we are applying dynamic capabilities not to private organisations or public institutions but to society in general.
By sensemaking capabilities, we refer to the process of understanding the empirical world, interpreting reality, and attributing meaning to the information we encounter. And decision-making capabilities are how this information is then assessed and informs the execution of decision-making processes, choices, and practical actions of individuals and society at large, its ability to find compromise and make at times difficult, collective choices. This might include the established frameworks, technological tools, policy implementation effectiveness, and communication channels that enable society to make and implement decisions.
Society's capacity for sensemaking and decision-making encompasses several critical questions. Does the societal standard of living and mental health allow it to focus on collective challenges? Do we have trustworthy media institutions?
The rising complexity within everyday life produces a cognitively and emotionally overwhelming stream of information, which is often exploited to numb and disorient citizens through techniques of disinformation and the creation of polarised narratives. This complexity impairs individuals’ capacity for sensemaking, and fosters antagonistic politics and dialogues that deem it wrong to disagree with institutional decisions—decisions that people are deeply sceptical of. These factors have, in part, led to the rise of polarisation, distrust, and incivility within our democratic systems—including a breakdown of infrastructural support that could, by default, allow for or engender more sustainable social practices, norms, and behaviours—thereby creating newfound opportunities for authoritarianism.
Our Western democracies largely fail to grapple with complex crises and often deliberately avoid taking action, which results in preserving the status quo.
This begs the question, how might we work in opposition to the dangers inherent in the current polarisation of societal values; emphasising the need for plurality, ongoing discourse, open dialogue, and mutual learning?
Achieving this will require a profound shift in how we invest in, govern, and nurture the decision-making and sensemaking capabilities and capacities of society to meet the needs of the present and anticipate the demands of the future. These will be key to developing infrastructures that focus on the services and systems supporting the well-being, productivity, and governance of a society in our dynamic and uncertain era.
A potential pathway that could help us structure our response strategy and shift our governance architecture is three-fold:
1. Recognising that building the collective capacity and capabilities for sensemaking and societal decision-making is a critical structural challenge and an opportunity to operate in a world of complexity, uncertainty, disinformation and information overload, and tendency toward polarisation and declining civility;
2. Designing the pathways to invest in those capabilities and collective capacity;
3. Achieving the first two prompts in practice requires governance innovation and interventions in the intricate architecture of soft infrastructure, rethinking its codes, processes, and institutions;
The absence of different, more diverse, and nuanced storytelling around complex political, social, and environmental matters, coupled with deliberate misinformation (i.e. disinformation) driven by vested interests continues to lead to a breakdown of security, civility, and humaneness towards one another. Major media outlets often employ binary and reductionist messaging, provoking polarisation and severe antagonism toward ‘the other’.
The multifaceted crises that society currently faces — whether related to climate, biodiversity, housing, healthcare or food and water security — also stem from structural and systemic inequities and exploitation, exacerbated by our economic model that solely focuses on profitability and the financialisation of every sector.
Moreover, our economic system externalises the true cost of a product or service’s impacts by only pricing in the economic costs. Externalising these costs is an economic practice in which companies do not account for the full societal or environmental impact of their products or services. In addition, the misleading practice of 'paltered' accounting—masterfully used in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting and other public and private institutional reports—tells only part of the truth while omitting important details.
These tactics are impeding structural changes to address the multitude of crises we currently face and also raising regulatory and data questions such as what corporate data reporting needs to be gathered and accounted for to build trust with investors who are now (often still performatively) demanding change, transparency, and thorough risk analyses?
It is also important to acknowledge that all of us, in one way or another, are part of following our own self-interests, even with the best intentions. Understanding how we support the current status quo and how we can take shared responsibility, rather than continuing with pushing the responsibility onto others, will be key in enabling collective action and shared accountability.
"Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.”— Marshall McLuhan, 1969 (4)
People's sensemaking capacity is impaired when they are inundated with information—rendering them unable to process information and interpret complex information. When inundated with information, people lose their ability to recognise patterns, and consequently, they become vulnerable to simply adopting patterns that are created for them by those with vested interests. These pattern narrative structures or frameworks are easily exploited, hijacking our comprehension of how we make sense of the world.
Political figures use deliberate tactics to overload people with information, disorienting and rendering them numb and paralysed. Initially applied by authoritarian regimes, these strategies deliberately create and popularise multiple opposing narratives transforming political landscape into a spectacle and engender cynicism in society.(5) We need to reconsider and expand the scope of regulatory and governance frameworks necessary to address these hijacking mechanisms.
Overtime, our storytelling and communication methods have grown increasingly sophisticated, persuasive, and attention grabbing. So perhaps our challenge with narratives is not only about creating better communication and storytelling but also about creating different ones.
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (2002) talk about examples for great storytelling, however harmful, when describing the phenomena of ‘manufacturing consent’. Manufacturing consent is the process by which the mass media, often in collusion with political and corporate interests, manipulates public opinion to align with those interests. Key elements of this include propaganda models, agenda setting, framing, selective reporting, and normalisation.
The stories told to everyday people in the mainstream media are often told in a way that provides a sense of safety, meant to create a delicate veneer that they and their families will not be directly impacted by the ‘crises of the day’, both now and in the future. This leads to dinner conversations often glossing over challenging future scenarios, priming people to label climate scientists, social activists, and student movements as overly dramatic, trivialising danger , and projecting the root of all threats onto ‘the other’.
Moreover, the lack of spaces designed for meaningful deliberation paired with out-dated, reactive governance models worsen society’s ability to respond to the crises we face.
These types of surface-level, binary narratives and one-off solutions threaten the very foundation of authentic, transformational change. The recognition of these vulnerabilities is crucial, prompting the imperative to encourage questioning and critical thinking about who benefits from maintaining the status quo, while also prioritising empathy, mutual understanding, and the evolution of collective perspectives.
Principles for improving decision-making capability
Equitably addressing today’s grand challenges requires the creation of new soft infrastructures with capabilities, capacities, networks, and principles that differ from the usual theories and practices of 'othering' and 'inducing fear’. How might we shift towards practices of 'operating with care, justice, and relationality,' 'turning towards one another with moral and intellectual humility,' 'appreciating plurality rather than forcing consensus,' 'understanding the evolution of each other’s positions and innermost drivers,' and 'understanding security as entanglement and interconnectedness,' rather than viewing it through a geographical, boundary-edged concept.
Although the implementation of these principles may seem subtle, their effects are profound and can have a significant impact. They can help us be more prepared for the challenges yet to come.
The philosophical underpinnings and practical implementations necessary for fostering a robust, pluralistic society capable of navigating the complexities of the 21st century underscores the importance of creating inclusive deliberative spaces that transcend mere ideological divides to maintain societal health and vitality.
The goal is not to bias, coerce, or influence decisions towards a particular ideological spectrum but to cultivate a space where diverse societal perspectives can deliberate, learn from one another, and evolve. Together.
a. embracing plurality
Any spaces and frameworks that would improve our capabilities and collective capacity for sensemaking and societal decision-making would aim to move towards a more nuanced understanding of plurality and individual positionality, and the diverse range of human experiences. Such a framework(s) would inherently respect and value the multiplicity of perspectives, facilitating a plurality of decision spaces essential for a thriving society.
In these dimensions and environments, it's crucial not to operate through a theory of ‘othering’. Instead, it's about recognising the value in, and embracing, different positionalities.
An example of how governments can systematically create space for embracing plurality and engaging with different societal perspectives comes from Ostbelgien, Belgium. The small 80,000 person German speaking region permanently established a Citizens’ Council in 2019 as a formalised ‘mini-publics’ democratic institution, intended to raise politically contentious issues on the agenda of the regional parliament. Overtime, the Citizens’ Council engages every voting age resident of Ostbelgien and invites them to participate in the mini-public deliberations that centre on selecting politically contentious topic that the residents believe need to be addressed, make recommendations on how to solve the issues they select and provide those recommendations to the regional parliament who either accept the recommendation or must come up with their own solutions. This process ensures the diversity of perspectives of residents of the region are recognised and formally considered by the regional parliament, regardless of how sensitive an issue might be.
b. learning from and amplifying uncommon logics and wisdom in currently marginalised practices
While being mindful about appropriation (6) amplifying uncommon logics and the wisdom in currently marginalised practices is important for several reasons: these perspectives often represent unique viewpoints and ways of thinking that are not typically part of mainstream discourse yet incredibly valuable and inspiring.
People and their communities who are marginalised often have practices, strategies, and capabilities for dealing with adversity. These practices develop over time through the need to survive and thrive, without joining the status quo or being deliberately excluded from it—in a world that at best ignores them and at worst is actively hostile to them. Their diverse logics and practices provide a more comprehensive understanding of human experiences and societal dynamics beyond dominant perspectives, challenging systemic biases and power imbalances and moving toward creating a more just and equitable world.
Listening to and genuinely understanding these voices can be the first step in learning from their practices and applying them more widely to help societal resilience at large. Most importantly, including these voices through various participatory approaches will not be enough. Any intervention must ensure and bring about actual changes in the health and well-being of communities, moving beyond tokenistic extraction of ideas and one-off engagements with no follow-through.
Common dimensions of just transitions, including recognition, distributive, procedural, and restorative justices, are inseparable and can guide us in our transition processes. Interventions need to consider all these layers of means and ends, with a genuine recognition of historical and structural inequities, leading to just distributive outcomes.
Following deforestation, heavy rainfall and devastating mudslides, Freetown, Sierra Leone created a new initiative called Freetown the Treetown, with the highline aim of planting a million trees in low-income parts of the city. The Freetown the Treetown initiative addresses multiple objectives – climate adaptation and resilience, poverty alleviation, community development – because of its approach and use of blending sources of finance and digital innovations. The initiative established an economic value for planting and care for each tree planted. An initial public investment was then used to mobilise private investment into the initiative, recognising the value generated from the newly planted trees. Residents of communities where trees were meant to be planted could then be paid for planting and maintaining the trees through a digital app and payment system, verifying each saplings planted and tracking its growth overtime. Freetown the Treetown has created many benefits – carbon sequestration, reduction in urban heat, improved water management, greening of vulnerable communities, provision of meaningful employment, flood protection and erosion prevention – by trying to tackle urban challenges through a creative lens.
c. demonstrating complexity, questioning what’s offered to us, and not trusting the process
In our current social climate, there is a tendency to take sides without deeply listening to and understanding others' positionality and experiences when engaging in conversations. Taking a pause before choosing sides can be a useful practice.
The declining complexity in arguments also leads to a growing mismatch between the simple, one-off solutions offered by partisan politicians and other actors and the real complexity of the problems themselves. For instance, replacing one technology with another—as seen with the fascination and uptake around private electric vehicles—is not a transformational solution. Understanding the trade-offs and the political and economic drivers behind different technological interventions will be key to avoiding investments in solutions that perpetuate the status quo.
The West Oakland neighbourhood in California’s Bay Area is a systematically vulnerable community. A racist planning system and historically exclusionary housing practices (i.e. ‘redlining’) have disproportionately exposed West Oakland residents to air pollution and toxins from unregulated sources. In 2018, the environmental justice group West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WOEIP) partnered with environmental regulators to co-lead the development of an air quality strategy, in collaboration with local private and community sector stakeholders. The ‘Owning Our Air’ strategy was adopted by WOEIP and state regulators in 2019. The strategy’s development process put residents, ‘experts,’ and public decision-makers in equal positions of power, building shared responsibility across compelling, actionable priorities. Their co-productive model and strategy enabled over a dozen private and public sector organisations to commit to taking 89 clearly-defined actions to meaningfully improve air quality, and overcome the complexity of historic systemic discrimination.
d. creating ‘brave’ spaces for genuine transformation—towards radical curiosity and kindness
Creating ‘brave spaces, as well as, ‘safe’ spaces, is essential for genuine transformation because it fosters an environment where individuals feel empowered to take risks, share bold ideas, and challenge the status quo. Open-mindedness, radical curiosity, and critical reflections are prioritised and welcomed—especially from those in leadership positions, encouraging team members to venture beyond their comfort zones and engage in honest, sometimes uncomfortable, dialogues. This openness to diverse perspectives and unconventional thinking can lead to breakthrough ideas.
Healthy friction, a key element of a progressive team, thrives in such settings as it stimulates debate and ensures that ideas are rigorously tested and refined. In brave spaces, individuals are encouraged to voice constructive criticism without fear of retribution, blaming, or shaming; facilitating a continuous loop of improvement, learning, and growth. These environments also foster loyalty and motivation in the long run.
Brave spaces allow us to practise and develop the muscle or capability for sensemaking and critical thinking, as people are continually challenged to analyse, interpret, and synthesise diverse perspectives and co-design accordingly.
e. challenging our own blindspots, judgments, and biases
When designing and implementing interventions, being cautious of our own biases, worldviews, and assumptions about the world will be key in avoiding reiterating current norms and practices. Ramia Mazé talks about how designers need to be careful when “mobilising particular ideals of the future” and keep reflecting on the role they may have in “reproducing already existing practices and norms in society”. (7)
We don’t only need to study the systems that surround us; we also need to acknowledge that our way of looking at and interacting with those systems can influence and change them. Explicitly acknowledging or stating our viewpoints and positionality will be key when inducing any change process.
The Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) has created a governance framework for managing the implementation of its climate action strategy—the 5-Year Environment Plan—in a way that enables civil servants and political leader’s perspectives to be continuously challenged and expanded. GMCA created an integrated governance framework for the 5-Year Environment Plan where public, private and third sector stakeholders oversee and lead implementation efforts through ‘Challenge Groups.’ As the name would suggest, the Challenge Groups are intended to bring diverse stakeholders together to work toward a shared goal but in a space where members are encouraged to disagree, challenge each other's assumption and interrogate weaknesses. This governance model’s critical and challenging ethos can slow the process of implementation down, but ensures GMCA doesn’t make mistakes due to the inherent blindspots, biases and preconceived ideas of those who created the 5-Year Environment Plan—fallibilities that all individuals and small groups have.
