A caveat up front: The Value Web has always been a community effort, and these are just my personal reflections as we reach a new part of the journey.

I was proud to be a part of the Value Web when it was a scrappy, international collective of practitioners that had come together to apply their talents to tackling some of the world's most intractable problems. I was a part of the board when we changed the mission statement to "transforming decision-making for the common good". It felt right. It felt big. It felt like it mattered.

But things have changed. And if you haven't noticed, decision-making doesn't seem to be doing too well right now.

What I have come to believe, however, is that we have, among us, the tools that we need to make a fundamental shift in how we approach the problems of our times.

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Where We Came From

This all started out - at least for me - as a corporate thing. Capgemini Consulting, by way of Ernst and Young, had acquired a methodology from a small, obscure and boutique group called MGTaylor for a facilitated process of group decision-making.

I was, perhaps, too inexperienced to fully understand why we were doing what we were doing when I started...but I knew something felt right about it. In the crudest sense, as I understood it then, what we were doing was creating and facilitating a process by which a group could openly and collectively evaluate the possibilities of potential future strategies and collaboratively find a path forward together.

Using a clear method for process design along with a set of design principles and concepts for the creation of physical environments to foster collaboration, the method achieved significant scale across the world and spawned a global community of practitioners dedicated to supporting collective decision-making. I'm abbreviating rather substantially in this history, of course.

When I first got involved, what stood out for me was the openness and democratic nature of the process. I thrived on that. From the moment I entered the workforce, I wondered why good ideas mattered less than hierarchy; encountering a method for allowing the best ideas from a group to emerge - no matter who they were from - was a breath of fresh air to me.

I didn't really understand the real meaning of what we were doing until years later. It was enough for me that the work we were doing seemed to give meaning to groups within various companies that were tackling their own challenges. They seemed to gain inspiration and energy simply by being engaged in conversation about how to approach the challenges facing their companies.

And Then, The Value Web

Over time, I came to genuinely appreciate the work we were doing. Participants in our processes became deeply engaged in the difficult work of navigating what were - oftentimes - existential threats to the organizations they were working for. I learned that by designing a collective process around how people think, which is often messy and non-linear, groups would build ownership and intent around their work that I hadn't seen otherwise in the working world. When they were meaningfully engaged, they leaned in.

And there was method around all this. We would often say "trust the process"...and we would mean it, because the "process" would reliably produce results.

When I came across The Value Web, they were doing something that I found very interesting: they were applying the methods we had used in our consulting context for collective decision-making in non-corporate settings, most interestingly in settings where nobody in the group was from the same organization.

I can't stress how important this factor was in the evolution of our thinking and our work.

Collective decision-making and co-creation is comparatively easy when everyone in the process is obligated to be there, has the same interests in the outcomes, and might be fired if they don't meaningfully contribute. It's participatory, but with consequences. And the smart participants know what game is being played.

Collective decision-making when everyone is from a different organization, when they do not share accountabilities and when ownership of the outcomes is unclear, is a different animal entirely. This was the arena I found the Value Web playing in. Diverse groups from multiple sectors and segments of society trying to figure out solutions to intractable problems. Together.

What became abundantly clear was that there was a real gap in how to balance the inclusiveness required to involve all the necessary stakeholders with the decisiveness required to move things forward. And what we were doing appeared to be working.

What We Did and What We Learned

For years, we operated as a collective. Awkwardly. Somehow, we, as a group, found organizations to work with that needed support, and we created beautiful, immersive and transformative experiences for leaders facing critical challenges.

We worked with the World Economic Forum to reimagine its gatherings. We worked with UN agencies to find points of collaboration between agencies to tackle complex challenges. We tackled projects on climate, nature, public health, resource scarcity while also learning the fundamental principles of community design and coalition-building.

More than anything, I think that what we learned was that while having methods to productively and decisively engage individuals in big decisions was useful in large organizations, it was fundamental to making progress in settings where the stakeholders weren't beholden to the same "boss" but, nonetheless, had common stakes in a problem that none of them owned individually, but all of them were responsible for collectively.

Over time, we reflected on what we were doing and realized that in our efforts, there was something bigger at play.

Shared Intent and Collective Intelligence

It turns out that having a global community of people obsessing over how decisions get made results in some fairly significant insights. Over hundreds of projects, there was a very real validation that all of the factors surrounding HOW decisions get made are as significant as the decisions themselves.

By focusing on the human experience of collaboration, the emotional journey, the heuristics and shortcuts of human cognition and the labor of human trust and connection - all of which were considered unprofessional, irrelevant externalities in traditional decision-making methods - we were able to create deep and stable transformations of the groups we worked with.

