Activating Civic Power for Social Impact

I just want to thank all of you for being here today and particularly thank the PopTech and Microsoft Envisioning teams for gathering us here. This is really, really juicy and I'm really appreciating what I'm learning already this morning. I wanted to say a word about the work that I do. My name is Eric Liu, I'm the founder of Citizen University, which is a non-profit. We're based in Seattle, but we do work all around the United States. Our work is fundamentally about trying to democratize understanding of how power works in civic life. We've got a variety of programs that do that and I'll describe some of them. But I want to say actually a word in the first place just about our world view. And this flows in part from the conversation we've already been participating in this morning, and some discussion we had last night, some of us over dinner. I think it's really striking how much resonance there already is between the presentations we've heard, and one of the things I want to name and just call out that's just a thread among all them and is core to our world view at Citizen University, is the ecosystemic view of things. Our work ... I wrote a book several years ago called, "The Gardens of Democracy" and the title of that book contains a bit of an argument. One that we've actually heard elements of this morning and the argument is this. That so much of the way we think about work, the economy, community, civic life is through the metaphor of a machine. Right? We're hearing [inaudible] from and others about this kind of obsession with efficiency and this mechanistic view of the purposes and the operations of all the ways that we work together and deal with one another in public or not in isolation. And the argument of this book was essentially that while that metaphor of the machine is useful in some ways, and it's illuminating, and when you actually start paying attention it's ubiquitous, right? We talk about the economy as a job creation machine, we talk about whether the Fed should tap the brakes on growth, we talk about priming the pump of economic growth. All these mechanistic metaphors and in politics as well, we talk about political machines and we talk about the ways that we relate to government in sort of the sense of a frustrated consumer who's put coins in a vending machine and then didn't get our candy bar, right? So we kick the machine. There is some utility to that metaphor. But I think this morning really underscores the ways in which that metaphor also blinds and it limits our sense of what's actually going on around us right now. And that it's properly understood. An economy, a workforce, a neighborhood, a community, a polity, these are gardens not machines. They're complex adaptive systems. They're networks that have organic life to them, that bloom and cascade in the ways that we're seeing images of all this morning. And the role of the worker, the role of the leader, the work of the manager and the work of, certainly of the citizen, is to be a gardener. Right? Gardens when left entirely to themselves will grow like gangbusters, they'll be awesome. And a laissez-faire approach to a garden, yields initially beautiful blooming growth. But then when you continue to be laissez-faire, it yields an opportunity for noxious weeds to take root and eventually take over and kill the garden and tip things over til they're all dead. Gardeners garden, gardeners weed, seed and feed. Right? And I think I wanted to kind of dive into that metaphor a little bit by way of opening because it seems like one of the ways that we segway from this conversation about networks in general and networks in workplaces and networks in a beautiful instant and yet evanescent polity like Burning Man, in all these cases, we're thinking ecosystemically and we're thinking and behaving like gardeners at our best. Right? So that is the spirit of our work at Citizen University. And one of the things that [inaudible] asked me to do here was to try to connect some of the dots between work and civic life. And the fundamental question before you here, which is the future of work, and I really like the way that Anton described this theme. That it's not about just enterprise workplaces and about context of work at your job, but just what it means in fact to, as my friend Howard Gardner at Harvard says, do good work. Howard has launched a thing called The Good Work Project that is looking at what is the meaning and the essence of good work in any domain. Whether it's a profession, whether it's your life as a citizen, whether it's in your life in family or faith, what is the essence of good work? In our work at Citizen University, I've learned several lessons that I wanted to share some reflections on today about the nature of networks and the way that networks in this day and age are activated for civic change. I think it goes without saying, I think we all recognize no matter how politically or civically engaged you might be personally, that we live in an age of citizen power. We live in an age of bottom up upheavals and that's not just the politics in the United States of the last year, it's the politics of the United States going back at least to 2010 and the arrival of the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street and other such movements that have since bloomed here. But of course it's not just the United States, it's the Arab Spring, it's the Maidan revolution, it's