Moving towards care and mutual thriving
The mental health of a society serves as an equally important foundational capacity. When we create mental fragility, we simultaneously diminish society's ability to navigate uncertainty and prevent individuals from avoiding falling into theories of fear, which render them vulnerable in dealing with complex, risk-oriented decisions.
This holistic approach to societal health necessitates a reevaluation of how we understand and address the various elements that contribute to collective mental wellbeing. There is an intricate interplay between emotional, environmental, nutritional, financial, and social stressors, and their cumulative impact on societal resilience and capacity for effective sensemaking and decision-making in the face of uncertainty.
We're living in a vicious cycle where stress, climate breakdown, energy price increases, and food system disruptions make it increasingly difficult for families to survive, let alone to thrive. This situation leads to increased incidents of domestic violence, heightened household tensions, inadequate nutrition, extended work hours, and a pervasive or overwhelming sense of fear, ultimately contributing to a decline in mental health and civility.
Investing in the cornerstone capabilities and capacities of society
Over time, our capabilities and collective capacity for sensemaking and societal decision-making have not only been overlooked and underinvested in but have also eroded due to factors such as a lack of transparency surrounding decision-making processes, citizen engagement processes that are often tokenistic and susceptible to capture by special interests, leaving the public feeling a lack of agency to influence democratic institutions.
Currently, we fail to recognise the more intangible but indispensable capabilities and capacities of society. So, what would it mean to include these as a new form of balance sheet or part of existing balance sheets, recognising them as foundational assets? How do we invest in and grow these capabilities and collective capacities as a foundational investment for society to deal with and operationalise itself in moments of large-scale uncertainty and risk, where decisions must be made in often hostile environments?
Only by recognising these as foundational pieces and indispensable assets of a functional society will we invest in them and acknowledge their vast societal spillover effects, aligning with the complex realities of the 21st century, fostering spaces and environments that are just, resilient, dynamic, and inclusive.
We have worked with and studied dozens of case studies across the globe—like the ones included in this chapter—where deliberative participatory and citizen engagement approaches have intentionally been paired with governance innovations and institutional, infrastructural, and structural change. These are instances where collective action and new partnerships were well-orchestrated and sustained, and the culture of organisations and the mindsets of various stakeholders shifted to prioritise mutual thriving and support, rather than narrow individual self-interest.
Whilst the challenges facing society that we explore in this piece are present, and will be enormously difficult to overcome, we have also seen that through tenacity and courage—from Freetown, Greater Manchester, West Oakland, and beyond—the seeds of sensemaking and societal decision-making are being sown, giving us hope that change is indeed possible.
Footnotes
This chapter is based on and inspired by dozens of conversations with our team and colleagues at Dark Matter Labs. Originally published by Media Evolution 2024 in The Mesh We're In.
“At its heart, governance is about the framework of decision making; identifying who has the power to make and enforce decisions, and how that power should be exercised and accountable. The ‘how’ is focused on the process of decision making and the ‘who’ is about identifying where the power to make and enforce a decision–or not–lies.”—Scottish Land Commission, 2023 (1)
The 21st century will be defined by society's ability to respond together to the entangled crises we currently face. From pandemics and inflation to the cost of living crisis and environmental breakdown, private organisations or public institutions but to society in general, interconnected crises demand nuanced, systemic and thoughtful questions and responses:
How do people and society understand the world and what problems there are to understand?
How does society make collective decisions about those problems, and what are the appropriate governance frameworks to make those decisions? How might we redesign our societal decision-making processes and systems of governance?
How do we recognise societal assets and soft infrastructures as vital in a time of crises, and how do we invest into and build those future infrastructures?
Such a nuanced response would require building an intangible yet indispensable scaffold for our society, which we call soft infrastructure. This includes the skills, capabilities, capacities, institutions, networks, and processes (2) needed to make wise, collective decisions amidst the complexity and unpredictability of our planetary condition.
When we talk about capabilities we refer to the concept of dynamic capabilities. These are “the specific abilities embedded in routines that enable organisations to adapt their resources, processes, and skills in response to an evolving strategic environment, and to utilise competence to address a rapidly changing environment”. (3) However, in our case, we are applying dynamic capabilities not to private organisations or public institutions but to society in general.
By sensemaking capabilities, we refer to the process of understanding the empirical world, interpreting reality, and attributing meaning to the information we encounter. And decision-making capabilities are how this information is then assessed and informs the execution of decision-making processes, choices, and practical actions of individuals and society at large, its ability to find compromise and make at times difficult, collective choices. This might include the established frameworks, technological tools, policy implementation effectiveness, and communication channels that enable society to make and implement decisions.
Society's capacity for sensemaking and decision-making encompasses several critical questions. Does the societal standard of living and mental health allow it to focus on collective challenges? Do we have trustworthy media institutions?
The rising complexity within everyday life produces a cognitively and emotionally overwhelming stream of information, which is often exploited to numb and disorient citizens through techniques of disinformation and the creation of polarised narratives. This complexity impairs individuals’ capacity for sensemaking, and fosters antagonistic politics and dialogues that deem it wrong to disagree with institutional decisions—decisions that people are deeply sceptical of. These factors have, in part, led to the rise of polarisation, distrust, and incivility within our democratic systems—including a breakdown of infrastructural support that could, by default, allow for or engender more sustainable social practices, norms, and behaviours—thereby creating newfound opportunities for authoritarianism.
Our Western democracies largely fail to grapple with complex crises and often deliberately avoid taking action, which results in preserving the status quo.
This begs the question, how might we work in opposition to the dangers inherent in the current polarisation of societal values; emphasising the need for plurality, ongoing discourse, open dialogue, and mutual learning?
Achieving this will require a profound shift in how we invest in, govern, and nurture the decision-making and sensemaking capabilities and capacities of society to meet the needs of the present and anticipate the demands of the future. These will be key to developing infrastructures that focus on the services and systems supporting the well-being, productivity, and governance of a society in our dynamic and uncertain era.
A potential pathway that could help us structure our response strategy and shift our governance architecture is three-fold:
1. Recognising that building the collective capacity and capabilities for sensemaking and societal decision-making is a critical structural challenge and an opportunity to operate in a world of complexity, uncertainty, disinformation and information overload, and tendency toward polarisation and declining civility;
2. Designing the pathways to invest in those capabilities and collective capacity;
3. Achieving the first two prompts in practice requires governance innovation and interventions in the intricate architecture of soft infrastructure, rethinking its codes, processes, and institutions;
The absence of different, more diverse, and nuanced storytelling around complex political, social, and environmental matters, coupled with deliberate misinformation (i.e. disinformation) driven by vested interests continues to lead to a breakdown of security, civility, and humaneness towards one another. Major media outlets often employ binary and reductionist messaging, provoking polarisation and severe antagonism toward ‘the other’.
The multifaceted crises that society currently faces — whether related to climate, biodiversity, housing, healthcare or food and water security — also stem from structural and systemic inequities and exploitation, exacerbated by our economic model that solely focuses on profitability and the financialisation of every sector.
Moreover, our economic system externalises the true cost of a product or service’s impacts by only pricing in the economic costs. Externalising these costs is an economic practice in which companies do not account for the full societal or environmental impact of their products or services. In addition, the misleading practice of 'paltered' accounting—masterfully used in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting and other public and private institutional reports—tells only part of the truth while omitting important details.
These tactics are impeding structural changes to address the multitude of crises we currently face and also raising regulatory and data questions such as what corporate data reporting needs to be gathered and accounted for to build trust with investors who are now (often still performatively) demanding change, transparency, and thorough risk analyses?
It is also important to acknowledge that all of us, in one way or another, are part of following our own self-interests, even with the best intentions. Understanding how we support the current status quo and how we can take shared responsibility, rather than continuing with pushing the responsibility onto others, will be key in enabling collective action and shared accountability.
"Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.”— Marshall McLuhan, 1969 (4)
People's sensemaking capacity is impaired when they are inundated with information—rendering them unable to process information and interpret complex information. When inundated with information, people lose their ability to recognise patterns, and consequently, they become vulnerable to simply adopting patterns that are created for them by those with vested interests. These pattern narrative structures or frameworks are easily exploited, hijacking our comprehension of how we make sense of the world.
Political figures use deliberate tactics to overload people with information, disorienting and rendering them numb and paralysed. Initially applied by authoritarian regimes, these strategies deliberately create and popularise multiple opposing narratives transforming political landscape into a spectacle and engender cynicism in society.(5) We need to reconsider and expand the scope of regulatory and governance frameworks necessary to address these hijacking mechanisms.
Overtime, our storytelling and communication methods have grown increasingly sophisticated, persuasive, and attention grabbing. So perhaps our challenge with narratives is not only about creating better communication and storytelling but also about creating different ones.
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (2002) talk about examples for great storytelling, however harmful, when describing the phenomena of ‘manufacturing consent’. Manufacturing consent is the process by which the mass media, often in collusion with political and corporate interests, manipulates public opinion to align with those interests. Key elements of this include propaganda models, agenda setting, framing, selective reporting, and normalisation.
The stories told to everyday people in the mainstream media are often told in a way that provides a sense of safety, meant to create a delicate veneer that they and their families will not be directly impacted by the ‘crises of the day’, both now and in the future. This leads to dinner conversations often glossing over challenging future scenarios, priming people to label climate scientists, social activists, and student movements as overly dramatic, trivialising danger , and projecting the root of all threats onto ‘the other’.
Moreover, the lack of spaces designed for meaningful deliberation paired with out-dated, reactive governance models worsen society’s ability to respond to the crises we face.
These types of surface-level, binary narratives and one-off solutions threaten the very foundation of authentic, transformational change. The recognition of these vulnerabilities is crucial, prompting the imperative to encourage questioning and critical thinking about who benefits from maintaining the status quo, while also prioritising empathy, mutual understanding, and the evolution of collective perspectives.
Principles for improving decision-making capability
Equitably addressing today’s grand challenges requires the creation of new soft infrastructures with capabilities, capacities, networks, and principles that differ from the usual theories and practices of 'othering' and 'inducing fear’. How might we shift towards practices of 'operating with care, justice, and relationality,' 'turning towards one another with moral and intellectual humility,' 'appreciating plurality rather than forcing consensus,' 'understanding the evolution of each other’s positions and innermost drivers,' and 'understanding security as entanglement and interconnectedness,' rather than viewing it through a geographical, boundary-edged concept.
Although the implementation of these principles may seem subtle, their effects are profound and can have a significant impact. They can help us be more prepared for the challenges yet to come.
The philosophical underpinnings and practical implementations necessary for fostering a robust, pluralistic society capable of navigating the complexities of the 21st century underscores the importance of creating inclusive deliberative spaces that transcend mere ideological divides to maintain societal health and vitality.
The goal is not to bias, coerce, or influence decisions towards a particular ideological spectrum but to cultivate a space where diverse societal perspectives can deliberate, learn from one another, and evolve. Together.
a. embracing plurality
Any spaces and frameworks that would improve our capabilities and collective capacity for sensemaking and societal decision-making would aim to move towards a more nuanced understanding of plurality and individual positionality, and the diverse range of human experiences. Such a framework(s) would inherently respect and value the multiplicity of perspectives, facilitating a plurality of decision spaces essential for a thriving society.
In these dimensions and environments, it's crucial not to operate through a theory of ‘othering’. Instead, it's about recognising the value in, and embracing, different positionalities.
An example of how governments can systematically create space for embracing plurality and engaging with different societal perspectives comes from Ostbelgien, Belgium. The small 80,000 person German speaking region permanently established a Citizens’ Council in 2019 as a formalised ‘mini-publics’ democratic institution, intended to raise politically contentious issues on the agenda of the regional parliament. Overtime, the Citizens’ Council engages every voting age resident of Ostbelgien and invites them to participate in the mini-public deliberations that centre on selecting politically contentious topic that the residents believe need to be addressed, make recommendations on how to solve the issues they select and provide those recommendations to the regional parliament who either accept the recommendation or must come up with their own solutions. This process ensures the diversity of perspectives of residents of the region are recognised and formally considered by the regional parliament, regardless of how sensitive an issue might be.
b. learning from and amplifying uncommon logics and wisdom in currently marginalised practices
While being mindful about appropriation (6) amplifying uncommon logics and the wisdom in currently marginalised practices is important for several reasons: these perspectives often represent unique viewpoints and ways of thinking that are not typically part of mainstream discourse yet incredibly valuable and inspiring.
People and their communities who are marginalised often have practices, strategies, and capabilities for dealing with adversity. These practices develop over time through the need to survive and thrive, without joining the status quo or being deliberately excluded from it—in a world that at best ignores them and at worst is actively hostile to them. Their diverse logics and practices provide a more comprehensive understanding of human experiences and societal dynamics beyond dominant perspectives, challenging systemic biases and power imbalances and moving toward creating a more just and equitable world.
Listening to and genuinely understanding these voices can be the first step in learning from their practices and applying them more widely to help societal resilience at large. Most importantly, including these voices through various participatory approaches will not be enough. Any intervention must ensure and bring about actual changes in the health and well-being of communities, moving beyond tokenistic extraction of ideas and one-off engagements with no follow-through.
Common dimensions of just transitions, including recognition, distributive, procedural, and restorative justices, are inseparable and can guide us in our transition processes. Interventions need to consider all these layers of means and ends, with a genuine recognition of historical and structural inequities, leading to just distributive outcomes.
