In this monologue, Tom Guarriello reflects on the pervasive political slogan “change” during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, arguing that the public’s conventional mental model of how leaders create change—top‑down vision‑to‑system implementation—is outdated. He explains that modern, networked communication technologies now allow a system to connect with itself, enabling an “open‑source” style of governance where citizens collaboratively shape policies. Guarriello cites Barack Obama as the only candidate who appears to grasp this approach, emphasizing the need to link citizens through technology to tackle entrenched problems such as healthcare, infrastructure, and taxation. He critiques the traditional, low‑engagement democratic process (infrequent voting, no ongoing dialogue with politicians) and contrasts it with contemporary business practices that continuously engage employees, customers, and suppliers in collaborative innovation. The speaker concludes that without adopting this new, participatory model of change, government will continue to repeat ineffective, top‑down solutions.
Chapters
Wahai, it's Tom Guarriello. You know, the word that probably has most characterized the current American presidential nomination season has been change. And, you know, got me thinking the other night, had dinner with a friend of mine and She was saying that, you know, she was talking about Barack Obama and she said, "You know, people are saying that Obama is talking about change, but he's not being very specific." And that made people uneasy. And she said, "Don't people know about change?" And it was a funny statement because You know, I think that my friend really hit on something pretty important, which is that we have within our minds and our imagination ideas about how leaders create, create change. You hear that phrase? Leaders Create Change, we believe that to be a leader means to have a— let's use all the buzzwords— to have a vision which then gets rolled out to whatever the system is that the leader is trying to change and that the The system then implements, executes the— sorry— the change that the leader has envisioned. And that's pretty much the model that most of us, if not all of us, have grown up with of change. Well, we live in a new time. Now I know that sounds, you know, like such a cliché and like such a— what do you mean we live in a new time? Well, this is what I mean. We now live in a time when the potential for connecting the system that we're working in with itself via all of these— simple yet profound communication technologies and methods, that the potential for connecting the system with itself is now greater than it's ever been in the past. And so, one way of thinking about change today is thinking that what leaders need to do is to enable the system to connect with itself and engage in work, conversation, activity, whatever it is that the system is designed to enable, um, to work with itself to create new structures, change. Now, The direction that those structures take and that the change takes then is certainly something that lives within the system's mission, its definition of itself, its, you know, its reason for being, why it exists. And so many leaders are finding that an open-source approach to change, as opposed— and in line with the open source approach to many other things, is yielding tremendous results. The kinds of things that could never have been accomplished by a group of people sitting in a room trying to figure out mission and then rolling it out for an organization to execute. Now, whether or not Barack Obama, if he were to be elected president, would be able to actually bring that kind of thinking to the presidency, he is the only candidate who has even the slightest idea about that approach to governing. When you listen closely and read the kinds of things that Obama has in mind, he is talking about putting the citizens of the country in connection with one another through these kinds of technologies and enabling a lot of open-source thinking about the kinds of problems that we currently have found to be intractable using previous means of solving them. What kinds of problems? Well, healthcare system, infrastructure investment, the tax system. I mean, there are so many— there are so many problems that for the last 40 years we have said must be solved, that have not been solved, that it's amazing to me that there are people who are willing once again to take another turn around the wheel of trying to solve them in the same ways that other people have tried to solve them in the past. What makes us believe that the next president, using the same kinds of approaches that the last presidents have used, is going to be able to be any more effective at getting things done. I, I don't understand that logic. It seems to me that we need to try something different because what we've been doing has not been up to the task of solving the kinds of problems that we are now facing. And, you know, does that mean that our system is unable to solve them? I don't think so. I think what it means is that the way we have been executing our system, our democratic system, has not provided us with enough engagement by the people who are living within it to make a difference. Um, you know, most of us, if we vote every 4 years or every 2 years in, you know, congressional elections, that's it. That's the only involvement we ever have. We never talk to a politician. We never engage with politicians. We don't, we don't do anything. We elect them. We send them on their way. We watch them go through the same things that they've been doing all of our lives, and then we complain when they fail. I think we have to try to embrace a new model of change which is in keeping with the model of change that we're seeing in every other kind of system today. Every business— look at what's happened with the way businesses are engaging in the kind of connective Conversations that they're now having, the most successful ones are using every possible means to engage their system, engage their employees, engage their ecosystem, including their customers and their suppliers, in conversations about how to make things work, how to innovate, how to change. Why we can't apply that kind of thinking to government is beyond me. But I think if we're going to have a chance to do anything, we're going to have to embrace a new approach to change itself if we're going to have a chance. So, um, thanks to my friend Connie for that great bit of insight, and, uh, I'll see you guys again soon. Take care. Bye-bye.