the Umbrella revolution, it's all of these movements in which without permissions, without the authorization or even knowledge of hierarchies, citizens in self-organizing, spontaneous ways are forming networks, activating those networks, and changing the frame of the possible in their communities and societies. So we live in this age. And our work at Citizen University is about trying to capture the essence of what it means to exercise power in a time of bottom up upheaval like this. And we've learned three lessons in our work and I want to kind of describe each of these about what it is that makes a network particularly effective in civic life. The three things that I want to reflect are in the first place mutuality, secondly moral clarity, and then finally, imagination. So let me just say a word about each of these and give you a little bit of example of some of the stuff that we're doing. So mutuality. I think you know those classic slides about [inaudible] and the strength of weak ties and you know the triads and the rest, I think are such a great vivid reminder, not only of the dynamics that unfold that become mappable and visible when you do a network map, but about the underlying pulse of social norms that actually feed any kind of network. And the most central of those is a spirit of mutuality. Right? There is no Burning Man without mutuality. This idea of that the gifting, for instance, is done with this kind of unspoken sense of reciprocal mutual response. Right? So at Citizen University, one of our projects is something called the Civic Collaboratory. And what this is, on one level, is a network. It's a network of civic innovators drawn from all across the United States, all different silos of civic work, and from across the breadth of the political spectrum. Right? It's folks who run the gamut from co-founders of the Tea Party to co-creators of Black Lives Matter, to folks who are leading advocates among the Dreamers and undocumented immigrants to people who are working on voting rights, people who are working on civic tech, people who are working on civic education, people who are thinking about veterans and activating veterans as civic assets here at home, people who are thinking about civic work in all these different ways. And yet the reason why we created this Collaboratory was our perspective revealed to us that relatively few of these folks were busting out of their silos. That relatively few of these people in their domains had not only opportunity but any knowledge of opportunities to play with one another across the lines of their different domains. And so in 2011, we convened the first meeting of the Civic Collaboratory. And we learned a very interesting lesson here. We did it kind of the old-fashioned way. We had a big meeting, we called it actually at a place that's Microsoft descended in a way, and the Gates Foundation headquarters in Seattle. Bill Gates Sr., Microsoft Bill's father and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, retired Supreme Court Justice, joined us as co-conveners of this and with two co-conveners like that everybody we invited came right? This great list of folks showed up, they wanted to be in the room with ... the rumor had happened with Bill Sr. And Justice O'Connor. And we had this great day and a half gathering and during much of the gathering all these people were meeting each other and learning about their respective kinds of work. Our intention as the curators of this gathering, was to say, "Okay folks before this day ends what are we going to do together, what are we going to commit to doing together," right? And at first, there was this high sense of purpose and energy and people were like, "Yeah what are we going to do together?" And then as the day went on, it started sinking in with people that wow we're coming up with all these interesting plans of how we're going to connect veterans and immigrant rights activists and how we're going to get Tea Partiers to work with people on the left, and we're going to do all these things. But it started to dawn on folks, I'm not getting paid to do any of this stuff, right? It started dawning on them that I don't have time to follow up on any of the commitments that I'm sort of making in front of Justice O'Connor and Bill Sr. here. It started dawning on folks as well that there's some of my competitors in the room here. I'm not sure it's totally in my self-interest to dive in and do this stuff in this way when other folks in the room might take advantage of my distraction or my non-focus on my core mission. And so by the end of the day, being attuned to that room, I sensed that there was this kind of sapping of commitment. People went through the motions still, and went through and kind of made a list of commitments but there was something less than fully satisfying about that first meeting. So, we went back after that first meeting of the Collaboratory and we said when we gathered it, we don't presume that there will be a second meeting. Right? We don't know. But we felt like there was enough there that there was something to with this, but that we needed to activate a different kind of energy. And what we identified was what we needed to do was to shift the terms of self-interest in that room. And to really make a set of rules and a set of norms that would unleash, that would invite and bring into the open, a sense of mutual self-interest. And indeed remind folks at the end of the day, that all