We came to see that work in these systemic contexts focused around three design challenges - distributed intelligence, individual action and personal intent.

It was similar to the work we did in the corporate context, but exploded to a scale that required us to extend the tools and models we used.

At its heart, though, the problems were deeply human. Intent was everything. With loose ties, individual intent that became shared intent was the most potent element in driving change. And collective intelligence simply meant that with the size of the challenges, no individual fully understood every part of the problem, so a meaningful process to allow members of a group to come to shared knowledge based on collective input was the most reliable way to ensure that decisions were based on the best information and could account for the many potential consequences.

Through it all, we validated that a model-driven design process helped create structure in otherwise confusing and unruly circumstances, because the common denominator, regardless of industry or domain, was the human condition.

Reaching the Limits of a Model

To achieve all this, The Value Web walked an organizational tightrope for many years. As a "collective", it was made up of a group of more than 30 practitioners delivering work together under a common name. Most of those members either operated another company or worked somewhere else, and the common brand was used as a neutral space to collaborate on projects for the common good.

It always felt somewhat temporary and incomplete. It had enough structure that we could work together, but each time we attempted to formalize it, the changes risked upsetting the balance that allowed a group of people who might otherwise be competitors to work together. The energy - our shared intent - was always in delivering meaningful work together to try and make a difference, and that energy was always tested when we tried to evolve the structure.

We had validated that well designed, effectively supported decision-making processes could make a difference at the very highest levels, and with the most difficult and complex problems, but we had done so using a structure held together with chewing gum and duct tape.

And then we noticed a set of challenges emerging that caused us to re-evaluate the path forward.

First, the rise of Design Thinking muddied any kind of comprehensive understanding of deeper methods. The runaway popularity of the set of techniques around Design Thinking made it more difficult to articulate the important nuance of designing thinking. And our community was small, obscure, and not widely known.

Second, our extended community of practice was getting older. Although practitioners of our craft had, collectively and individually, achieved a remarkable degree of success, the obscurity that had always given it an edge now acted as an impediment to a generation of people who didn't even know these practices existed. Extinction didn't seem out of the realm of possibility.

Thirdly, our own practice could not evolve if it was not clearly defined enough to enter into conversation with other practices. There was no clear frame of reference outside of our community for what on earth we were doing.

Finally, and most importantly, there was no conceivable way that we could achieve our mission of transforming decision-making for the common good simply through scaling our service delivery. We could never grow enough or deliver enough projects to meaningfully change the broken processes that were steering our species off a cliff.

So the question became, given all that we've learned, how could we, as a community, change societal expectations of what constitutes "due process" in how critical decisions are made?

Ending the Old to Create the New

Svenja Ruger, Tanja Kerlo and myself took on the project of imagining what that might look like. First, the organization could no longer deliver projects itself, so that it would not be in conflict or competing with its own members. This was the most emotionally difficult part of the process, as we all had a connection to this dysfunctional but beautiful way of working together.

We came up with a minimal structure that would allow us to conduct research, establish the boundaries of a profession, and provide a learning path for new practitioners and to advocate for leading methods in complex decision-making. We call it Process Activism.

The most important element, however, was that it would take the time, intelligence and talents of our entire existing community of practice to come together and bring this into the world. With thoughtful practitioners spread all across the world choosing to move this forward together, it might just stand a chance of really changing things for the better. With this community as a start, and with an intent to learn with other communities of practice, it would be conceivable that collectively we could shift towards more inclusive, informed and robust collaborative decision-making.

We believe that we need to build community around key challenges, so there is a shared understanding among stakeholders not around what a given decision should be, but how we should be approaching those decisions.

One week ago, we made our case to 100 members of our community that had gathered for The Happening. We relinquished control of the organization to allow its rebirth as a community project.

What I witnessed was a group of people stand up and answer the challenge. What I felt in that room was the emergence of shared intent, and a genuine desire to build something together to ensure that we, as a species, can work towards a time when we can say that all decisions that affect our future were made in the best interests of all, and represented the very best of our knowledge and abilities.

Matt and Gail Taylor gave an incredible gift to this community when they assembled and nurtured this method. This community has now expressed the desire to honour what we’ve learned by extending it, sharing it and allowing something new to grow.

I am very excited to work together with this amazing community to create a future where we can not only say our decisions reflect our collective intelligence, but that, together, we have nurtured the ability to act with collective wisdom.

You should join us.

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