Effective Ways to Influence Appreciative Set Points? Deliberative Mini-Publics As Socio-Technical Systems Change Initiatives

How might systems perspectives, including socio-technical systems change, cybernetics, and organization development, deepen our learning from existing experiments with sortition-based deliberative mini-publics? In this paper, I apply these lenses to the results of recent natural experiments where a cross-section of the larger system (a given socio-political system, not an organization) is invited to develop shared recommendations for a given policy area; in the process, participants generally also develop a greater sense of agency. Since these mini-publics can produce significant shifts in the system’s “imaginal field” or Overton window of possibilities, they can be seen as responses to Vicker’s call for ethical ways to influence the appreciative set-points of our socio-cultural system. Sometimes this influence occurs through large-scale narrative diffusion, as with the 1991 “People’s Verdict” sponsored by Maclean’s in response to a growing risk of separatism in Canada. Other times, built-in design elements increase the likelihood of sponsoring bodies adopting some or all of a microcosm’s recommendations, such as the feedback loops in the Citizens’ Council model from Vorarlberg, Austria. Yet even with a growing number of different formats worldwide and variations with regard to implementation, we see repeatedly that regular people, chosen by public lottery and offered a supportive interaction context, find value in exploring public issues together and work through differences to arrive at meaningful shared recommendations. Analogous to McGregor’s “theory X / theory Y”, a different pattern of behavior emerges in the context of intentionally designed and facilitated processes where each participant is respected and heard. Regardless of local design variants, in supportive contexts we repeatedly witness humans’ desire to take responsibility for improving collective life, and ability to navigate nuance and complexity.