Strangers in group chats and exercises in nation-building

In recent months, I have grown increasingly obsessed with a dinner table as a unit of change.

The idea being that how we build a dinner table is, in many ways, how we build a world: the people sat around a table together have more resources, ideas, and possibilities between them than any one of them have on their own. Together, the right group of people can shape the direction of a community and a company, a city or a country. The question, then, is how to assemble the right group and unlock their cumulative power: not just what each person brings to the table, but what they can make happen together.

It’s not that we have any shortage of good ideas, money to invest, or well-meaning people who want to shape the future in our world. What we do have are systems where allocation and coordination are needed for solutions to meet the complexity of problems. If the people investing money and the people making laws have different end goals in mind or see different paths to the same end goal, they might want to move in the same direction but be canceling each others’ efforts.

I’m simplifying, of course, and I’m not suggesting that the point is to flatten a diversity of voices or approaches into one unified agreed-upon direction, but rather, that it when I talk to smart people working on systemic problems, they often point to system failures, not a lack of money, ideas, or the will to build the worlds we want. And when I talk to people everywhere in the world, it feels like there’s a sense of… so much is possible, and somehow, out of reach at the same time. That the direction of progress doesn’t often match the direction of peoples’ desires and dreams.

In simple English, then, aren’t the systemic failings, the coordination failures, simply the fact that lots of people who want to move in the same direction aren’t able to do so? Is it because they aren’t able to… coordinate? Or that they aren’t working from the same set of rules? Or they don’t know how to find each other?

I might be over-simplifying, but it feels, often, like the first step is to rebuild the infrastructure for this coordination. For people to get back into the habit of sitting at the table with each other, talking to each other and listening to each other, across difference and distance.

About a decade ago, when I worked at The Washington Post, I put four strangers in a group chat to discuss politics during an American president’s State of the Union speech… and then published their conversations.

I wanted to understand the kinds of conversations people were having, or wanted to have, away from feeds, like buttons, and the anonymity promised by the earlier days of social media. I wanted to understand what would happen if people had to talk to each other, not at each other. Would that even be possible?

Looking back now, I can hardly believe that my colleagues and bosses let me do this. But want unfolded was kind of… marvellous? I had created several small group chats with different groups of strangers. Some fell flat, some included beats of conversation that petered away, but one surprised me and has stayed with me for more than a decade. During the speech we all watched together, that group chat broke my phone with how regularly and furiously they were texting and surprised me with how civil, friendly, and human they were with each other.

I had started the group chats a few hours before they watched the speeches together and tried to get the conversations going with introductions and questions that got people texting about their lives and their thoughts.

This particular group discovered early that they shared something in common: a favourite TV show, and that was enough to break the ice. This fandom gave them a common language and reference point, something that they knew they shared with each other. It made the other people in the group feel less like strangers because they all loved one same thing. And this shared interest was a foundation on which they built the rest of the conversation (about politics!) that followed.

In the early 1990s, as South Africa was transitioning from apartheid to holding their first democratic elections for all citizens to vote in, an exercise was hosted to bring together a diverse group of leaders to imagine the future of the country.

This exercise was called the Mont Fleur process or Mont Fleur scenarios: three 3-day sessions including 22 leaders across ideological groups including political leaders, business people, academics, and thinkers. Adam Kahane, then a scenario planner at Shell, was one of the people who facilitated this exercise and wrote the book Solving Tough Problems about it. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this exercise and approach since reading Kahane’s book a few months ago.

During these sessions, the group’s job was to begin to imagine the trajectory their country could take in the next ten years.

It could have been easy for the scenarios to become a forum for airing grievances, for looking to the past. After all, it’s hard, if not impossible, to be able to meaningfully imagine a future with someone if you cannot agree on the present that you’re building from.

But instead of the process being focused on what was broken, it was fiercely insistent on being future-facing. Participants used scenario-planning to articulate what they thought were possible outcomes for their country. Not just the outcome they wanted or that would best serve them, but what they thought might or could happen. They then worked backward together, re-engineering the game of chess, almost. How would each party or each group have to act for that to be the end outcome? Tracing the map of how the future could be born out of this present moment, and how every different set of stakeholders would have to act to enable this.

The magic in this is also that it wasn’t all conjecture: enough of the participant groups were in the room together at the same time, so they could more accurately predict what their actions and reactions would be

Instead of saying “this is wrong” or “I disagree with this,” what they were tasked with instead was trying to understand what different groups would need to do in order for a collective outcome to happen. The future wasn’t seen an inevitability, but as something the participants in the room and beyond it, would have the power and agency to shape.

At the end of the exercise, the groups had come up with four likely outcomes and the path that would lead to them, which were also shared with the media. Stakeholders in the room had built relationships and a common language: a shared vocabulary and map that they could see the future being built from. And this was a language shared more broadly to give the wider public (or the media at least) the same map and language.

Why am I writing about nation-building and group texts with strangers in the same post? Because maybe they’re two versions of the same thing: how we come together, tolerate and even embrace difference, to start to have conversations about the worlds we can build together.

I’ve been looking more and more for models of just this: instances where in polarised, divided or inequitable environments, people found ways to come together and start sharing meals or plotting futures together. A small group as a unit of change, the dinner table as a unit of change.

These conversations are often at risk of becoming accountings of past grievances. There is enough horror and injustice in history for that to just be the only conversation, and we could argue that there’s no way to build a future together unless we can agree on the realities of the present with each other.

But there’s power in finding a way to get people to stand together or sit at a table together, and start looking forward together.

Perhaps that group text experiment gave us a model: start by finding common ground. So that we begin to see each other not as adversaries to fight for the same scarce resources, or opponents whose vision for a good future inevitably requires taking something from us, but as… humans, just like us. Other people who are worried about the same kinds of things. Other people who want the same kinds of things. Other people who maybe love the same TV show, football team, or pop star as us.

And the Mont Fleur scenarios also gave us a model for what we do once we find that common ground and shared humanity: create a room where everyone has a seat at the table, a voice in the conversation, a stake in the futures that are being imagined and start looking forward.