Following deforestation, heavy rainfall and devastating mudslides, Freetown, Sierra Leone created a new initiative called Freetown the Treetown, with the highline aim of planting a million trees in low-income parts of the city. The Freetown the Treetown initiative addresses multiple objectives – climate adaptation and resilience, poverty alleviation, community development – because of its approach and use of blending sources of finance and digital innovations. The initiative established an economic value for planting and care for each tree planted. An initial public investment was then used to mobilise private investment into the initiative, recognising the value generated from the newly planted trees. Residents of communities where trees were meant to be planted could then be paid for planting and maintaining the trees through a digital app and payment system, verifying each saplings planted and tracking its growth overtime. Freetown the Treetown has created many benefits – carbon sequestration, reduction in urban heat, improved water management, greening of vulnerable communities, provision of meaningful employment, flood protection and erosion prevention – by trying to tackle urban challenges through a creative lens.
c. demonstrating complexity, questioning what’s offered to us, and not trusting the process
In our current social climate, there is a tendency to take sides without deeply listening to and understanding others' positionality and experiences when engaging in conversations. Taking a pause before choosing sides can be a useful practice.
The declining complexity in arguments also leads to a growing mismatch between the simple, one-off solutions offered by partisan politicians and other actors and the real complexity of the problems themselves. For instance, replacing one technology with another—as seen with the fascination and uptake around private electric vehicles—is not a transformational solution. Understanding the trade-offs and the political and economic drivers behind different technological interventions will be key to avoiding investments in solutions that perpetuate the status quo.
The West Oakland neighbourhood in California’s Bay Area is a systematically vulnerable community. A racist planning system and historically exclusionary housing practices (i.e. ‘redlining’) have disproportionately exposed West Oakland residents to air pollution and toxins from unregulated sources. In 2018, the environmental justice group West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WOEIP) partnered with environmental regulators to co-lead the development of an air quality strategy, in collaboration with local private and community sector stakeholders. The ‘Owning Our Air’ strategy was adopted by WOEIP and state regulators in 2019. The strategy’s development process put residents, ‘experts,’ and public decision-makers in equal positions of power, building shared responsibility across compelling, actionable priorities. Their co-productive model and strategy enabled over a dozen private and public sector organisations to commit to taking 89 clearly-defined actions to meaningfully improve air quality, and overcome the complexity of historic systemic discrimination.
d. creating ‘brave’ spaces for genuine transformation—towards radical curiosity and kindness
Creating ‘brave spaces, as well as, ‘safe’ spaces, is essential for genuine transformation because it fosters an environment where individuals feel empowered to take risks, share bold ideas, and challenge the status quo. Open-mindedness, radical curiosity, and critical reflections are prioritised and welcomed—especially from those in leadership positions, encouraging team members to venture beyond their comfort zones and engage in honest, sometimes uncomfortable, dialogues. This openness to diverse perspectives and unconventional thinking can lead to breakthrough ideas.
Healthy friction, a key element of a progressive team, thrives in such settings as it stimulates debate and ensures that ideas are rigorously tested and refined. In brave spaces, individuals are encouraged to voice constructive criticism without fear of retribution, blaming, or shaming; facilitating a continuous loop of improvement, learning, and growth. These environments also foster loyalty and motivation in the long run.
Brave spaces allow us to practise and develop the muscle or capability for sensemaking and critical thinking, as people are continually challenged to analyse, interpret, and synthesise diverse perspectives and co-design accordingly.
e. challenging our own blindspots, judgments, and biases
When designing and implementing interventions, being cautious of our own biases, worldviews, and assumptions about the world will be key in avoiding reiterating current norms and practices. Ramia Mazé talks about how designers need to be careful when “mobilising particular ideals of the future” and keep reflecting on the role they may have in “reproducing already existing practices and norms in society”. (7)
We don’t only need to study the systems that surround us; we also need to acknowledge that our way of looking at and interacting with those systems can influence and change them. Explicitly acknowledging or stating our viewpoints and positionality will be key when inducing any change process.
The Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) has created a governance framework for managing the implementation of its climate action strategy—the 5-Year Environment Plan—in a way that enables civil servants and political leader’s perspectives to be continuously challenged and expanded. GMCA created an integrated governance framework for the 5-Year Environment Plan where public, private and third sector stakeholders oversee and lead implementation efforts through ‘Challenge Groups.’ As the name would suggest, the Challenge Groups are intended to bring diverse stakeholders together to work toward a shared goal but in a space where members are encouraged to disagree, challenge each other's assumption and interrogate weaknesses. This governance model’s critical and challenging ethos can slow the process of implementation down, but ensures GMCA doesn’t make mistakes due to the inherent blindspots, biases and preconceived ideas of those who created the 5-Year Environment Plan—fallibilities that all individuals and small groups have.
Moving towards care and mutual thriving
The mental health of a society serves as an equally important foundational capacity. When we create mental fragility, we simultaneously diminish society's ability to navigate uncertainty and prevent individuals from avoiding falling into theories of fear, which render them vulnerable in dealing with complex, risk-oriented decisions.
This holistic approach to societal health necessitates a reevaluation of how we understand and address the various elements that contribute to collective mental wellbeing. There is an intricate interplay between emotional, environmental, nutritional, financial, and social stressors, and their cumulative impact on societal resilience and capacity for effective sensemaking and decision-making in the face of uncertainty.
We're living in a vicious cycle where stress, climate breakdown, energy price increases, and food system disruptions make it increasingly difficult for families to survive, let alone to thrive. This situation leads to increased incidents of domestic violence, heightened household tensions, inadequate nutrition, extended work hours, and a pervasive or overwhelming sense of fear, ultimately contributing to a decline in mental health and civility.
Investing in the cornerstone capabilities and capacities of society
Over time, our capabilities and collective capacity for sensemaking and societal decision-making have not only been overlooked and underinvested in but have also eroded due to factors such as a lack of transparency surrounding decision-making processes, citizen engagement processes that are often tokenistic and susceptible to capture by special interests, leaving the public feeling a lack of agency to influence democratic institutions.
Currently, we fail to recognise the more intangible but indispensable capabilities and capacities of society. So, what would it mean to include these as a new form of balance sheet or part of existing balance sheets, recognising them as foundational assets? How do we invest in and grow these capabilities and collective capacities as a foundational investment for society to deal with and operationalise itself in moments of large-scale uncertainty and risk, where decisions must be made in often hostile environments?
Only by recognising these as foundational pieces and indispensable assets of a functional society will we invest in them and acknowledge their vast societal spillover effects, aligning with the complex realities of the 21st century, fostering spaces and environments that are just, resilient, dynamic, and inclusive.
We have worked with and studied dozens of case studies across the globe—like the ones included in this chapter—where deliberative participatory and citizen engagement approaches have intentionally been paired with governance innovations and institutional, infrastructural, and structural change. These are instances where collective action and new partnerships were well-orchestrated and sustained, and the culture of organisations and the mindsets of various stakeholders shifted to prioritise mutual thriving and support, rather than narrow individual self-interest.
Whilst the challenges facing society that we explore in this piece are present, and will be enormously difficult to overcome, we have also seen that through tenacity and courage—from Freetown, Greater Manchester, West Oakland, and beyond—the seeds of sensemaking and societal decision-making are being sown, giving us hope that change is indeed possible.
Footnotes
This chapter is based on and inspired by dozens of conversations with our team and colleagues at Dark Matter Labs. Originally published by Media Evolution 2024 in The Mesh We're In.
Gyorgyi Galik is a socio-ecological systems designer. She is the City Transitions Co-Holder at Dark Matter Labs. Previously she worked as the Head of Strategic Partnerships at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and as a Lead Advisor at Design Council. She has seventeen years of experience in policy, service, and innovation design. Her specialisation spans design, behavioural and environmental sciences, with a strong understanding of the built and natural environment.
Vlad Afanasiev is a strategic designer and researcher. He works at Dark Matter Labs where he focuses on governance and foresight at bioregional and planetary scales.
Ryan Bellinson is an action-oriented researcher, policy advisor and public sector innovator. He has advised cities on participative approaches to climate action and published widely on place-based approaches to innovation and community empowerment. Ryan is currently the Community Innovation Strategist at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and Visiting Senior Research Fellow in Cities, Climate and Innovation at University College London Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.
Gyorgyi Galik, PhD, Vlad Afanasiev, Ryan Bellinson, Indy Johar
“At its heart, governance is about the framework of decision making; identifying who has the power to make and enforce decisions, and how that power should be exercised and accountable. The ‘how’ is focused on the process of decision making and the ‘who’ is about identifying where the power to make and enforce a decision–or not–lies.”—Scottish Land Commission, 2023 (1)
The 21st century will be defined by society's ability to respond together to the entangled crises we currently face. From pandemics and inflation to the cost of living crisis and environmental breakdown, private organisations or public institutions but to society in general, interconnected crises demand nuanced, systemic and thoughtful questions and responses:
How do people and society understand the world and what problems there are to understand?
How does society make collective decisions about those problems, and what are the appropriate governance frameworks to make those decisions? How might we redesign our societal decision-making processes and systems of governance?
How do we recognise societal assets and soft infrastructures as vital in a time of crises, and how do we invest into and build those future infrastructures?
Such a nuanced response would require building an intangible yet indispensable scaffold for our society, which we call soft infrastructure. This includes the skills, capabilities, capacities, institutions, networks, and processes (2) needed to make wise, collective decisions amidst the complexity and unpredictability of our planetary condition.
When we talk about capabilities we refer to the concept of dynamic capabilities. These are “the specific abilities embedded in routines that enable organisations to adapt their resources, processes, and skills in response to an evolving strategic environment, and to utilise competence to address a rapidly changing environment”. (3) However, in our case, we are applying dynamic capabilities not to private organisations or public institutions but to society in general.
By sensemaking capabilities, we refer to the process of understanding the empirical world, interpreting reality, and attributing meaning to the information we encounter. And decision-making capabilities are how this information is then assessed and informs the execution of decision-making processes, choices, and practical actions of individuals and society at large, its ability to find compromise and make at times difficult, collective choices. This might include the established frameworks, technological tools, policy implementation effectiveness, and communication channels that enable society to make and implement decisions.
Society's capacity for sensemaking and decision-making encompasses several critical questions. Does the societal standard of living and mental health allow it to focus on collective challenges? Do we have trustworthy media institutions?
The rising complexity within everyday life produces a cognitively and emotionally overwhelming stream of information, which is often exploited to numb and disorient citizens through techniques of disinformation and the creation of polarised narratives. This complexity impairs individuals’ capacity for sensemaking, and fosters antagonistic politics and dialogues that deem it wrong to disagree with institutional decisions—decisions that people are deeply sceptical of. These factors have, in part, led to the rise of polarisation, distrust, and incivility within our democratic systems—including a breakdown of infrastructural support that could, by default, allow for or engender more sustainable social practices, norms, and behaviours—thereby creating newfound opportunities for authoritarianism.
Our Western democracies largely fail to grapple with complex crises and often deliberately avoid taking action, which results in preserving the status quo.
This begs the question, how might we work in opposition to the dangers inherent in the current polarisation of societal values; emphasising the need for plurality, ongoing discourse, open dialogue, and mutual learning?
Achieving this will require a profound shift in how we invest in, govern, and nurture the decision-making and sensemaking capabilities and capacities of society to meet the needs of the present and anticipate the demands of the future. These will be key to developing infrastructures that focus on the services and systems supporting the well-being, productivity, and governance of a society in our dynamic and uncertain era.
A potential pathway that could help us structure our response strategy and shift our governance architecture is three-fold:
1. Recognising that building the collective capacity and capabilities for sensemaking and societal decision-making is a critical structural challenge and an opportunity to operate in a world of complexity, uncertainty, disinformation and information overload, and tendency toward polarisation and declining civility;
2. Designing the pathways to invest in those capabilities and collective capacity;
3. Achieving the first two prompts in practice requires governance innovation and interventions in the intricate architecture of soft infrastructure, rethinking its codes, processes, and institutions;
The absence of different, more diverse, and nuanced storytelling around complex political, social, and environmental matters, coupled with deliberate misinformation (i.e. disinformation) driven by vested interests continues to lead to a breakdown of security, civility, and humaneness towards one another. Major media outlets often employ binary and reductionist messaging, provoking polarisation and severe antagonism toward ‘the other’.
The multifaceted crises that society currently faces — whether related to climate, biodiversity, housing, healthcare or food and water security — also stem from structural and systemic inequities and exploitation, exacerbated by our economic model that solely focuses on profitability and the financialisation of every sector.
Moreover, our economic system externalises the true cost of a product or service’s impacts by only pricing in the economic costs. Externalising these costs is an economic practice in which companies do not account for the full societal or environmental impact of their products or services. In addition, the misleading practice of 'paltered' accounting—masterfully used in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting and other public and private institutional reports—tells only part of the truth while omitting important details.
These tactics are impeding structural changes to address the multitude of crises we currently face and also raising regulatory and data questions such as what corporate data reporting needs to be gathered and accounted for to build trust with investors who are now (often still performatively) demanding change, transparency, and thorough risk analyses?
It is also important to acknowledge that all of us, in one way or another, are part of following our own self-interests, even with the best intentions. Understanding how we support the current status quo and how we can take shared responsibility, rather than continuing with pushing the responsibility onto others, will be key in enabling collective action and shared accountability.
"Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.”— Marshall McLuhan, 1969 (4)
People's sensemaking capacity is impaired when they are inundated with information—rendering them unable to process information and interpret complex information. When inundated with information, people lose their ability to recognise patterns, and consequently, they become vulnerable to simply adopting patterns that are created for them by those with vested interests. These pattern narrative structures or frameworks are easily exploited, hijacking our comprehension of how we make sense of the world.
