Speaking
“Huge impact, masses of positive feedback, great to see your approach reflected in the conversations that took place through the rest of the day. You nailed it. Thank you.”
Recent keynotes
Democracy is Dead, Long Live Democracy!
The Trump administration is tearing up the rulebook, but democracy is in crisis everywhere, and has been for some time. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, almost half of those elections won’t have been free and fair; fewer than 8% of the world’s population now lives in a “full democracy”; and the EIU’s Democracy Index score for the world as a whole has fallen to its lowest ever level. But there is another truth. Across the world and at every scale of governance, from local to national to supranational, a bigger idea of democracy is emerging. Jon gives a view of this new world, drawing on examples ranging from Taiwan’s crowdsourced Covid response to Malawi’s systems for local budget accountability to the growing movement for a Global Citizens’ Assembly as part of the United Nations. Best of all, we can all play our part in this work of renewing democracy – and Jon will show us how.
Watch Jon’s keynote at NEXT24 in Hamburg, Germany.
The role of Technology in a Citizen Future
The media philosopher Marshall Mcluhan proposed the idea of the global village in the 1960s, as a potential future where technology enables us to understand and collaborate on a global scale as if it were a village – chaotic and certainly not utopian, but plausible. Drawing on his core framework of Subject, Consumer and Citizen as three competing stories of self and society, and on two of Mcluhan’s most famous aphorisms, “the medium is the message” and “first we shape our tools then our tools shape us,” Jon offers a powerful diagnosis of the deeply dangerous moment we find ourselves in with regard to technology – and offers a way through.
We are building our technology from within the Consumer Story, with Consumer assumptions and design principles and purposes, so we are building a marketplace not a village – and we could easily trap ourselves forever. But many around the world are shifting to a Citizen mindset, as Jon shares, and building something that could be transformative as a result. His conclusion? Technology will neither save us nor kill us; it’s the idea of ourselves that we design into the technology, and with which we use the technology, that matters. So it’s time to decide: do you think of people as Consumers, or Citizens?
Read Citizens Equipped, an excerpt from Jon’s book CITIZENS.
A Challenge to the Marketing Industry: Think Citizen, Not Consumer
Sir John Hegarty, one of the most influential marketing minds of his generation, recently called for the word “consumer” to be banned, saying “it assumes complacency, lethargy and a top-down means of communication… It takes the full spectrum of human experience and reduces it to a single action – consumption.”
He’s right. But replacing the idea of humans as consumers is not just a matter of changing a word; it requires a total shift in mindset which could transform the industry from top to bottom. Jon argues that what we have to abandon is not just a word, but many of the frameworks that have sat at the heart of marketing for decades. In place of consumers, he’ll give you citizens; in place of the four Ps of the “Marketing Mix”, he’ll give you the Three Principles of Participatory Organisations; and in doing so, he’ll offer you a path to be proud of working in marketing again.
Listen to Jon’s Marketing Society podcast: Can Marketing Save The Planet?
A Provocation for HR Professionals: Citizens at work, not Consumers of jobs
Wellbeing at work – and in life – especially in this moment in time, is much more about agency and purpose than it is about transactional benefits or material standards of living. The companies that will thrive in the uncertainty of the coming decades will be those which create the space for the ideas, energy and resources of their teams.
Jon offers the concept of Facilitator Leadership (as opposed to either Command or Servant Leadership) as a framework for understanding the role of leaders in this time, and provides a toolkit for starting.