Effective citizen assemblies require experts, but not in their traditional, top-down authoritative role. Experts must learn to be "on tap, not on top"—simplifying their language and responding to citizens' needs rather than dictating solutions. This creates a difficult but necessary learning curve, shifting the expert's role from a leader to a service provider.
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Frontline employees have the most information about customer needs, while leaders have all the authority. To deliver exceptional service, empower the people interacting with customers to make decisions in the moment. This closes the gap and allows the organization to be truly responsive.
"Expertitis" is a form of the curse of knowledge where one knows too much about a subject to explain it simply to a newcomer. The cure is communication empathy: deliberately stepping out of your own expertise to see and frame the message from the fresh, uninitiated perspective of the audience.
Individual contributors are rewarded for having answers and sharing their expertise. To succeed as a leader, one must fundamentally change their approach. The job becomes about empowering others by asking insightful questions and actively listening, a diametrically opposed skillset that is difficult to adopt.
When leading functions outside your core expertise (e.g., product leading tech and data), credibility cannot come from having answers. Instead, it's built by consistently asking open-ended questions to deeply understand the team's challenges. This approach prevents solutionizing and fosters trust.
In siloed government environments, pushing for change fails. The effective strategy is to involve agency leaders directly in the process. By presenting data, establishing a common goal (serving the citizen), and giving them a voice in what gets built, they transition from roadblocks to champions.
Many leaders, particularly in technical fields, mistakenly believe their role is to provide all the answers. This approach disempowers teams and creates a bottleneck. Shifting from advising to coaching unlocks a team's problem-solving potential and allows leaders to scale their impact.
Experts lose public trust not only from being wrong, but from being 'dangerously out of touch.' Their use of cold, impersonal jargon like 'transition costs' to describe devastating life events like job loss displays a lack of empathy, making their advice seem disconnected from human reality and easy to reject.
Effective activism doesn't try to persuade politicians or stage a revolution. Instead, it should 'inject a retrovirus': build and run privately-funded alternative institutions (like citizens' assemblies) that operate on a different logic. By demonstrating a better way of doing things, this strategy creates demand and allows new institutional 'DNA' to spread organically.
Citizen assemblies don't require pre-existing expertise from participants. The inclusion of diverse individuals, like the homeless or elderly, changes the conversation's nature, fosters empathy, and provides a therapeutic function for the political body. This emotional and social bonding is considered at least as important as technical problem-solving.
Expecting politicians to vote themselves out of a job is unrealistic. The path to reform is a bottom-up approach, using numerous local citizen assemblies to prove their value. When politicians realize these assemblies can solve problems and reconcile people with the system, they will adopt them to secure their own legitimacy and hold onto power.