Political figures use deliberate tactics to overload people with information, disorienting and rendering them numb and paralysed. Initially applied by authoritarian regimes, these strategies deliberately create and popularise multiple opposing narratives transforming political landscape into a spectacle and engender cynicism in society.(5) We need to reconsider and expand the scope of regulatory and governance frameworks necessary to address these hijacking mechanisms.
Overtime, our storytelling and communication methods have grown increasingly sophisticated, persuasive, and attention grabbing. So perhaps our challenge with narratives is not only about creating better communication and storytelling but also about creating different ones.
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (2002) talk about examples for great storytelling, however harmful, when describing the phenomena of ‘manufacturing consent’. Manufacturing consent is the process by which the mass media, often in collusion with political and corporate interests, manipulates public opinion to align with those interests. Key elements of this include propaganda models, agenda setting, framing, selective reporting, and normalisation.
The stories told to everyday people in the mainstream media are often told in a way that provides a sense of safety, meant to create a delicate veneer that they and their families will not be directly impacted by the ‘crises of the day’, both now and in the future. This leads to dinner conversations often glossing over challenging future scenarios, priming people to label climate scientists, social activists, and student movements as overly dramatic, trivialising danger , and projecting the root of all threats onto ‘the other’.
Moreover, the lack of spaces designed for meaningful deliberation paired with out-dated, reactive governance models worsen society’s ability to respond to the crises we face.
These types of surface-level, binary narratives and one-off solutions threaten the very foundation of authentic, transformational change. The recognition of these vulnerabilities is crucial, prompting the imperative to encourage questioning and critical thinking about who benefits from maintaining the status quo, while also prioritising empathy, mutual understanding, and the evolution of collective perspectives.
Principles for improving decision-making capability
Equitably addressing today’s grand challenges requires the creation of new soft infrastructures with capabilities, capacities, networks, and principles that differ from the usual theories and practices of 'othering' and 'inducing fear’. How might we shift towards practices of 'operating with care, justice, and relationality,' 'turning towards one another with moral and intellectual humility,' 'appreciating plurality rather than forcing consensus,' 'understanding the evolution of each other’s positions and innermost drivers,' and 'understanding security as entanglement and interconnectedness,' rather than viewing it through a geographical, boundary-edged concept.
Although the implementation of these principles may seem subtle, their effects are profound and can have a significant impact. They can help us be more prepared for the challenges yet to come.
The philosophical underpinnings and practical implementations necessary for fostering a robust, pluralistic society capable of navigating the complexities of the 21st century underscores the importance of creating inclusive deliberative spaces that transcend mere ideological divides to maintain societal health and vitality.
The goal is not to bias, coerce, or influence decisions towards a particular ideological spectrum but to cultivate a space where diverse societal perspectives can deliberate, learn from one another, and evolve. Together.
a. embracing plurality
Any spaces and frameworks that would improve our capabilities and collective capacity for sensemaking and societal decision-making would aim to move towards a more nuanced understanding of plurality and individual positionality, and the diverse range of human experiences. Such a framework(s) would inherently respect and value the multiplicity of perspectives, facilitating a plurality of decision spaces essential for a thriving society.
In these dimensions and environments, it's crucial not to operate through a theory of ‘othering’. Instead, it's about recognising the value in, and embracing, different positionalities.
An example of how governments can systematically create space for embracing plurality and engaging with different societal perspectives comes from Ostbelgien, Belgium. The small 80,000 person German speaking region permanently established a Citizens’ Council in 2019 as a formalised ‘mini-publics’ democratic institution, intended to raise politically contentious issues on the agenda of the regional parliament. Overtime, the Citizens’ Council engages every voting age resident of Ostbelgien and invites them to participate in the mini-public deliberations that centre on selecting politically contentious topic that the residents believe need to be addressed, make recommendations on how to solve the issues they select and provide those recommendations to the regional parliament who either accept the recommendation or must come up with their own solutions. This process ensures the diversity of perspectives of residents of the region are recognised and formally considered by the regional parliament, regardless of how sensitive an issue might be.
b. learning from and amplifying uncommon logics and wisdom in currently marginalised practices
While being mindful about appropriation (6) amplifying uncommon logics and the wisdom in currently marginalised practices is important for several reasons: these perspectives often represent unique viewpoints and ways of thinking that are not typically part of mainstream discourse yet incredibly valuable and inspiring.
People and their communities who are marginalised often have practices, strategies, and capabilities for dealing with adversity. These practices develop over time through the need to survive and thrive, without joining the status quo or being deliberately excluded from it—in a world that at best ignores them and at worst is actively hostile to them. Their diverse logics and practices provide a more comprehensive understanding of human experiences and societal dynamics beyond dominant perspectives, challenging systemic biases and power imbalances and moving toward creating a more just and equitable world.
Listening to and genuinely understanding these voices can be the first step in learning from their practices and applying them more widely to help societal resilience at large. Most importantly, including these voices through various participatory approaches will not be enough. Any intervention must ensure and bring about actual changes in the health and well-being of communities, moving beyond tokenistic extraction of ideas and one-off engagements with no follow-through.
Common dimensions of just transitions, including recognition, distributive, procedural, and restorative justices, are inseparable and can guide us in our transition processes. Interventions need to consider all these layers of means and ends, with a genuine recognition of historical and structural inequities, leading to just distributive outcomes.
Following deforestation, heavy rainfall and devastating mudslides, Freetown, Sierra Leone created a new initiative called Freetown the Treetown, with the highline aim of planting a million trees in low-income parts of the city. The Freetown the Treetown initiative addresses multiple objectives – climate adaptation and resilience, poverty alleviation, community development – because of its approach and use of blending sources of finance and digital innovations. The initiative established an economic value for planting and care for each tree planted. An initial public investment was then used to mobilise private investment into the initiative, recognising the value generated from the newly planted trees. Residents of communities where trees were meant to be planted could then be paid for planting and maintaining the trees through a digital app and payment system, verifying each saplings planted and tracking its growth overtime. Freetown the Treetown has created many benefits – carbon sequestration, reduction in urban heat, improved water management, greening of vulnerable communities, provision of meaningful employment, flood protection and erosion prevention – by trying to tackle urban challenges through a creative lens.
c. demonstrating complexity, questioning what’s offered to us, and not trusting the process
In our current social climate, there is a tendency to take sides without deeply listening to and understanding others' positionality and experiences when engaging in conversations. Taking a pause before choosing sides can be a useful practice.
The declining complexity in arguments also leads to a growing mismatch between the simple, one-off solutions offered by partisan politicians and other actors and the real complexity of the problems themselves. For instance, replacing one technology with another—as seen with the fascination and uptake around private electric vehicles—is not a transformational solution. Understanding the trade-offs and the political and economic drivers behind different technological interventions will be key to avoiding investments in solutions that perpetuate the status quo.
The West Oakland neighbourhood in California’s Bay Area is a systematically vulnerable community. A racist planning system and historically exclusionary housing practices (i.e. ‘redlining’) have disproportionately exposed West Oakland residents to air pollution and toxins from unregulated sources. In 2018, the environmental justice group West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WOEIP) partnered with environmental regulators to co-lead the development of an air quality strategy, in collaboration with local private and community sector stakeholders. The ‘Owning Our Air’ strategy was adopted by WOEIP and state regulators in 2019. The strategy’s development process put residents, ‘experts,’ and public decision-makers in equal positions of power, building shared responsibility across compelling, actionable priorities. Their co-productive model and strategy enabled over a dozen private and public sector organisations to commit to taking 89 clearly-defined actions to meaningfully improve air quality, and overcome the complexity of historic systemic discrimination.
d. creating ‘brave’ spaces for genuine transformation—towards radical curiosity and kindness
Creating ‘brave spaces, as well as, ‘safe’ spaces, is essential for genuine transformation because it fosters an environment where individuals feel empowered to take risks, share bold ideas, and challenge the status quo. Open-mindedness, radical curiosity, and critical reflections are prioritised and welcomed—especially from those in leadership positions, encouraging team members to venture beyond their comfort zones and engage in honest, sometimes uncomfortable, dialogues. This openness to diverse perspectives and unconventional thinking can lead to breakthrough ideas.
Healthy friction, a key element of a progressive team, thrives in such settings as it stimulates debate and ensures that ideas are rigorously tested and refined. In brave spaces, individuals are encouraged to voice constructive criticism without fear of retribution, blaming, or shaming; facilitating a continuous loop of improvement, learning, and growth. These environments also foster loyalty and motivation in the long run.
Brave spaces allow us to practise and develop the muscle or capability for sensemaking and critical thinking, as people are continually challenged to analyse, interpret, and synthesise diverse perspectives and co-design accordingly.
e. challenging our own blindspots, judgments, and biases
When designing and implementing interventions, being cautious of our own biases, worldviews, and assumptions about the world will be key in avoiding reiterating current norms and practices. Ramia Mazé talks about how designers need to be careful when “mobilising particular ideals of the future” and keep reflecting on the role they may have in “reproducing already existing practices and norms in society”. (7)
We don’t only need to study the systems that surround us; we also need to acknowledge that our way of looking at and interacting with those systems can influence and change them. Explicitly acknowledging or stating our viewpoints and positionality will be key when inducing any change process.
The Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) has created a governance framework for managing the implementation of its climate action strategy—the 5-Year Environment Plan—in a way that enables civil servants and political leader’s perspectives to be continuously challenged and expanded. GMCA created an integrated governance framework for the 5-Year Environment Plan where public, private and third sector stakeholders oversee and lead implementation efforts through ‘Challenge Groups.’ As the name would suggest, the Challenge Groups are intended to bring diverse stakeholders together to work toward a shared goal but in a space where members are encouraged to disagree, challenge each other's assumption and interrogate weaknesses. This governance model’s critical and challenging ethos can slow the process of implementation down, but ensures GMCA doesn’t make mistakes due to the inherent blindspots, biases and preconceived ideas of those who created the 5-Year Environment Plan—fallibilities that all individuals and small groups have.
Moving towards care and mutual thriving
The mental health of a society serves as an equally important foundational capacity. When we create mental fragility, we simultaneously diminish society's ability to navigate uncertainty and prevent individuals from avoiding falling into theories of fear, which render them vulnerable in dealing with complex, risk-oriented decisions.
This holistic approach to societal health necessitates a reevaluation of how we understand and address the various elements that contribute to collective mental wellbeing. There is an intricate interplay between emotional, environmental, nutritional, financial, and social stressors, and their cumulative impact on societal resilience and capacity for effective sensemaking and decision-making in the face of uncertainty.
We're living in a vicious cycle where stress, climate breakdown, energy price increases, and food system disruptions make it increasingly difficult for families to survive, let alone to thrive. This situation leads to increased incidents of domestic violence, heightened household tensions, inadequate nutrition, extended work hours, and a pervasive or overwhelming sense of fear, ultimately contributing to a decline in mental health and civility.
Investing in the cornerstone capabilities and capacities of society
Over time, our capabilities and collective capacity for sensemaking and societal decision-making have not only been overlooked and underinvested in but have also eroded due to factors such as a lack of transparency surrounding decision-making processes, citizen engagement processes that are often tokenistic and susceptible to capture by special interests, leaving the public feeling a lack of agency to influence democratic institutions.
Currently, we fail to recognise the more intangible but indispensable capabilities and capacities of society. So, what would it mean to include these as a new form of balance sheet or part of existing balance sheets, recognising them as foundational assets? How do we invest in and grow these capabilities and collective capacities as a foundational investment for society to deal with and operationalise itself in moments of large-scale uncertainty and risk, where decisions must be made in often hostile environments?
Only by recognising these as foundational pieces and indispensable assets of a functional society will we invest in them and acknowledge their vast societal spillover effects, aligning with the complex realities of the 21st century, fostering spaces and environments that are just, resilient, dynamic, and inclusive.
We have worked with and studied dozens of case studies across the globe—like the ones included in this chapter—where deliberative participatory and citizen engagement approaches have intentionally been paired with governance innovations and institutional, infrastructural, and structural change. These are instances where collective action and new partnerships were well-orchestrated and sustained, and the culture of organisations and the mindsets of various stakeholders shifted to prioritise mutual thriving and support, rather than narrow individual self-interest.
Whilst the challenges facing society that we explore in this piece are present, and will be enormously difficult to overcome, we have also seen that through tenacity and courage—from Freetown, Greater Manchester, West Oakland, and beyond—the seeds of sensemaking and societal decision-making are being sown, giving us hope that change is indeed possible.
Footnotes
This chapter is based on and inspired by dozens of conversations with our team and colleagues at Dark Matter Labs. Originally published by Media Evolution 2024 in The Mesh We're In.
“At its heart, governance is about the framework of decision making; identifying who has the power to make and enforce decisions, and how that power should be exercised and accountable. The ‘how’ is focused on the process of decision making and the ‘who’ is about identifying where the power to make and enforce a decision–or not–lies.”—Scottish Land Commission, 2023 (1)
The 21st century will be defined by society's ability to respond together to the entangled crises we currently face. From pandemics and inflation to the cost of living crisis and environmental breakdown, private organisations or public institutions but to society in general, interconnected crises demand nuanced, systemic and thoughtful questions and responses:
How do people and society understand the world and what problems there are to understand?
How does society make collective decisions about those problems, and what are the appropriate governance frameworks to make those decisions? How might we redesign our societal decision-making processes and systems of governance?
How do we recognise societal assets and soft infrastructures as vital in a time of crises, and how do we invest into and build those future infrastructures?
Such a nuanced response would require building an intangible yet indispensable scaffold for our society, which we call soft infrastructure. This includes the skills, capabilities, capacities, institutions, networks, and processes (2) needed to make wise, collective decisions amidst the complexity and unpredictability of our planetary condition.
