MVP: Motivation/Vision/Process
By: Dick Ault
Tags: Congress, Change Management, Democracy, Legislature, Action

Motivation/Vision: Last week I discussed the need to make our legislative bodies more representative of our population as proposed by founders such as Benjamin Franklin [“Congress should be a mirror of the people”] and John Adams [“A legislature should be in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large.”]

Coming in early December: The Christmas Ham: Stories, Essays and Poems, a new book by Richard Ault

Unfortunately at the moment they look mostly like rich, white male, lawyers. Also, unfortunately but not coincidentally, they represent their self-interest, their party, and the special interest groups who finance them, not their constituents or their constitutional oaths.

Thus we established both a motive for change and a vision of a more desirable future. But we are still in need of a process for getting there. One suggestion was to replace our present method of election with some form of random sampling, or, as this approach has been called since its use in ancient Athens the birthplace of democracy, sortition.

Some might call that a pipe dream rather than a practical action step, or think it may be a nice but impossible idea. Of course, at one point women’s suffrage was an impossible idea, as was the right for black people to vote.Today we have a black woman as our Vice President elect. Same sex marriage? Impossible. I could cite many more such “impossibilities.”

None of these just happened out of the blue, of course. They took years, even centuries, of struggle to overcome resistance. As Martin Luther King said, “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

So it is with changing the demography of Congress and our state legislative bodies. We need to step back and examine some practical first steps toward that vision. First we need to widen awareness of the vision itself as well of the benefits of some form of random selection. Even though sortition has been employed for centuries in many and various settings, and even in many places today in the form of citizen assemblies, my guess is that most people have never yet even heard the word. When I first heard of it in the nineties, I was intrigued but could scarcely find any mention of it in my research. I am happy to report that has changed. There are many readily available online resources, including the international Sortition Foundation at sortitionfoundation.org.

Still, few people even know about or care to explore these sources. Would a public service ad campaign help? Maybe, but at his point, I’m afraid it would only be laughed at. Better would be for opinion leaders, so-called “influencers,” to become sufficiently educated to get beyond mere awareness to a level of understanding that, in turn, would lead to a number of trials at local and state levels less than the wholesale change of any given legislative institution.

Many years ago, social scientist/consultant Herb Shepherd wrote a short but highly influential article called “Rules of Thumb for Change Agents.” One of his rules reads “Innovation requires a good idea, initiative and a few friends.” Another urges: “Light many fires.” When I was consulting on culture change in large companies, I found some success using “Find some friends and light some fires” as my own mantra. There is much more than meets the eye in this simple change principle, but, basically it entails not only find people who are friendly to an idea, but who have sufficient will and resources to engage in and support multiple trials at many levels. In other words it pays to have at least some of the friends in high places. That’s why we need opinion leaders.

To find examples of the many current trials, please check out The Sortition Foundation, and this Ted Talk on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FsOH4KQp54), and The Jefferson Center.

Of course, there are always pessimists, people who can find a problem for every solution, but just maybe you can be one of the friends who will start even more little fires until they spread into one big one.

[Read more: My novel, The Names in the Hat, explores the concept of random selection of a state legislature.]

Coming in early December: The Christmas Ham: Stories, Essays, and Poems by Richard Ault. Available soon on Amazon and elsewhere.