What is Participatory Intelligence?

Participatory intelligence refers to the combined expertise, insights and experience

contributed by large groups of people in formal consultation processes. It is collective

intelligence, yes, of the type that emerges from a particular kind of structured

engagement, but it is also the technology that enables institutions to find the

intelligence distributed across huge volumes of public inputs and it is the capability to

use that intelligence in a dynamic approach to designing processes and outcomes

that actually respond to what people are saying.

Participatory intelligence is a technology and a practise, developed in reaction to the

tragic waste of time and resources when public participation becomes more

performative than effective. It is a critical reimagining of ancient traditions for solving

difficult problems together, centred on the shift from top-down solutions that are

crafted in isolation and then defended in consultation processes, to an approach

which seeks to develop solutions that are informed by our combined knowledge and

problem-solving capacities. Participatory intelligence has become both necessary

and urgent, because what we are doing right now is not working. Institutions consult

more extensively than ever, yet public trust in the legitimacy of their decisions is at

an all-time low. Grievance is on the rise and along with it, increased risks of social

and political instability. Policy and regulation routinely faces widespread resistance

and then drifts into partial or complete failure. We are drowning in this failure.

Participatory intelligence rethinks how institutions engage with the enormous

volumes of input received from the people they are meant to serve. Rooted in African

decision-making traditions which embodied participatory, relational governance long

before any theorist named the phenomenon, it proposes an approach to

decision making where the institutional responses to our biggest challenges can be

meaningfully shaped by lived experience, expertise and a shared approach to our

collective flourishing.

This sensibility is informed by decades of experience with the current limitations of

consultation processes and unfolds to address questions of how technology can be

used to enable a richer understanding of public contributions and support our

capacity to work with these contributions at scale. It is not algorithmic decision

making, but the use of supervised AI systems to find the patterns spread across

diverse public inputs, patterns that are not visible from any single contribution, but

appear only when we have the tools to find and engage with the recurring themes,

issues, concerns and proposals spread across the totality of all public participation

on a given issue.

Institutions today have become quite good at collecting public inputs. We hear ministers report on the hundreds of thousands of public comments collected in critical processes, but how does any decision-maker engage with this volume of input? This is the gap –  consultations have grown in scale and complexity, but institutional capacities have not kept pace. The ability to engage with large volumes of public input matters, not because it will magically fix everything, but because working with participatory intelligence makes institutions significantly better at identifying areas of stakeholder agreement, understanding the sources of genuine disagreement and recognizing practical challenges before decisions are implemented. It is not simply a tool for better consultations, it is a new capability that enables institutions to navigate large scale public consultations in order to find emergent solutions to complex problems.

Participatory intelligence matters because we know that there are more human ways of making decisions together, approaches to solving problems that value connection and collaboration.  It seeks to contribute to the painstaking work of building decision-making capacity in our institutions, while at the same time bringing new vitality to already existing commitments to public participation. The problem hiding in plain sight is that the scale of participation has outgrown the ability of institutions to engage with public contributions in a meaningful way. This is the challenge that participatory intelligence confronts, how to work effectively with a multitude of voices to ensure more responsive, transparent and legitimate decision making.