When we talk about capabilities we refer to the concept of dynamic capabilities. These are “the specific abilities embedded in routines that enable organisations to adapt their resources, processes, and skills in response to an evolving strategic environment, and to utilise competence to address a rapidly changing environment”. (3) However, in our case, we are applying dynamic capabilities not to private organisations or public institutions but to society in general.
By sensemaking capabilities, we refer to the process of understanding the empirical world, interpreting reality, and attributing meaning to the information we encounter. And decision-making capabilities are how this information is then assessed and informs the execution of decision-making processes, choices, and practical actions of individuals and society at large, its ability to find compromise and make at times difficult, collective choices. This might include the established frameworks, technological tools, policy implementation effectiveness, and communication channels that enable society to make and implement decisions.
Society's capacity for sensemaking and decision-making encompasses several critical questions. Does the societal standard of living and mental health allow it to focus on collective challenges? Do we have trustworthy media institutions?
The rising complexity within everyday life produces a cognitively and emotionally overwhelming stream of information, which is often exploited to numb and disorient citizens through techniques of disinformation and the creation of polarised narratives. This complexity impairs individuals’ capacity for sensemaking, and fosters antagonistic politics and dialogues that deem it wrong to disagree with institutional decisions—decisions that people are deeply sceptical of. These factors have, in part, led to the rise of polarisation, distrust, and incivility within our democratic systems—including a breakdown of infrastructural support that could, by default, allow for or engender more sustainable social practices, norms, and behaviours—thereby creating newfound opportunities for authoritarianism.
Our Western democracies largely fail to grapple with complex crises and often deliberately avoid taking action, which results in preserving the status quo.
This begs the question, how might we work in opposition to the dangers inherent in the current polarisation of societal values; emphasising the need for plurality, ongoing discourse, open dialogue, and mutual learning?
Achieving this will require a profound shift in how we invest in, govern, and nurture the decision-making and sensemaking capabilities and capacities of society to meet the needs of the present and anticipate the demands of the future. These will be key to developing infrastructures that focus on the services and systems supporting the well-being, productivity, and governance of a society in our dynamic and uncertain era.
A potential pathway that could help us structure our response strategy and shift our governance architecture is three-fold:
1. Recognising that building the collective capacity and capabilities for sensemaking and societal decision-making is a critical structural challenge and an opportunity to operate in a world of complexity, uncertainty, disinformation and information overload, and tendency toward polarisation and declining civility;
2. Designing the pathways to invest in those capabilities and collective capacity;
3. Achieving the first two prompts in practice requires governance innovation and interventions in the intricate architecture of soft infrastructure, rethinking its codes, processes, and institutions;
The absence of different, more diverse, and nuanced storytelling around complex political, social, and environmental matters, coupled with deliberate misinformation (i.e. disinformation) driven by vested interests continues to lead to a breakdown of security, civility, and humaneness towards one another. Major media outlets often employ binary and reductionist messaging, provoking polarisation and severe antagonism toward ‘the other’.
The multifaceted crises that society currently faces — whether related to climate, biodiversity, housing, healthcare or food and water security — also stem from structural and systemic inequities and exploitation, exacerbated by our economic model that solely focuses on profitability and the financialisation of every sector.
Moreover, our economic system externalises the true cost of a product or service’s impacts by only pricing in the economic costs. Externalising these costs is an economic practice in which companies do not account for the full societal or environmental impact of their products or services. In addition, the misleading practice of 'paltered' accounting—masterfully used in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting and other public and private institutional reports—tells only part of the truth while omitting important details.
These tactics are impeding structural changes to address the multitude of crises we currently face and also raising regulatory and data questions such as what corporate data reporting needs to be gathered and accounted for to build trust with investors who are now (often still performatively) demanding change, transparency, and thorough risk analyses?
It is also important to acknowledge that all of us, in one way or another, are part of following our own self-interests, even with the best intentions. Understanding how we support the current status quo and how we can take shared responsibility, rather than continuing with pushing the responsibility onto others, will be key in enabling collective action and shared accountability.
"Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.”— Marshall McLuhan, 1969 (4)
People's sensemaking capacity is impaired when they are inundated with information—rendering them unable to process information and interpret complex information. When inundated with information, people lose their ability to recognise patterns, and consequently, they become vulnerable to simply adopting patterns that are created for them by those with vested interests. These pattern narrative structures or frameworks are easily exploited, hijacking our comprehension of how we make sense of the world.
Political figures use deliberate tactics to overload people with information, disorienting and rendering them numb and paralysed. Initially applied by authoritarian regimes, these strategies deliberately create and popularise multiple opposing narratives transforming political landscape into a spectacle and engender cynicism in society.(5) We need to reconsider and expand the scope of regulatory and governance frameworks necessary to address these hijacking mechanisms.
Overtime, our storytelling and communication methods have grown increasingly sophisticated, persuasive, and attention grabbing. So perhaps our challenge with narratives is not only about creating better communication and storytelling but also about creating different ones.
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (2002) talk about examples for great storytelling, however harmful, when describing the phenomena of ‘manufacturing consent’. Manufacturing consent is the process by which the mass media, often in collusion with political and corporate interests, manipulates public opinion to align with those interests. Key elements of this include propaganda models, agenda setting, framing, selective reporting, and normalisation.
The stories told to everyday people in the mainstream media are often told in a way that provides a sense of safety, meant to create a delicate veneer that they and their families will not be directly impacted by the ‘crises of the day’, both now and in the future. This leads to dinner conversations often glossing over challenging future scenarios, priming people to label climate scientists, social activists, and student movements as overly dramatic, trivialising danger , and projecting the root of all threats onto ‘the other’.
Moreover, the lack of spaces designed for meaningful deliberation paired with out-dated, reactive governance models worsen society’s ability to respond to the crises we face.
These types of surface-level, binary narratives and one-off solutions threaten the very foundation of authentic, transformational change. The recognition of these vulnerabilities is crucial, prompting the imperative to encourage questioning and critical thinking about who benefits from maintaining the status quo, while also prioritising empathy, mutual understanding, and the evolution of collective perspectives.
Principles for improving decision-making capability
Equitably addressing today’s grand challenges requires the creation of new soft infrastructures with capabilities, capacities, networks, and principles that differ from the usual theories and practices of 'othering' and 'inducing fear’. How might we shift towards practices of 'operating with care, justice, and relationality,' 'turning towards one another with moral and intellectual humility,' 'appreciating plurality rather than forcing consensus,' 'understanding the evolution of each other’s positions and innermost drivers,' and 'understanding security as entanglement and interconnectedness,' rather than viewing it through a geographical, boundary-edged concept.
Although the implementation of these principles may seem subtle, their effects are profound and can have a significant impact. They can help us be more prepared for the challenges yet to come.
The philosophical underpinnings and practical implementations necessary for fostering a robust, pluralistic society capable of navigating the complexities of the 21st century underscores the importance of creating inclusive deliberative spaces that transcend mere ideological divides to maintain societal health and vitality.
The goal is not to bias, coerce, or influence decisions towards a particular ideological spectrum but to cultivate a space where diverse societal perspectives can deliberate, learn from one another, and evolve. Together.
a. embracing plurality
Any spaces and frameworks that would improve our capabilities and collective capacity for sensemaking and societal decision-making would aim to move towards a more nuanced understanding of plurality and individual positionality, and the diverse range of human experiences. Such a framework(s) would inherently respect and value the multiplicity of perspectives, facilitating a plurality of decision spaces essential for a thriving society.
In these dimensions and environments, it's crucial not to operate through a theory of ‘othering’. Instead, it's about recognising the value in, and embracing, different positionalities.
An example of how governments can systematically create space for embracing plurality and engaging with different societal perspectives comes from Ostbelgien, Belgium. The small 80,000 person German speaking region permanently established a Citizens’ Council in 2019 as a formalised ‘mini-publics’ democratic institution, intended to raise politically contentious issues on the agenda of the regional parliament. Overtime, the Citizens’ Council engages every voting age resident of Ostbelgien and invites them to participate in the mini-public deliberations that centre on selecting politically contentious topic that the residents believe need to be addressed, make recommendations on how to solve the issues they select and provide those recommendations to the regional parliament who either accept the recommendation or must come up with their own solutions. This process ensures the diversity of perspectives of residents of the region are recognised and formally considered by the regional parliament, regardless of how sensitive an issue might be.
b. learning from and amplifying uncommon logics and wisdom in currently marginalised practices
While being mindful about appropriation (6) amplifying uncommon logics and the wisdom in currently marginalised practices is important for several reasons: these perspectives often represent unique viewpoints and ways of thinking that are not typically part of mainstream discourse yet incredibly valuable and inspiring.
People and their communities who are marginalised often have practices, strategies, and capabilities for dealing with adversity. These practices develop over time through the need to survive and thrive, without joining the status quo or being deliberately excluded from it—in a world that at best ignores them and at worst is actively hostile to them. Their diverse logics and practices provide a more comprehensive understanding of human experiences and societal dynamics beyond dominant perspectives, challenging systemic biases and power imbalances and moving toward creating a more just and equitable world.
Listening to and genuinely understanding these voices can be the first step in learning from their practices and applying them more widely to help societal resilience at large. Most importantly, including these voices through various participatory approaches will not be enough. Any intervention must ensure and bring about actual changes in the health and well-being of communities, moving beyond tokenistic extraction of ideas and one-off engagements with no follow-through.
Common dimensions of just transitions, including recognition, distributive, procedural, and restorative justices, are inseparable and can guide us in our transition processes. Interventions need to consider all these layers of means and ends, with a genuine recognition of historical and structural inequities, leading to just distributive outcomes.
Following deforestation, heavy rainfall and devastating mudslides, Freetown, Sierra Leone created a new initiative called Freetown the Treetown, with the highline aim of planting a million trees in low-income parts of the city. The Freetown the Treetown initiative addresses multiple objectives – climate adaptation and resilience, poverty alleviation, community development – because of its approach and use of blending sources of finance and digital innovations. The initiative established an economic value for planting and care for each tree planted. An initial public investment was then used to mobilise private investment into the initiative, recognising the value generated from the newly planted trees. Residents of communities where trees were meant to be planted could then be paid for planting and maintaining the trees through a digital app and payment system, verifying each saplings planted and tracking its growth overtime. Freetown the Treetown has created many benefits – carbon sequestration, reduction in urban heat, improved water management, greening of vulnerable communities, provision of meaningful employment, flood protection and erosion prevention – by trying to tackle urban challenges through a creative lens.
c. demonstrating complexity, questioning what’s offered to us, and not trusting the process
In our current social climate, there is a tendency to take sides without deeply listening to and understanding others' positionality and experiences when engaging in conversations. Taking a pause before choosing sides can be a useful practice.
The declining complexity in arguments also leads to a growing mismatch between the simple, one-off solutions offered by partisan politicians and other actors and the real complexity of the problems themselves. For instance, replacing one technology with another—as seen with the fascination and uptake around private electric vehicles—is not a transformational solution. Understanding the trade-offs and the political and economic drivers behind different technological interventions will be key to avoiding investments in solutions that perpetuate the status quo.
The West Oakland neighbourhood in California’s Bay Area is a systematically vulnerable community. A racist planning system and historically exclusionary housing practices (i.e. ‘redlining’) have disproportionately exposed West Oakland residents to air pollution and toxins from unregulated sources. In 2018, the environmental justice group West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WOEIP) partnered with environmental regulators to co-lead the development of an air quality strategy, in collaboration with local private and community sector stakeholders. The ‘Owning Our Air’ strategy was adopted by WOEIP and state regulators in 2019. The strategy’s development process put residents, ‘experts,’ and public decision-makers in equal positions of power, building shared responsibility across compelling, actionable priorities. Their co-productive model and strategy enabled over a dozen private and public sector organisations to commit to taking 89 clearly-defined actions to meaningfully improve air quality, and overcome the complexity of historic systemic discrimination.
d. creating ‘brave’ spaces for genuine transformation—towards radical curiosity and kindness
Creating ‘brave spaces, as well as, ‘safe’ spaces, is essential for genuine transformation because it fosters an environment where individuals feel empowered to take risks, share bold ideas, and challenge the status quo. Open-mindedness, radical curiosity, and critical reflections are prioritised and welcomed—especially from those in leadership positions, encouraging team members to venture beyond their comfort zones and engage in honest, sometimes uncomfortable, dialogues. This openness to diverse perspectives and unconventional thinking can lead to breakthrough ideas.
Healthy friction, a key element of a progressive team, thrives in such settings as it stimulates debate and ensures that ideas are rigorously tested and refined. In brave spaces, individuals are encouraged to voice constructive criticism without fear of retribution, blaming, or shaming; facilitating a continuous loop of improvement, learning, and growth. These environments also foster loyalty and motivation in the long run.
Brave spaces allow us to practise and develop the muscle or capability for sensemaking and critical thinking, as people are continually challenged to analyse, interpret, and synthesise diverse perspectives and co-design accordingly.
e. challenging our own blindspots, judgments, and biases
When designing and implementing interventions, being cautious of our own biases, worldviews, and assumptions about the world will be key in avoiding reiterating current norms and practices. Ramia Mazé talks about how designers need to be careful when “mobilising particular ideals of the future” and keep reflecting on the role they may have in “reproducing already existing practices and norms in society”. (7)
We don’t only need to study the systems that surround us; we also need to acknowledge that our way of looking at and interacting with those systems can influence and change them. Explicitly acknowledging or stating our viewpoints and positionality will be key when inducing any change process.
The Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) has created a governance framework for managing the implementation of its climate action strategy—the 5-Year Environment Plan—in a way that enables civil servants and political leader’s perspectives to be continuously challenged and expanded. GMCA created an integrated governance framework for the 5-Year Environment Plan where public, private and third sector stakeholders oversee and lead implementation efforts through ‘Challenge Groups.’ As the name would suggest, the Challenge Groups are intended to bring diverse stakeholders together to work toward a shared goal but in a space where members are encouraged to disagree, challenge each other's assumption and interrogate weaknesses. This governance model’s critical and challenging ethos can slow the process of implementation down, but ensures GMCA doesn’t make mistakes due to the inherent blindspots, biases and preconceived ideas of those who created the 5-Year Environment Plan—fallibilities that all individuals and small groups have.
Moving towards care and mutual thriving
The mental health of a society serves as an equally important foundational capacity. When we create mental fragility, we simultaneously diminish society's ability to navigate uncertainty and prevent individuals from avoiding falling into theories of fear, which render them vulnerable in dealing with complex, risk-oriented decisions.
This holistic approach to societal health necessitates a reevaluation of how we understand and address the various elements that contribute to collective mental wellbeing. There is an intricate interplay between emotional, environmental, nutritional, financial, and social stressors, and their cumulative impact on societal resilience and capacity for effective sensemaking and decision-making in the face of uncertainty.
We're living in a vicious cycle where stress, climate breakdown, energy price increases, and food system disruptions make it increasingly difficult for families to survive, let alone to thrive. This situation leads to increased incidents of domestic violence, heightened household tensions, inadequate nutrition, extended work hours, and a pervasive or overwhelming sense of fear, ultimately contributing to a decline in mental health and civility.
Investing in the cornerstone capabilities and capacities of society
Over time, our capabilities and collective capacity for sensemaking and societal decision-making have not only been overlooked and underinvested in but have also eroded due to factors such as a lack of transparency surrounding decision-making processes, citizen engagement processes that are often tokenistic and susceptible to capture by special interests, leaving the public feeling a lack of agency to influence democratic institutions.
Currently, we fail to recognise the more intangible but indispensable capabilities and capacities of society. So, what would it mean to include these as a new form of balance sheet or part of existing balance sheets, recognising them as foundational assets? How do we invest in and grow these capabilities and collective capacities as a foundational investment for society to deal with and operationalise itself in moments of large-scale uncertainty and risk, where decisions must be made in often hostile environments?
Only by recognising these as foundational pieces and indispensable assets of a functional society will we invest in them and acknowledge their vast societal spillover effects, aligning with the complex realities of the 21st century, fostering spaces and environments that are just, resilient, dynamic, and inclusive.
We have worked with and studied dozens of case studies across the globe—like the ones included in this chapter—where deliberative participatory and citizen engagement approaches have intentionally been paired with governance innovations and institutional, infrastructural, and structural change. These are instances where collective action and new partnerships were well-orchestrated and sustained, and the culture of organisations and the mindsets of various stakeholders shifted to prioritise mutual thriving and support, rather than narrow individual self-interest.
Whilst the challenges facing society that we explore in this piece are present, and will be enormously difficult to overcome, we have also seen that through tenacity and courage—from Freetown, Greater Manchester, West Oakland, and beyond—the seeds of sensemaking and societal decision-making are being sown, giving us hope that change is indeed possible.
Footnotes
This chapter is based on and inspired by dozens of conversations with our team and colleagues at Dark Matter Labs. Originally published by Media Evolution 2024 in The Mesh We're In.
Gyorgyi Galik is a socio-ecological systems designer. She is the City Transitions Co-Holder at Dark Matter Labs. Previously she worked as the Head of Strategic Partnerships at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and as a Lead Advisor at Design Council. She has seventeen years of experience in policy, service, and innovation design. Her specialisation spans design, behavioural and environmental sciences, with a strong understanding of the built and natural environment.
Vlad Afanasiev is a strategic designer and researcher. He works at Dark Matter Labs where he focuses on governance and foresight at bioregional and planetary scales.
Ryan Bellinson is an action-oriented researcher, policy advisor and public sector innovator. He has advised cities on participative approaches to climate action and published widely on place-based approaches to innovation and community empowerment. Ryan is currently the Community Innovation Strategist at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and Visiting Senior Research Fellow in Cities, Climate and Innovation at University College London Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.
Gyorgyi Galik, PhD, Vlad Afanasiev, Ryan Bellinson, Indy Johar
“At its heart, governance is about the framework of decision making; identifying who has the power to make and enforce decisions, and how that power should be exercised and accountable. The ‘how’ is focused on the process of decision making and the ‘who’ is about identifying where the power to make and enforce a decision–or not–lies.”—Scottish Land Commission, 2023 (1)
The 21st century will be defined by society's ability to respond together to the entangled crises we currently face. From pandemics and inflation to the cost of living crisis and environmental breakdown, private organisations or public institutions but to society in general, interconnected crises demand nuanced, systemic and thoughtful questions and responses:
How do people and society understand the world and what problems there are to understand?
How does society make collective decisions about those problems, and what are the appropriate governance frameworks to make those decisions? How might we redesign our societal decision-making processes and systems of governance?
How do we recognise societal assets and soft infrastructures as vital in a time of crises, and how do we invest into and build those future infrastructures?
Such a nuanced response would require building an intangible yet indispensable scaffold for our society, which we call soft infrastructure. This includes the skills, capabilities, capacities, institutions, networks, and processes (2) needed to make wise, collective decisions amidst the complexity and unpredictability of our planetary condition.
When we talk about capabilities we refer to the concept of dynamic capabilities. These are “the specific abilities embedded in routines that enable organisations to adapt their resources, processes, and skills in response to an evolving strategic environment, and to utilise competence to address a rapidly changing environment”. (3) However, in our case, we are applying dynamic capabilities not to private organisations or public institutions but to society in general.
By sensemaking capabilities, we refer to the process of understanding the empirical world, interpreting reality, and attributing meaning to the information we encounter. And decision-making capabilities are how this information is then assessed and informs the execution of decision-making processes, choices, and practical actions of individuals and society at large, its ability to find compromise and make at times difficult, collective choices. This might include the established frameworks, technological tools, policy implementation effectiveness, and communication channels that enable society to make and implement decisions.
Society's capacity for sensemaking and decision-making encompasses several critical questions. Does the societal standard of living and mental health allow it to focus on collective challenges? Do we have trustworthy media institutions?
The rising complexity within everyday life produces a cognitively and emotionally overwhelming stream of information, which is often exploited to numb and disorient citizens through techniques of disinformation and the creation of polarised narratives. This complexity impairs individuals’ capacity for sensemaking, and fosters antagonistic politics and dialogues that deem it wrong to disagree with institutional decisions—decisions that people are deeply sceptical of. These factors have, in part, led to the rise of polarisation, distrust, and incivility within our democratic systems—including a breakdown of infrastructural support that could, by default, allow for or engender more sustainable social practices, norms, and behaviours—thereby creating newfound opportunities for authoritarianism.
Our Western democracies largely fail to grapple with complex crises and often deliberately avoid taking action, which results in preserving the status quo.
This begs the question, how might we work in opposition to the dangers inherent in the current polarisation of societal values; emphasising the need for plurality, ongoing discourse, open dialogue, and mutual learning?
Achieving this will require a profound shift in how we invest in, govern, and nurture the decision-making and sensemaking capabilities and capacities of society to meet the needs of the present and anticipate the demands of the future. These will be key to developing infrastructures that focus on the services and systems supporting the well-being, productivity, and governance of a society in our dynamic and uncertain era.
A potential pathway that could help us structure our response strategy and shift our governance architecture is three-fold:
1. Recognising that building the collective capacity and capabilities for sensemaking and societal decision-making is a critical structural challenge and an opportunity to operate in a world of complexity, uncertainty, disinformation and information overload, and tendency toward polarisation and declining civility;
2. Designing the pathways to invest in those capabilities and collective capacity;
3. Achieving the first two prompts in practice requires governance innovation and interventions in the intricate architecture of soft infrastructure, rethinking its codes, processes, and institutions;
The absence of different, more diverse, and nuanced storytelling around complex political, social, and environmental matters, coupled with deliberate misinformation (i.e. disinformation) driven by vested interests continues to lead to a breakdown of security, civility, and humaneness towards one another. Major media outlets often employ binary and reductionist messaging, provoking polarisation and severe antagonism toward ‘the other’.
The multifaceted crises that society currently faces — whether related to climate, biodiversity, housing, healthcare or food and water security — also stem from structural and systemic inequities and exploitation, exacerbated by our economic model that solely focuses on profitability and the financialisation of every sector.
Moreover, our economic system externalises the true cost of a product or service’s impacts by only pricing in the economic costs. Externalising these costs is an economic practice in which companies do not account for the full societal or environmental impact of their products or services. In addition, the misleading practice of 'paltered' accounting—masterfully used in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting and other public and private institutional reports—tells only part of the truth while omitting important details.
These tactics are impeding structural changes to address the multitude of crises we currently face and also raising regulatory and data questions such as what corporate data reporting needs to be gathered and accounted for to build trust with investors who are now (often still performatively) demanding change, transparency, and thorough risk analyses?
It is also important to acknowledge that all of us, in one way or another, are part of following our own self-interests, even with the best intentions. Understanding how we support the current status quo and how we can take shared responsibility, rather than continuing with pushing the responsibility onto others, will be key in enabling collective action and shared accountability.
"Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.”— Marshall McLuhan, 1969 (4)
People's sensemaking capacity is impaired when they are inundated with information—rendering them unable to process information and interpret complex information. When inundated with information, people lose their ability to recognise patterns, and consequently, they become vulnerable to simply adopting patterns that are created for them by those with vested interests. These pattern narrative structures or frameworks are easily exploited, hijacking our comprehension of how we make sense of the world.
Political figures use deliberate tactics to overload people with information, disorienting and rendering them numb and paralysed. Initially applied by authoritarian regimes, these strategies deliberately create and popularise multiple opposing narratives transforming political landscape into a spectacle and engender cynicism in society.(5) We need to reconsider and expand the scope of regulatory and governance frameworks necessary to address these hijacking mechanisms.
Overtime, our storytelling and communication methods have grown increasingly sophisticated, persuasive, and attention grabbing. So perhaps our challenge with narratives is not only about creating better communication and storytelling but also about creating different ones.
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (2002) talk about examples for great storytelling, however harmful, when describing the phenomena of ‘manufacturing consent’. Manufacturing consent is the process by which the mass media, often in collusion with political and corporate interests, manipulates public opinion to align with those interests. Key elements of this include propaganda models, agenda setting, framing, selective reporting, and normalisation.
The stories told to everyday people in the mainstream media are often told in a way that provides a sense of safety, meant to create a delicate veneer that they and their families will not be directly impacted by the ‘crises of the day’, both now and in the future. This leads to dinner conversations often glossing over challenging future scenarios, priming people to label climate scientists, social activists, and student movements as overly dramatic, trivialising danger , and projecting the root of all threats onto ‘the other’.
Moreover, the lack of spaces designed for meaningful deliberation paired with out-dated, reactive governance models worsen society’s ability to respond to the crises we face.
These types of surface-level, binary narratives and one-off solutions threaten the very foundation of authentic, transformational change. The recognition of these vulnerabilities is crucial, prompting the imperative to encourage questioning and critical thinking about who benefits from maintaining the status quo, while also prioritising empathy, mutual understanding, and the evolution of collective perspectives.
Principles for improving decision-making capability
Equitably addressing today’s grand challenges requires the creation of new soft infrastructures with capabilities, capacities, networks, and principles that differ from the usual theories and practices of 'othering' and 'inducing fear’. How might we shift towards practices of 'operating with care, justice, and relationality,' 'turning towards one another with moral and intellectual humility,' 'appreciating plurality rather than forcing consensus,' 'understanding the evolution of each other’s positions and innermost drivers,' and 'understanding security as entanglement and interconnectedness,' rather than viewing it through a geographical, boundary-edged concept.
Although the implementation of these principles may seem subtle, their effects are profound and can have a significant impact. They can help us be more prepared for the challenges yet to come.
The philosophical underpinnings and practical implementations necessary for fostering a robust, pluralistic society capable of navigating the complexities of the 21st century underscores the importance of creating inclusive deliberative spaces that transcend mere ideological divides to maintain societal health and vitality.
The goal is not to bias, coerce, or influence decisions towards a particular ideological spectrum but to cultivate a space where diverse societal perspectives can deliberate, learn from one another, and evolve. Together.
a. embracing plurality
Any spaces and frameworks that would improve our capabilities and collective capacity for sensemaking and societal decision-making would aim to move towards a more nuanced understanding of plurality and individual positionality, and the diverse range of human experiences. Such a framework(s) would inherently respect and value the multiplicity of perspectives, facilitating a plurality of decision spaces essential for a thriving society.
In these dimensions and environments, it's crucial not to operate through a theory of ‘othering’. Instead, it's about recognising the value in, and embracing, different positionalities.
An example of how governments can systematically create space for embracing plurality and engaging with different societal perspectives comes from Ostbelgien, Belgium. The small 80,000 person German speaking region permanently established a Citizens’ Council in 2019 as a formalised ‘mini-publics’ democratic institution, intended to raise politically contentious issues on the agenda of the regional parliament. Overtime, the Citizens’ Council engages every voting age resident of Ostbelgien and invites them to participate in the mini-public deliberations that centre on selecting politically contentious topic that the residents believe need to be addressed, make recommendations on how to solve the issues they select and provide those recommendations to the regional parliament who either accept the recommendation or must come up with their own solutions. This process ensures the diversity of perspectives of residents of the region are recognised and formally considered by the regional parliament, regardless of how sensitive an issue might be.
b. learning from and amplifying uncommon logics and wisdom in currently marginalised practices
While being mindful about appropriation (6) amplifying uncommon logics and the wisdom in currently marginalised practices is important for several reasons: these perspectives often represent unique viewpoints and ways of thinking that are not typically part of mainstream discourse yet incredibly valuable and inspiring.