self-interest is mutual self-interest. And so in the next meeting that we did, it's a couple months later, we devised a new format that we called a rotating credit club. And the rotating credit club is this very simple format that's in some ways adapted from processes that unfold in a lot of unbanked immigrant communities around the United States, where a circle of would-be entrepreneurs who don't have access to capital or traditional lenders, will put their savings into a pot and then they'll take turns getting the benefit of the entire pot in order to capitalize their small business, their dry cleaner, their restaurant, whatever it might be. We adapted that format so that every single time we meet at the Collaboratory, five or six members of the group will take turns in rotation. And they'll present to the rest of the group a project they're working on, an initiative they're trying to launch, a challenge they're facing. And the rest of the group has to offer not just commentary or critique, the rest of the group has to make hard commitments of capital. Social capital, ideas capital, relationship capital, in some cases because there are funders in the room, it's money capital, though it's not primarily about that. But this idea is that you will lean in and you will make those commitments of capital because in the best sense, what goes around comes around. Right? It's going to be your turn to be in rotation next quarter and you're going to want folks from this very disparate network of activists and catalysts and civic change makers to want to lean in and commit back to you. That's one big lesson that we've learned from our work at Citizen University is the power of mutuality. The second lesson here is about moral clarity. And I want to describe another project that we launched actually four days after the election. This is a project called Civic Saturdays. We launched this project as I say, right after the election, and what Civic Saturday is is essentially a civic analog to church. It's not church, it's not synagogue or mosque. It's not a traditional faith institution or gathering, but it is about American civic religion, about the norms, the values, the texts, the creed that those of us who live in the United States have both the right and the opportunity and the obligation to actually inhabit and revivify by our choices and by our deeds. And our gatherings have the arc of a faith gathering. So we get together and there are, there's song. We sing together. You turn to your neighbor, you talk about a common prompt in response to a question. There are readings of what you might think of as civic scripture, texts from the American tradition, well known and not well known. There are sermons that thus far in Seattle, I've been giving but others will be giving as well. And then afterwards, there's a social hour like you might have after church or something, which started out as just literally tea and cookies and the rest, but has evolved organically into sort of a self-organizing activism hour. Right? When we did this first one four days after the election, it was just out of the strong instinctive sense that there was this yearning, this need for people to try to make sense of this moment of upheaval. And we thought well, on four days notice it'll be great if 50 people show up at the basement of this bookstore that we booked for the event. And over 250 people came to that first one. And [00:14:00] we realized wow, we had tapped into something here. And what we tapped into was not just post-election need to make sense of things, because we've now done these periodic gatherings every month since then. What we tapped into was a desire that people had to be in a community where together they could seek moral clarity. Right? And so it's one thing to have a network of affinity and a network of shared skill or strategy or objective in public policy, and that is what connects Black Lives Matter to the Dreamers to the 15 dollars an hour movement to the Tea Party, they all have some purpose in which they are able to kind of use that purpose to organize in a seamless non-directed way. But what gives their networks life in an enduring way is moral clarity. Each of them has a strong moral point of view. You may not like their point of view, you may not agree with it at all, but there's no ambiguity about what Black Lives Matter stands for. It stands for the idea that black lives ought to matter in this country as much as non-black life. And that in our institutions, and in our criminal justice system, in our education system, and in employment, black life does not matter as much as non-black life does. And that is a strong moral point of view, right? The point of view of the Tea Party and the successor networks that have grown out of the Tea Party, organizations like Citizens for Self-Governance, is similarly a point of view that says this country was founded to overthrow tyranny. And that the federal government today is itself the source of tyranny and we need to unwind and rewind and scale back the reach and scope of the federal government. Again, like, dislike, agree, disagree, that's fine. But there's no ambiguity about the moral purpose that's driving that network and that feeds that network magnetically in a way that helps it grow. This brings me though to the third and final element that I wanted to say a word about and thinking about social civic networks and the ways in which they live and thrive. And that is