Thought Piece | A Sense of Agency: Reclaiming Political Power in a Chaotic World
- Chiara Rosselli, Executive Director
- Nov 7
- 8 min read
Chiara Rosselli, Executive Director, APROPOS Group
Author's Disclaimer: this is advocacy, it’s long and it’s personal, so read on at your own discretion. It is, also, an introduction to my latest policy paper 'The Role of (Process) Design in Politics'.
I personally began my path in the political world by choosing to study Economics and Politics - mainly because international law wasn’t a Bachelor’s subject at the time, but that’s another story.
I started my think tank career fresh out of university at age twenty-three, and very early on I was confronted with a strong sense of disillusionment and frustration, which was met with almost equal frustration by my superiors, who deployed the classic retort: I was impatient, apparently.
I wonder if you can remember at what age, or where you were in your career when you had your first taste of bitter disillusionment.
What sparked it? Who did you share it with? What happened to it?
I think disillusionment can be a powerful activating force, if properly channelled.
I personally came to realise, much later, that what I was experiencing as disillusionment was the materialisation before my eyes of the gap between the way I thought the world worked— the way we were taught to think the world worked — and how the world actually worked.
The image I had cherished, of working diligently on the sidelines of politics, contributing polished and cunningly researched framings and policy tweaks, in a nutshell, being of service and improving policy, all from the safety of our own ivory towers, Think Tanks — violently shattered.
It shattered against a vortex of senseless gatherings, mortifying readership of our policy papers, leadership blaming the burden of fundraising and projectitis for their lack of impact, and, the final blow: the dissolution of any illusion I still had regarding the existence of an orderly and rationally sequenced so-called ‘policy cycle’.
And as the world grew more divided and angrier, the few remaining seductive political ideas we were raised to believe in — the European project, in my case — were being repeatedly tarnished by crisis after crisis: financial, austerity, migration, anti-establishment (everything was a crisis). With each failure, real or perceived, I felt the progressive unpeeling of political reality from my own political ideal grow ever more pronounced.
And with it, the greater my restlessness grew, and the louder my sense of powerlessness.
And then I met Peter Woodward.
I’d never seen anything have such an impact as Peter had on the whole dynamic and outcome of a policy conversation.
To Peter — if it's appropriate to do so — I'd like to dedicate the paper I'm about to share with you.
Peter is, and was, the lead facilitator of the then ‘New Voices in European Politics’ political dialogue initiative, today - the Open European Dialogue.
I was thunderstruck.
I grew curious and had to learn more about how Peter made what seemed impossible —getting politicians with dramatically different political views to engage in honest, vulnerable, constructive conversation on the most divisive political issues — feel so effortless.
I had an opportunity present itself to me.
I took over the leadership of the Open European Dialogue and, seven years later, I co-founded the APROPOS Group, all in the pursuit of that single intuition: process matters, the how matters.
If transforming how politicians talked to one another was not only possible but so clearly within grasp, imagine what might be achievable by applying that same intentionality to designing political processes as a whole?
I sensed, I saw, I knew, that we could regain our lost sense of agency by putting our heads down and instead of obsessing over how different reality was from our ideal political system, we could start getting to work on designing the stepping stones between the chaotic reality we live in and our vision of how society and politics should function.
A crisis of knowledge?
Allow me to sidestep for a moment. This intuition about the importance of process seems especially urgent to me when considering the broader context we're in.
In The Polymath, British cultural historian Peter Burke identifies two distinct crises of knowledge: one in the 17th century, driven by the scientific revolution, another in the 19th century, fuelled by industrialisation and mass publishing. He hints at a third following the digital communications revolution — a tipping point where our old sensemaking structures strain under an information deluge — and, I would add, leading to a concomitant loss of intelligence and wisdom.
I firmly believe we are witnessing a crisis of knowledge (or maybe it’s best to call it an evolution, and avoid labelling yet another political challenge as a crisis).
If so, the question we need to answer becomes: how do we create new processes that help us think better together, even amid this transformation of knowledge?
I do believe that if unrecognised and unmanaged, this new evolution in human knowledge poses a significant threat to our individual and collective intelligence, even more so if we take into consideration the darker mid- to long-term effects of AI on human cognition.
It requires our society to start investing now in the creation of new frameworks, political institutions, cultures and practices, through which we can rebuild thinking and knowing, both at the individual and societal level.
We need to start designing better ways for us to think and decide together as a society and particularly looking to harness what we nowadays know about human cognition and behaviour - including the notorious elephant in the room: our dramatically limited rationality.
And this is where the design of political processes comes into play.
Political processes can be intentionally designed to sharpen our thinking and support the exercise of collective intelligence, which is particularly needed when it comes to the negotiation of different values and worldviews. Even in an age of hyper-complexity and stark division, we need not surrender our agency and succumb to powerlessness.
