New grounds for hope: Humanity can govern its complex planetary tragedies!

Humanity is overwhelmed by planetary tragedies: climate crisis, widespread hunger, desertification, migrations, destruction of biodiversity, corruption and many more. They are out of control because they are too complex for common-sense approaches like analysis and committees.  

But now there are grounds for hope. Dr Alfredo del Valle’s method, ‘Participatory Innovation Praxis’, can make tragedies governable through new forms of social interaction, fostering ‘strong participation’ and ‘future-building communities’. It has saved thousands of lives and could positively impact millions globally. 

Read more in Research Features

Read the original research: doi.org/10.1016/j.socimp.2023.100004

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Research Pod! Thank you for listening and joining us today.  

In this episode we look at the the Participatory Innovation Praxis, an effective method for governing the planetary tragedies that today overwhelm humanity: climate crisis, widespread hunger, desertification, migrations, destruction of biodiversity, corruption and many other. They are out of control because of their high complexity: each one involves large numbers of issues, actors, conflicts and cultures, and this leads to fear and dispair. They need several disciplines like medicine, engineering or others to be possibly understood. 

Why are these planetary tragedies out of control? Because they are too complex for the four common-sense approaches that are usually applied: ‘simplification’ imposes someone’s priorities; ‘analysis’ looks through the eyes of a single discipline; ‘trial-and-error’ seeks to learn from a single experiment; and ‘committees’ collect proposals from just a few actors.. But such approaches clearly miss broad aspects of reality, and fail: the planetary tragedies of humanity keep proliferating. 

Dr Alfredo del Valle has done theoretical and practical work into this severe failure and has created an original alternative. His Participatory Innovation Praxis is a natural-intelligence method based on systems thinking or complex thinking. It makes high complexity governable by means of new forms of social interaction that proceed bottom-up: ‘strong participation’ and ‘future-building communities’. It leads to designing and implementing dozens or hundreds of innovations. Being a praxis it prescribes no social, political, or economic model to follow; rather, it is a learning guide for a social system to transform itself from within, towards displaying its whole potential. This method involves principles, concepts, tools, processes, and methodological agency. In principle it is applicable in any field and place, at any scale. 

A good illustration comes from a deadly ‘high-complexity’ problem that kills 1.3 million people worldwide every year, according to the World Health Organisation. That is the problem of road traffic crashes. To face this problem in Chile a road safety policy was formulated with Del Valle’s methodological guidance between 1993 and 1997. Its group of convenors included seven ministries and the national police, and its future-building community had 200 representative participants: transport engineers, judges, police officers, bus drivers, etcetera. They closely interacted to generate a strategy with 129 institutional and social innovations, which was implemented in the subsequent years.  It dramatically changed the road fatalities trend; so far some 20,000 lives have been saved and injuries to 300,000 people have been avoided, in this country of 20 million. At the global scale this policy could save 3 million lives and avoid 30 million injuries in 10 years. As a key outcome, the policy changed traffic culture, since drivers now give way to pedestrians and cyclists at designated places, what is apparently unique in Latin America. Its economic benefits were hundreds of times larger than its costs, following WHO and World Bank criteria. 

What is the rationale behind this impact? In the 1950s, the British cybernetician Ross Ashby discovered a general law that explains how complex systems are actually governed in nature, and also in society when well done. He specified a measure of complexity, called variety: the number of distinguishable states in which some entity can be (a traffic light has three states: green, amber, red; an interacting group of people is complex and has a huge number of possible states). Ashby’s law of requisite variety is clear and intuitive: A can only govern B if A’s variety is equal or larger than B’s variety; otherwise A will miss many of B’s states. For instance, a master chess player beats a regular one by knowing far more positions: his variety is much greater. This is a logical law that is always in force. 

Del Valle has found that Ashby´s law explains why common sense fails, and also provides the key to governing high complexity in practice. Why does it fail? Because the varieties of high-complexity problems are astronomically large and the usual approaches can only consider a few possible states: they are reductionist. Thus, common sense is very far from understanding any high-complexity problem, let alone governing it. 

How can this limitation be overcome? First, by developing a high-variety understanding of the problem that effectively matches its whole complexity; and second, by using it as grounds for a future-directed governance system. The PI Praxis does this by methodically working with human minds and human language. It harnesses the astounding ability of human minds to process complex meanings when they interact on natural language. Human brains have 80 billion neurones, each linked to other 5,000 to 200,000 neurones; and the English language involves 171,000 words in use. Mind-word combinations into phrases, sentences, and texts give rise to varieties of meaning that are more than astronomically large. PI combines them via participatory exercises that also build high commitment from the actors involved. 

Del Valle provides a paradox: ‘Governing high complexity needs no big bureaucracy, as common sense believes. It does need powerful systemic tools based on natural language, a strong participatory process, and competent guidance. Our team for Chile´s road safety policy had 11 members.’ 

Del Valle has conducted around 80 experiences in Chile and other countries at different scales, involving some or all the tools of this method. These are a few: a municipal development plan; five participatory innovation processes at the scale of medium business; the promotion of bike culture that gave rise to Chile’s social movement of cyclists and to 2,000 km of cycle-routes; the broad participatory plan that cleaned Santiago´s air, with no emergencies since 1999; the Chilean – British pilot strategy to reverse soil erosion in the Rapel river basin, with participants from Argentina, Brazil and Mexico; Chile’s energy national efficiency policy; the strategic plan of the Latin American Co-operation of Advanced Networks (CLARA) at the continental scale; and the linkage of green and inequality agendas in the context of the Green Economy Coalition at the global scale. 

The process that makes a ‘high-complexity’ problem governable has body and soul. its body is the ‘future-building community’ of 100 to 500 participants that gradually evolves within the relevant social system – a city, a region, a country’s roads, etc. This community identifies, designs, and implements the innovations that impact the system from within and eventually transform its operations, structure, and culture. The process starts by creating a group of convenors with 4 to 10 key actors to provide legitimacy and strategic guidance, and proceeds through a series of methodical workshops that apply the four verbal tools of the PI Praxis. An activation team mobilises the participants to the workshops. Once the group of convenors is established, it takes only six to twelve months to formulate an effective and legitimate strategy for the longer term, with all innovations defined, and to start implementing it.  

At the deeper level in this process is ‘strong participation’, the soul that gives life to the community. This is a future-directed and synergic dialogue between all participants, that takes place at special workshops and produces on consensus all visions and proposals along the process, without any prior blueprint. This widely differs from ‘weak participation’, the common-sense practice that summons people to validate or marginally improve existing proposals from public or private entities. Strong participation multiplies intelligences, enriches ideas, humanises and dignifies people, because humans are social beings that seek to create. 

As a final, key note, the work of foundations, governments and international agencies that are concerned with today’s planetary tragedies could greatly benefit by applying the Participarory Innovation Praxis. It is described in Isssue 153 of Research Features magazine, free to access. 

That’s all for this episode – thanks for listening, and stay subscribed to Research Pod for more of the latest science.