People and their communities who are marginalised often have practices, strategies, and capabilities for dealing with adversity. These practices develop over time through the need to survive and thrive, without joining the status quo or being deliberately excluded from it—in a world that at best ignores them and at worst is actively hostile to them. Their diverse logics and practices provide a more comprehensive understanding of human experiences and societal dynamics beyond dominant perspectives, challenging systemic biases and power imbalances and moving toward creating a more just and equitable world.
Listening to and genuinely understanding these voices can be the first step in learning from their practices and applying them more widely to help societal resilience at large. Most importantly, including these voices through various participatory approaches will not be enough. Any intervention must ensure and bring about actual changes in the health and well-being of communities, moving beyond tokenistic extraction of ideas and one-off engagements with no follow-through.
Common dimensions of just transitions, including recognition, distributive, procedural, and restorative justices, are inseparable and can guide us in our transition processes. Interventions need to consider all these layers of means and ends, with a genuine recognition of historical and structural inequities, leading to just distributive outcomes.
Following deforestation, heavy rainfall and devastating mudslides, Freetown, Sierra Leone created a new initiative called Freetown the Treetown, with the highline aim of planting a million trees in low-income parts of the city. The Freetown the Treetown initiative addresses multiple objectives – climate adaptation and resilience, poverty alleviation, community development – because of its approach and use of blending sources of finance and digital innovations. The initiative established an economic value for planting and care for each tree planted. An initial public investment was then used to mobilise private investment into the initiative, recognising the value generated from the newly planted trees. Residents of communities where trees were meant to be planted could then be paid for planting and maintaining the trees through a digital app and payment system, verifying each saplings planted and tracking its growth overtime. Freetown the Treetown has created many benefits – carbon sequestration, reduction in urban heat, improved water management, greening of vulnerable communities, provision of meaningful employment, flood protection and erosion prevention – by trying to tackle urban challenges through a creative lens.
c. demonstrating complexity, questioning what’s offered to us, and not trusting the process
In our current social climate, there is a tendency to take sides without deeply listening to and understanding others' positionality and experiences when engaging in conversations. Taking a pause before choosing sides can be a useful practice.
The declining complexity in arguments also leads to a growing mismatch between the simple, one-off solutions offered by partisan politicians and other actors and the real complexity of the problems themselves. For instance, replacing one technology with another—as seen with the fascination and uptake around private electric vehicles—is not a transformational solution. Understanding the trade-offs and the political and economic drivers behind different technological interventions will be key to avoiding investments in solutions that perpetuate the status quo.
The West Oakland neighbourhood in California’s Bay Area is a systematically vulnerable community. A racist planning system and historically exclusionary housing practices (i.e. ‘redlining’) have disproportionately exposed West Oakland residents to air pollution and toxins from unregulated sources. In 2018, the environmental justice group West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WOEIP) partnered with environmental regulators to co-lead the development of an air quality strategy, in collaboration with local private and community sector stakeholders. The ‘Owning Our Air’ strategy was adopted by WOEIP and state regulators in 2019. The strategy’s development process put residents, ‘experts,’ and public decision-makers in equal positions of power, building shared responsibility across compelling, actionable priorities. Their co-productive model and strategy enabled over a dozen private and public sector organisations to commit to taking 89 clearly-defined actions to meaningfully improve air quality, and overcome the complexity of historic systemic discrimination.
d. creating ‘brave’ spaces for genuine transformation—towards radical curiosity and kindness
Creating ‘brave spaces, as well as, ‘safe’ spaces, is essential for genuine transformation because it fosters an environment where individuals feel empowered to take risks, share bold ideas, and challenge the status quo. Open-mindedness, radical curiosity, and critical reflections are prioritised and welcomed—especially from those in leadership positions, encouraging team members to venture beyond their comfort zones and engage in honest, sometimes uncomfortable, dialogues. This openness to diverse perspectives and unconventional thinking can lead to breakthrough ideas.
Healthy friction, a key element of a progressive team, thrives in such settings as it stimulates debate and ensures that ideas are rigorously tested and refined. In brave spaces, individuals are encouraged to voice constructive criticism without fear of retribution, blaming, or shaming; facilitating a continuous loop of improvement, learning, and growth. These environments also foster loyalty and motivation in the long run.
Brave spaces allow us to practise and develop the muscle or capability for sensemaking and critical thinking, as people are continually challenged to analyse, interpret, and synthesise diverse perspectives and co-design accordingly.
e. challenging our own blindspots, judgments, and biases
When designing and implementing interventions, being cautious of our own biases, worldviews, and assumptions about the world will be key in avoiding reiterating current norms and practices. Ramia Mazé talks about how designers need to be careful when “mobilising particular ideals of the future” and keep reflecting on the role they may have in “reproducing already existing practices and norms in society”. (7)
We don’t only need to study the systems that surround us; we also need to acknowledge that our way of looking at and interacting with those systems can influence and change them. Explicitly acknowledging or stating our viewpoints and positionality will be key when inducing any change process.
The Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) has created a governance framework for managing the implementation of its climate action strategy—the 5-Year Environment Plan—in a way that enables civil servants and political leader’s perspectives to be continuously challenged and expanded. GMCA created an integrated governance framework for the 5-Year Environment Plan where public, private and third sector stakeholders oversee and lead implementation efforts through ‘Challenge Groups.’ As the name would suggest, the Challenge Groups are intended to bring diverse stakeholders together to work toward a shared goal but in a space where members are encouraged to disagree, challenge each other's assumption and interrogate weaknesses. This governance model’s critical and challenging ethos can slow the process of implementation down, but ensures GMCA doesn’t make mistakes due to the inherent blindspots, biases and preconceived ideas of those who created the 5-Year Environment Plan—fallibilities that all individuals and small groups have.
Moving towards care and mutual thriving
The mental health of a society serves as an equally important foundational capacity. When we create mental fragility, we simultaneously diminish society's ability to navigate uncertainty and prevent individuals from avoiding falling into theories of fear, which render them vulnerable in dealing with complex, risk-oriented decisions.
This holistic approach to societal health necessitates a reevaluation of how we understand and address the various elements that contribute to collective mental wellbeing. There is an intricate interplay between emotional, environmental, nutritional, financial, and social stressors, and their cumulative impact on societal resilience and capacity for effective sensemaking and decision-making in the face of uncertainty.
We're living in a vicious cycle where stress, climate breakdown, energy price increases, and food system disruptions make it increasingly difficult for families to survive, let alone to thrive. This situation leads to increased incidents of domestic violence, heightened household tensions, inadequate nutrition, extended work hours, and a pervasive or overwhelming sense of fear, ultimately contributing to a decline in mental health and civility.
Investing in the cornerstone capabilities and capacities of society
Over time, our capabilities and collective capacity for sensemaking and societal decision-making have not only been overlooked and underinvested in but have also eroded due to factors such as a lack of transparency surrounding decision-making processes, citizen engagement processes that are often tokenistic and susceptible to capture by special interests, leaving the public feeling a lack of agency to influence democratic institutions.
Currently, we fail to recognise the more intangible but indispensable capabilities and capacities of society. So, what would it mean to include these as a new form of balance sheet or part of existing balance sheets, recognising them as foundational assets? How do we invest in and grow these capabilities and collective capacities as a foundational investment for society to deal with and operationalise itself in moments of large-scale uncertainty and risk, where decisions must be made in often hostile environments?
Only by recognising these as foundational pieces and indispensable assets of a functional society will we invest in them and acknowledge their vast societal spillover effects, aligning with the complex realities of the 21st century, fostering spaces and environments that are just, resilient, dynamic, and inclusive.
We have worked with and studied dozens of case studies across the globe—like the ones included in this chapter—where deliberative participatory and citizen engagement approaches have intentionally been paired with governance innovations and institutional, infrastructural, and structural change. These are instances where collective action and new partnerships were well-orchestrated and sustained, and the culture of organisations and the mindsets of various stakeholders shifted to prioritise mutual thriving and support, rather than narrow individual self-interest.
Whilst the challenges facing society that we explore in this piece are present, and will be enormously difficult to overcome, we have also seen that through tenacity and courage—from Freetown, Greater Manchester, West Oakland, and beyond—the seeds of sensemaking and societal decision-making are being sown, giving us hope that change is indeed possible.
Footnotes
This chapter is based on and inspired by dozens of conversations with our team and colleagues at Dark Matter Labs. Originally published by Media Evolution 2024 in The Mesh We're In.
“At its heart, governance is about the framework of decision making; identifying who has the power to make and enforce decisions, and how that power should be exercised and accountable. The ‘how’ is focused on the process of decision making and the ‘who’ is about identifying where the power to make and enforce a decision–or not–lies.”—Scottish Land Commission, 2023 (1)
The 21st century will be defined by society's ability to respond together to the entangled crises we currently face. From pandemics and inflation to the cost of living crisis and environmental breakdown, private organisations or public institutions but to society in general, interconnected crises demand nuanced, systemic and thoughtful questions and responses:
How do people and society understand the world and what problems there are to understand?
How does society make collective decisions about those problems, and what are the appropriate governance frameworks to make those decisions? How might we redesign our societal decision-making processes and systems of governance?
How do we recognise societal assets and soft infrastructures as vital in a time of crises, and how do we invest into and build those future infrastructures?
Such a nuanced response would require building an intangible yet indispensable scaffold for our society, which we call soft infrastructure. This includes the skills, capabilities, capacities, institutions, networks, and processes (2) needed to make wise, collective decisions amidst the complexity and unpredictability of our planetary condition.
When we talk about capabilities we refer to the concept of dynamic capabilities. These are “the specific abilities embedded in routines that enable organisations to adapt their resources, processes, and skills in response to an evolving strategic environment, and to utilise competence to address a rapidly changing environment”. (3) However, in our case, we are applying dynamic capabilities not to private organisations or public institutions but to society in general.
By sensemaking capabilities, we refer to the process of understanding the empirical world, interpreting reality, and attributing meaning to the information we encounter. And decision-making capabilities are how this information is then assessed and informs the execution of decision-making processes, choices, and practical actions of individuals and society at large, its ability to find compromise and make at times difficult, collective choices. This might include the established frameworks, technological tools, policy implementation effectiveness, and communication channels that enable society to make and implement decisions.
Society's capacity for sensemaking and decision-making encompasses several critical questions. Does the societal standard of living and mental health allow it to focus on collective challenges? Do we have trustworthy media institutions?
The rising complexity within everyday life produces a cognitively and emotionally overwhelming stream of information, which is often exploited to numb and disorient citizens through techniques of disinformation and the creation of polarised narratives. This complexity impairs individuals’ capacity for sensemaking, and fosters antagonistic politics and dialogues that deem it wrong to disagree with institutional decisions—decisions that people are deeply sceptical of. These factors have, in part, led to the rise of polarisation, distrust, and incivility within our democratic systems—including a breakdown of infrastructural support that could, by default, allow for or engender more sustainable social practices, norms, and behaviours—thereby creating newfound opportunities for authoritarianism.
Our Western democracies largely fail to grapple with complex crises and often deliberately avoid taking action, which results in preserving the status quo.
This begs the question, how might we work in opposition to the dangers inherent in the current polarisation of societal values; emphasising the need for plurality, ongoing discourse, open dialogue, and mutual learning?
Achieving this will require a profound shift in how we invest in, govern, and nurture the decision-making and sensemaking capabilities and capacities of society to meet the needs of the present and anticipate the demands of the future. These will be key to developing infrastructures that focus on the services and systems supporting the well-being, productivity, and governance of a society in our dynamic and uncertain era.
A potential pathway that could help us structure our response strategy and shift our governance architecture is three-fold:
1. Recognising that building the collective capacity and capabilities for sensemaking and societal decision-making is a critical structural challenge and an opportunity to operate in a world of complexity, uncertainty, disinformation and information overload, and tendency toward polarisation and declining civility;
2. Designing the pathways to invest in those capabilities and collective capacity;
3. Achieving the first two prompts in practice requires governance innovation and interventions in the intricate architecture of soft infrastructure, rethinking its codes, processes, and institutions;
The absence of different, more diverse, and nuanced storytelling around complex political, social, and environmental matters, coupled with deliberate misinformation (i.e. disinformation) driven by vested interests continues to lead to a breakdown of security, civility, and humaneness towards one another. Major media outlets often employ binary and reductionist messaging, provoking polarisation and severe antagonism toward ‘the other’.
The multifaceted crises that society currently faces — whether related to climate, biodiversity, housing, healthcare or food and water security — also stem from structural and systemic inequities and exploitation, exacerbated by our economic model that solely focuses on profitability and the financialisation of every sector.
Moreover, our economic system externalises the true cost of a product or service’s impacts by only pricing in the economic costs. Externalising these costs is an economic practice in which companies do not account for the full societal or environmental impact of their products or services. In addition, the misleading practice of 'paltered' accounting—masterfully used in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting and other public and private institutional reports—tells only part of the truth while omitting important details.
These tactics are impeding structural changes to address the multitude of crises we currently face and also raising regulatory and data questions such as what corporate data reporting needs to be gathered and accounted for to build trust with investors who are now (often still performatively) demanding change, transparency, and thorough risk analyses?
It is also important to acknowledge that all of us, in one way or another, are part of following our own self-interests, even with the best intentions. Understanding how we support the current status quo and how we can take shared responsibility, rather than continuing with pushing the responsibility onto others, will be key in enabling collective action and shared accountability.
"Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.”— Marshall McLuhan, 1969 (4)
People's sensemaking capacity is impaired when they are inundated with information—rendering them unable to process information and interpret complex information. When inundated with information, people lose their ability to recognise patterns, and consequently, they become vulnerable to simply adopting patterns that are created for them by those with vested interests. These pattern narrative structures or frameworks are easily exploited, hijacking our comprehension of how we make sense of the world.
Political figures use deliberate tactics to overload people with information, disorienting and rendering them numb and paralysed. Initially applied by authoritarian regimes, these strategies deliberately create and popularise multiple opposing narratives transforming political landscape into a spectacle and engender cynicism in society.(5) We need to reconsider and expand the scope of regulatory and governance frameworks necessary to address these hijacking mechanisms.
Overtime, our storytelling and communication methods have grown increasingly sophisticated, persuasive, and attention grabbing. So perhaps our challenge with narratives is not only about creating better communication and storytelling but also about creating different ones.
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (2002) talk about examples for great storytelling, however harmful, when describing the phenomena of ‘manufacturing consent’. Manufacturing consent is the process by which the mass media, often in collusion with political and corporate interests, manipulates public opinion to align with those interests. Key elements of this include propaganda models, agenda setting, framing, selective reporting, and normalisation.
The stories told to everyday people in the mainstream media are often told in a way that provides a sense of safety, meant to create a delicate veneer that they and their families will not be directly impacted by the ‘crises of the day’, both now and in the future. This leads to dinner conversations often glossing over challenging future scenarios, priming people to label climate scientists, social activists, and student movements as overly dramatic, trivialising danger , and projecting the root of all threats onto ‘the other’.
Moreover, the lack of spaces designed for meaningful deliberation paired with out-dated, reactive governance models worsen society’s ability to respond to the crises we face.
These types of surface-level, binary narratives and one-off solutions threaten the very foundation of authentic, transformational change. The recognition of these vulnerabilities is crucial, prompting the imperative to encourage questioning and critical thinking about who benefits from maintaining the status quo, while also prioritising empathy, mutual understanding, and the evolution of collective perspectives.
Principles for improving decision-making capability
Equitably addressing today’s grand challenges requires the creation of new soft infrastructures with capabilities, capacities, networks, and principles that differ from the usual theories and practices of 'othering' and 'inducing fear’. How might we shift towards practices of 'operating with care, justice, and relationality,' 'turning towards one another with moral and intellectual humility,' 'appreciating plurality rather than forcing consensus,' 'understanding the evolution of each other’s positions and innermost drivers,' and 'understanding security as entanglement and interconnectedness,' rather than viewing it through a geographical, boundary-edged concept.
Although the implementation of these principles may seem subtle, their effects are profound and can have a significant impact. They can help us be more prepared for the challenges yet to come.
The philosophical underpinnings and practical implementations necessary for fostering a robust, pluralistic society capable of navigating the complexities of the 21st century underscores the importance of creating inclusive deliberative spaces that transcend mere ideological divides to maintain societal health and vitality.
The goal is not to bias, coerce, or influence decisions towards a particular ideological spectrum but to cultivate a space where diverse societal perspectives can deliberate, learn from one another, and evolve. Together.
a. embracing plurality
Any spaces and frameworks that would improve our capabilities and collective capacity for sensemaking and societal decision-making would aim to move towards a more nuanced understanding of plurality and individual positionality, and the diverse range of human experiences. Such a framework(s) would inherently respect and value the multiplicity of perspectives, facilitating a plurality of decision spaces essential for a thriving society.
In these dimensions and environments, it's crucial not to operate through a theory of ‘othering’. Instead, it's about recognising the value in, and embracing, different positionalities.
An example of how governments can systematically create space for embracing plurality and engaging with different societal perspectives comes from Ostbelgien, Belgium. The small 80,000 person German speaking region permanently established a Citizens’ Council in 2019 as a formalised ‘mini-publics’ democratic institution, intended to raise politically contentious issues on the agenda of the regional parliament. Overtime, the Citizens’ Council engages every voting age resident of Ostbelgien and invites them to participate in the mini-public deliberations that centre on selecting politically contentious topic that the residents believe need to be addressed, make recommendations on how to solve the issues they select and provide those recommendations to the regional parliament who either accept the recommendation or must come up with their own solutions. This process ensures the diversity of perspectives of residents of the region are recognised and formally considered by the regional parliament, regardless of how sensitive an issue might be.
b. learning from and amplifying uncommon logics and wisdom in currently marginalised practices
While being mindful about appropriation (6) amplifying uncommon logics and the wisdom in currently marginalised practices is important for several reasons: these perspectives often represent unique viewpoints and ways of thinking that are not typically part of mainstream discourse yet incredibly valuable and inspiring.
People and their communities who are marginalised often have practices, strategies, and capabilities for dealing with adversity. These practices develop over time through the need to survive and thrive, without joining the status quo or being deliberately excluded from it—in a world that at best ignores them and at worst is actively hostile to them. Their diverse logics and practices provide a more comprehensive understanding of human experiences and societal dynamics beyond dominant perspectives, challenging systemic biases and power imbalances and moving toward creating a more just and equitable world.
Listening to and genuinely understanding these voices can be the first step in learning from their practices and applying them more widely to help societal resilience at large. Most importantly, including these voices through various participatory approaches will not be enough. Any intervention must ensure and bring about actual changes in the health and well-being of communities, moving beyond tokenistic extraction of ideas and one-off engagements with no follow-through.
Common dimensions of just transitions, including recognition, distributive, procedural, and restorative justices, are inseparable and can guide us in our transition processes. Interventions need to consider all these layers of means and ends, with a genuine recognition of historical and structural inequities, leading to just distributive outcomes.
Following deforestation, heavy rainfall and devastating mudslides, Freetown, Sierra Leone created a new initiative called Freetown the Treetown, with the highline aim of planting a million trees in low-income parts of the city. The Freetown the Treetown initiative addresses multiple objectives – climate adaptation and resilience, poverty alleviation, community development – because of its approach and use of blending sources of finance and digital innovations. The initiative established an economic value for planting and care for each tree planted. An initial public investment was then used to mobilise private investment into the initiative, recognising the value generated from the newly planted trees. Residents of communities where trees were meant to be planted could then be paid for planting and maintaining the trees through a digital app and payment system, verifying each saplings planted and tracking its growth overtime. Freetown the Treetown has created many benefits – carbon sequestration, reduction in urban heat, improved water management, greening of vulnerable communities, provision of meaningful employment, flood protection and erosion prevention – by trying to tackle urban challenges through a creative lens.
c. demonstrating complexity, questioning what’s offered to us, and not trusting the process
In our current social climate, there is a tendency to take sides without deeply listening to and understanding others' positionality and experiences when engaging in conversations. Taking a pause before choosing sides can be a useful practice.
The declining complexity in arguments also leads to a growing mismatch between the simple, one-off solutions offered by partisan politicians and other actors and the real complexity of the problems themselves. For instance, replacing one technology with another—as seen with the fascination and uptake around private electric vehicles—is not a transformational solution. Understanding the trade-offs and the political and economic drivers behind different technological interventions will be key to avoiding investments in solutions that perpetuate the status quo.
The West Oakland neighbourhood in California’s Bay Area is a systematically vulnerable community. A racist planning system and historically exclusionary housing practices (i.e. ‘redlining’) have disproportionately exposed West Oakland residents to air pollution and toxins from unregulated sources. In 2018, the environmental justice group West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WOEIP) partnered with environmental regulators to co-lead the development of an air quality strategy, in collaboration with local private and community sector stakeholders. The ‘Owning Our Air’ strategy was adopted by WOEIP and state regulators in 2019. The strategy’s development process put residents, ‘experts,’ and public decision-makers in equal positions of power, building shared responsibility across compelling, actionable priorities. Their co-productive model and strategy enabled over a dozen private and public sector organisations to commit to taking 89 clearly-defined actions to meaningfully improve air quality, and overcome the complexity of historic systemic discrimination.
d. creating ‘brave’ spaces for genuine transformation—towards radical curiosity and kindness
Creating ‘brave spaces, as well as, ‘safe’ spaces, is essential for genuine transformation because it fosters an environment where individuals feel empowered to take risks, share bold ideas, and challenge the status quo. Open-mindedness, radical curiosity, and critical reflections are prioritised and welcomed—especially from those in leadership positions, encouraging team members to venture beyond their comfort zones and engage in honest, sometimes uncomfortable, dialogues. This openness to diverse perspectives and unconventional thinking can lead to breakthrough ideas.
Healthy friction, a key element of a progressive team, thrives in such settings as it stimulates debate and ensures that ideas are rigorously tested and refined. In brave spaces, individuals are encouraged to voice constructive criticism without fear of retribution, blaming, or shaming; facilitating a continuous loop of improvement, learning, and growth. These environments also foster loyalty and motivation in the long run.
Brave spaces allow us to practise and develop the muscle or capability for sensemaking and critical thinking, as people are continually challenged to analyse, interpret, and synthesise diverse perspectives and co-design accordingly.
e. challenging our own blindspots, judgments, and biases
When designing and implementing interventions, being cautious of our own biases, worldviews, and assumptions about the world will be key in avoiding reiterating current norms and practices. Ramia Mazé talks about how designers need to be careful when “mobilising particular ideals of the future” and keep reflecting on the role they may have in “reproducing already existing practices and norms in society”. (7)
We don’t only need to study the systems that surround us; we also need to acknowledge that our way of looking at and interacting with those systems can influence and change them. Explicitly acknowledging or stating our viewpoints and positionality will be key when inducing any change process.
The Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) has created a governance framework for managing the implementation of its climate action strategy—the 5-Year Environment Plan—in a way that enables civil servants and political leader’s perspectives to be continuously challenged and expanded. GMCA created an integrated governance framework for the 5-Year Environment Plan where public, private and third sector stakeholders oversee and lead implementation efforts through ‘Challenge Groups.’ As the name would suggest, the Challenge Groups are intended to bring diverse stakeholders together to work toward a shared goal but in a space where members are encouraged to disagree, challenge each other's assumption and interrogate weaknesses. This governance model’s critical and challenging ethos can slow the process of implementation down, but ensures GMCA doesn’t make mistakes due to the inherent blindspots, biases and preconceived ideas of those who created the 5-Year Environment Plan—fallibilities that all individuals and small groups have.
Moving towards care and mutual thriving
The mental health of a society serves as an equally important foundational capacity. When we create mental fragility, we simultaneously diminish society's ability to navigate uncertainty and prevent individuals from avoiding falling into theories of fear, which render them vulnerable in dealing with complex, risk-oriented decisions.
This holistic approach to societal health necessitates a reevaluation of how we understand and address the various elements that contribute to collective mental wellbeing. There is an intricate interplay between emotional, environmental, nutritional, financial, and social stressors, and their cumulative impact on societal resilience and capacity for effective sensemaking and decision-making in the face of uncertainty.
We're living in a vicious cycle where stress, climate breakdown, energy price increases, and food system disruptions make it increasingly difficult for families to survive, let alone to thrive. This situation leads to increased incidents of domestic violence, heightened household tensions, inadequate nutrition, extended work hours, and a pervasive or overwhelming sense of fear, ultimately contributing to a decline in mental health and civility.
Investing in the cornerstone capabilities and capacities of society
Over time, our capabilities and collective capacity for sensemaking and societal decision-making have not only been overlooked and underinvested in but have also eroded due to factors such as a lack of transparency surrounding decision-making processes, citizen engagement processes that are often tokenistic and susceptible to capture by special interests, leaving the public feeling a lack of agency to influence democratic institutions.
Currently, we fail to recognise the more intangible but indispensable capabilities and capacities of society. So, what would it mean to include these as a new form of balance sheet or part of existing balance sheets, recognising them as foundational assets? How do we invest in and grow these capabilities and collective capacities as a foundational investment for society to deal with and operationalise itself in moments of large-scale uncertainty and risk, where decisions must be made in often hostile environments?
Only by recognising these as foundational pieces and indispensable assets of a functional society will we invest in them and acknowledge their vast societal spillover effects, aligning with the complex realities of the 21st century, fostering spaces and environments that are just, resilient, dynamic, and inclusive.
We have worked with and studied dozens of case studies across the globe—like the ones included in this chapter—where deliberative participatory and citizen engagement approaches have intentionally been paired with governance innovations and institutional, infrastructural, and structural change. These are instances where collective action and new partnerships were well-orchestrated and sustained, and the culture of organisations and the mindsets of various stakeholders shifted to prioritise mutual thriving and support, rather than narrow individual self-interest.
Whilst the challenges facing society that we explore in this piece are present, and will be enormously difficult to overcome, we have also seen that through tenacity and courage—from Freetown, Greater Manchester, West Oakland, and beyond—the seeds of sensemaking and societal decision-making are being sown, giving us hope that change is indeed possible.
Footnotes
This chapter is based on and inspired by dozens of conversations with our team and colleagues at Dark Matter Labs. Originally published by Media Evolution 2024 in The Mesh We're In.
Gyorgyi Galik is a socio-ecological systems designer. She is the City Transitions Co-Holder at Dark Matter Labs. Previously she worked as the Head of Strategic Partnerships at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and as a Lead Advisor at Design Council. She has seventeen years of experience in policy, service, and innovation design. Her specialisation spans design, behavioural and environmental sciences, with a strong understanding of the built and natural environment.
Vlad Afanasiev is a strategic designer and researcher. He works at Dark Matter Labs where he focuses on governance and foresight at bioregional and planetary scales.
Ryan Bellinson is an action-oriented researcher, policy advisor and public sector innovator. He has advised cities on participative approaches to climate action and published widely on place-based approaches to innovation and community empowerment. Ryan is currently the Community Innovation Strategist at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and Visiting Senior Research Fellow in Cities, Climate and Innovation at University College London Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.