This is why the field of design for politics feels so critical and urgent to me in our current political context.
Can we really move from disillusionment to intervention?
To me, yes, we can, and to be frank – we must.
The discipline of Design, when earnestly applied, offers us an incredibly underutilised and very powerful political tool, not only to navigate the shifting currents of society, but to chart a deliberate course toward something better, to start building the infrastructures our democracy requires to remain fit-for-purpose. Knowledge systems that shine a light on complexity, dialogue platforms that work to bridge legitimate divides, and cooperative frameworks that transform conflict between enemies into competition between adversaries (à la Chantal Mouffe).
Without this intentional rebuilding, I fear our democratic institutions will continue their drift toward irrelevance, and citizens and political representatives alike will find themselves surrendering more and more of their sense of agency to those very systems they were meant to govern.
In a political context where more and more of the things that I expected to be inconceivable have become a reality — and I know this holds true for many; where nothing seems to matter, not facts, nor lies, nor children being intentionally starved, focusing on wielding the instrument of design to construct new mechanisms of political collaboration, able to broker ways forward in a divided society, became a beacon of hope for me.
It has meant refusing to remain stuck in disillusionment, resisting the knee-jerk reaction to simply fight fire with fire, and choosing to intervene on what can be done, on the control we do have, if not over the outcome, then over the process.
Being able to practise the art of meticulously designing processes and spaces where political dialogue and collaboration happen, and witnessing how quickly a conversation can change when you change the parameters and setting within which it happens, has been the motivating drive behind all of the work of APROPOS.
Through our work, we’ve witnessed things we feel a responsibility to share with others:
- we have seen design allow for the emergence of a sense of community among people who share none of the same political beliefs,
- we have seen how design is able to orchestrate productive conflict, allowing difficult conversations to surface, tensions to be overcome, and small yet significant ways to make progress together in diversity,
- we have seen design ignite imagination, curiosity and create the conditions for a reinforced sense of agency and courage among political and societal leaders.
If we applied this same intentionality to the way we design our political spaces and decision-making arenas, how could the small-scale transformative conversations we’ve witnessed translate into a democratic infrastructure that’s more resilient to the complexity and ideological battles of our era?
A Contribution
'The Role of (Process) Design in Politics' paper which I am sharing with you today is a contribution, nothing more.
It’s our attempt to share why design offers a rare opportunity to restore agency in a world that feels increasingly out of control. And how, by understanding the mechanics of human collaboration, we can reclaim our political power.
If this paper brings even a little more attention to the how behind our political ambitions — how we engage and move people; how we construct spaces for collective intelligence for complex, nuanced issues; how we orchestrate productive conflict; and how we design all of the spaces in which we attempt to do these essential political functions — we’ll consider that a win.
It’s been a long time since I first met Peter, but since then at APROPOS we decided we would be doers, practitioners, rather than observers - building in public and advancing with purpose toward directions that we're still busy charting. We call this "coddiwompling": to travel purposefully toward an as-yet-undefined destination.
From this commitment to get our hands dirty, the term Political Process Design emerged as our idea for a generative framework describing the intentional design of political thinking, dialogue, collaboration, and decision-making spaces, a practice which focuses specifically on how political interactions happen rather than on what people’s political positions should or shouldn’t be.
This, in turn, led us to the definition of the role of the Political Process Designer, which has provided us with an emboldened sense of agency and a renewed commitment to improve the workings of politics at its core, and which has allowed us to start sharing this renewed sense of agency with others, a growing community of political process designers.
I have one note of caution for those drawn to this role: it's a demanding way of seeing the world.
It’s a role that comes with many questions: How does change happen? How do I get there? How do I build a process that will do that? How do I design a future that does not yet exist?
Once you begin, you can't stop yourself from questioning the many different ways you could have designed this conversation, or that process, that would have led to a better outcome. But therein lies the beauty and power of it — you stop seeing outcomes as inevitabilities and start seeing possibility instead, the potential for a different outcome to emerge, one that you simply haven't designed your way to yet.
This paper formalises for the very first time our vision of Political Process Design as a fundamental function of politics and advocates for the cultivation of a new breed of democratic innovator: the Political Process Designer.
I don’t believe Political Process Design will magically fix the many and profound flaws of our democratic system overnight, but what it does do is offer a tangible, actionable pathway forward, something we can — despite it all — still do. A way to stop feeling paralysed by the political reality we live in and start actively designing meaningful alternatives to rebuild the resilience of our democracies.
Ready to reclaim your political power? Dig in - and let me know if anything resonates!
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A special thanks to the Design|Policy Research Network and the authors of ‘Design & Policy: Current Debates and Future Directions for Research in the UK’ who provided a beautifully thoughtful analysis of design for the policy sector, against which we were able to sharpen our own thinking about the work of APROPOS and our Political Process Design framework.