this idea of imagination. Now you've got a good dose of that in both looking at images of and hearing talk about the beauty of Burning Man. But I think one essential element that is true at a Burning Man, that's true in pick your movement today of civic action in the United States that's effective, and that's certainly going to be crucial in any work place setting where leaders like you are thinking about how to form and activate networks that cohere and give people a sense of purpose, is this notion of play, of how do you awaken a spirit of imagination and creativity. [00:16:30] And I want to tell you about another project of ours at Citizen University that we launched last year called The Joy of Voting. And this is a simple project that recognized there used to be in the United States, a culture, around local elections in particular, that was about joyful, raucous, robust participation in voting and elections. It was about street theater, open air debates, dueling parades, bands, bonfires, the culture in which it wasn't just do your duty, eat your vegetables, cast a vote, but it was about join the club, join the party, join the tribe and participate in public in a joyful, creative way that expresses your ownership of the republic. Right? Screens, whether television initially or now you know our other screens have pretty much killed that culture of joyful engagement in voting. But our hypothesis was there's no good reason why we couldn't rekindle that, particularly at the local level. And so in working with the Knight Foundation, which as some of you know, operates in a couple of dozen cities around the United States where there are or used to be strong Knight [inaudible] newspapers. We partnered with them to catalyze Joy of Voting projects and they're very simple projects where in each of these cities that ran the gamut from Akron, Philly, Wichita, Miami, now St. Paul, Charlotte, Grand Forks, and other places around the country, big and small, blue and red, was we convened artists, activists, musicians, everyday citizens, neighbors, folks who were just engaged in the life of the community. We came and invited them to practice imagination. We invited them to think about what would it look like to have a project at a small scale, that you could create in election season that would awaken people's sense of belonging, that would awaken their desire to be part of something greater than themselves and would awaken most of all their spirit of imagination and play. In each of these communities, people brainstormed ideas, they went out to their networks and generated and harvested more ideas, and then over the course of weeks we ultimately chose in each of these cities, five projects and gave them micro-grants so about thirty five, thirty six hundred dollars. And we seeded all of these little projects around the country. And last year, in what was one of the least joyful, most grim election seasons in living memory, we were able to spark this spirit of imagination and creativity in civic life in these cities. And now we're expanding to a group of other cities in the United States. I tell you about this project because whether it's about voting or it's about showing up in other ways, when you think about what it means to activate a network, it's not just about mutual aid, it's not just about a sense of moral clarity, but there has to be activating the spirit of imagination and purposeful play. And that is certainly true in civic life, you think about the Women's March, you think about all the ways in which people have been figuring out, and the March for Science, ways in which to create this sense of spectacle this joyful sense that we're not getting beaten down by the threats and menaces to our democratic systems and institutions, we're going to revive them by expressing the full breadth of our humanity with spirit, purpose, play and joy. Right? And that is the spirit in which we've got to operate in applying everything that we do in one domain, in my case civic, to everything that we do in another, perhaps in your case the workplace. So the final word that I want to say is this. In thinking about networks, in thinking about the ways that we learn from each other in activating our networks both civic and workplace, one of the most basic lessons that we've learned at Citizen University and that I've tried to express personally. And it's actually in the book that the good folks were good enough to put in your gift bags, my new book "You're More Powerful than you Think," about this age of citizen power and how we practice citizen power, is this simple insight. Once you take stock the way that these images and slides today have shown us how to take stock, once you take stock of your network and your network of networks and the network capital that each of you has individually, collectively, institutionally. Once you have that assessment, you've made that visual map and you've taken that accounting, you face a pretty binary choice. The choice is this. Shall you hoard? Or shall you circulate? That's it. In civic life today, in the United States in this age of nearly unprecedented inequality and concentration of wealth and opportunity, we face this choice. Shall you hoard the power of your network? Or shall you circulate it? And I'm here today just to beg of you, as you think about how you're going to get smarter about networks, to make a personal and collective commitment to circulating your power. Thank you very much.