For a couple of years now, I have had Tom Atlee’s classic book on creating a more co-intelligent society, The Tao of Democracy, sitting on my bookshelf. There were so many others in my stack and I assumed that I had already studied many of the methodologies described in the book (Council, Appreciative Inquiry, World Cafe, Open Space Technology, The Work That Reconnects, Permaculture, etc). But when I heard that Atlee was going to be one of a select group invited to a national gathering of Transition leaders at Genesis Farm in New Jersey this December, I decided to pull his book off the shelf and give it a try.

When I did, I learned two things:

1. There were a lot of valuable, co-intelligent practices that Atlee describes I was previously unfamiliar with.
2. Atlee possesses a deep understanding of democracy and co-intelligence that has the power to fundamentally transform the way we approach our work in the Transition Movement.

For both these reasons and many more, The Tao of Democracy is a book well worth reading and revisiting.

If We Take Democracy Seriously

The Tao of Democracy begins with seemingly innocuous question: “What would intelligence look like if we took wholeness, interconnectedness and co-creativity seriously?” While many of us probably believe in wholeness, interconnectedness, and co-creativity, how good are we at actually practicing them? And how easily do we discard them when they become inconvenient for us?

In a culture of what Atlee calls “adversarial activism,” we often do not practice what we preach. We say we want a society that values all its members, but then split the world into us against them. We say we want positive solutions, but all we ever seem to talk about are problems. We say we want peace, but our words and actions deepen partisan divides that inevitably lead to more conflict. While we may repeat Gandhi’s admonition to “be the change you wish to see in the world,” we do not practice it. We rationalize that adversarial activism is a justifiable means to an end.

As an alternative to adversarial activism, Atlee offers what he calls “social process activism.” His view of social process activism is perhaps best summed up by these words:

“Our goal is no longer a desired state for society, but rather a desirable unfolding of society. In other words, we are not trying to engineer a new society to our specifications so much as trying to jump-start certain innovations which will (we hope) elicit society’s conscious and continuous re-creation of itself to its own changing specifications, as needed, to meet the challenges, changes, and opportunities it faces.”

The Transition Movement can surely benefit from this deeply democratic perspective.  Although the idea of “unleashing the collective genius” is encoded in the Transition model, we should not fool ourselves that intellectual understanding is the same as embodiment. Putting these principles into practice is far more difficult. Doing so requires us to become conscious of the habits of adversarial activism that persist within ourselves and begin to act as if “communities and societies can collectively reflect on their problems and possibilities, and collectively choose and implement effective, even brilliant solutions and initiatives.”

Ultimately, we have no choice. The old way simply doesn’t work anymore. We all need to get good at fostering co-intelligence, and fast.

Taking Democracy to Scale

“Collectively, we are creating effects in our world beyond our collective ability to comprehend what we are doing, at a speed that surpasses our collective ability to reflect and respond.”

Atlee has dubbed the situation we are currently facing, “complexxity.” Yes, with two x’s. If we open our eyes, complexxity is manifest everywhere we look, from the complicated financial instruments that played a major role in last year’s financial collapse to the accelerating speed of our own lives, and from the uncertainty of climate change to the dizzying spin of the mainstream media. We cannot possibly keep informed of every issue that affects our lives, and many of us feel it doesn’t really matter anyway.

The Transition approach to complexxity has been to bring our attention back to the local level, where we as ordinary citizens have more knowledge and power. As Atlee points out, this is where democracy was born, and this is the scale it is currently best adapted to:

“Democratic citizenship in ancient Athens was practiced by propertied free men. They had time on their hands and only a city to think about. Democracy was reborn in a predominantly rural America where town meetings made sense. People knew each other and shared the immediate experience of their problems and the consequences of their collective solutions. Their lives were busy but far slower paced and less cluttered than our own.”

Transition also manages to cut through some of this complexxity by focusing sharply on transitioning away from fossil fuels. This approach makes good sense because fossil fuel dependence is closely linked with many other critical issues, including food security, climate change, economic prosperity, resource wars, and quality of life. But how can we take Transition to scale? Even our local communities are often too large to bring everyone together in a single room.

While there are many possible answers to this question, the one that Atlee promotes most enthusiastically is what he calls “citizen deliberative councils.” Within this broad category, there are “citizen juries” that have been used to guide regional agricultural policy in India, “consensus conferences” that have become part of the routine functioning of the Danish government, and “wisdom councils” that have been proposed for use in the United States. What all of these different approaches have in common is that they bring ordinary citizens together in dialogue in order to discuss and decide their collective future.

This is exactly what Transition, in general, and the Energy Descent Action Plan, in particular, is aspiring to do. For an Energy Descent Action Plan to ultimately be successful it must be broadly supported by its community, and for it to be broadly supported by its community it will have to find a way to synthesize the diverse interests, needs, and concerns of the whole community. Reading The Tao of Democracy, I couldn’t help but wonder if citizen deliberative councils could be adapted to play a role in the Energy Descent Action Plan process.

A More Democratic Transition

“Most public meetings do not qualify as citizen deliberative councils because they normally involve only an airing of views. This is not only true of the usual public hearings, but even of many collaborative ’roundtables’ intended to nurture relationships across community boundaries. Citizen deliberative councils, in contrast, are specifically designed to provide ample opportunity for thoughtful dialogue among the diverse participants. Each person can move towards wiser perspectives than they started out with – larger understandings that can be of use to the whole community.”

As we can see in the current debates on health care and the economy, many of our greatest challenges are not primarily technical. They are cultural and have to do with real differences in perspective, values, and priorities. While Transition has the potential to be a highly unifying and integrative movement, it has yet in my observation to reach beyond the choir of mostly middle-class, white environmentalists. However, in order for Transition to really make a significant impact on the community-scale, this is exactly what it must do. It can’t afford to become a partisan issue. Look at what that has done for health care.

It would be presumptuous for anyone to say at this point how best to go about creating an Energy Descent Action Plan. The earliest Transition Initiatives in the UK are still working on theirs and no initiative in the US has even started one. Nevertheless, we can say with confidence that it will need to be inclusive. Another model that Atlee describes that we should consider learning from are stakeholder dialogues, in which representatives of the various constituencies affected by an issue are all invited to participate.

Of course, no fundamental change in culture is likely to occur without the cultivation of “a culture of dialogue,” to quote none other than the Dalai Lama. In the pages of The Tao of Democracy, Atlee describes dozens of co-intelligent practices that can be readily applied and lists more than 120 for further research.

While you will not emerge from The Tao of Democracy as an expert on any of these practices, it can serve as a powerful starting point for exploring the vast, open field of co-intelligence. From there, pick a couple of the practices that interest you most, follow the links that Atlee generously includes throughout his book, and try them out on your own.

Regardless of where you start, it’s time to get involved. I’d like to leave you with some food for thought:

“We are active participants in everything that happens, even when we think we are ‘doing nothing,’ even when we are totally ignorant of what’s going on. We are never merely irrelevant observers, spectators or bystanders. We are – each of us, right now – actively participating in the unfolding of the world into its future. I think of this as ‘intrinsic participation.’ We cannot avoid participating.”

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For more information on Tom Atlee and his work, please visit the website for The Co-Intelligence Institute.

Don Hall is the former Education and Outreach Coordinator for Transition Colorado, a non-profit organization that serves as a hub for local Transition Initiatives throughout the state. He is a graduate of the Environmental Leadership Master's Program at Naropa University, and a certified Permaculture Designer and Consultant. Don is also a co-founder of the Transition Naropa University Initiative, one of the first of its kind in the world.