The RE:Generation Collective Podcast – The Next UN: Visions for a Regenerative Future
As the United Nations approaches its 80th year, the question of how it can evolve from an institution that delivers to one that regenerates has never been more urgent. In this episode of the RE:Generation Collective Podcast, host Silke von Brockhausen speaks with Jon Alexander, strategist, storyteller, and co-founder of the New Citizen Project. Jon’s award-winning book Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything Is All of Us has become a quiet revolution in how organizations think about participation, purpose, and power. Drawing on his work with governments, NGOs, and social movements, Jon offers a deeply human invitation to reimagine the UN not as a service provider, but as a living, participatory ecosystem—a convener of collective intelligence and shared purpose.
The Collapse of a Story, Not of Humanity
Jon opens with a radical but compassionate idea: the crisis of our time is not the collapse of humanity—it’s the collapse of a story. For centuries, we’ve lived inside successive “stories of self and society.”
At the end of the 19th century, the dominant story was the Subject Story: “keep your head down; a God-given few know best.” Then came the Consumer Story: “pursue your self-interest; the market will add it up.” Many of our modern institutions—including parts of the UN—were built in that second era, where efficiency and control were seen as virtues. But the Consumer Story can’t solve the crises it helped create: loneliness, inequality, ecological breakdown.
Jon believes we are now ready to remember and step into a third chapter—the Citizen Story. It begins with the recognition that “all of us are smarter than any of us.” It’s an invitation to reclaim trust in people’s collective intelligence and creativity—to stop building systems for people and start designing with them.
Leadership in “Safe Uncertainty”
What kind of leadership does this require? Jon cites family therapist Barry Mason’s concept of Safe Uncertainty. Real leadership, he says, isn’t about projecting false confidence or supplying pre-packaged answers. It’s about standing shoulder-to-shoulder with your team or community and saying: this is the question we’re facing; what might it look like if we held it together?
Expertise still matters, but it becomes “on tap, not on top.” The leader’s role is to pinpoint the question, create the process, and hold the space in which many can contribute their intelligence.
From Taiwan to the UN: Opening Up Institutions
To show what this looks like in practice, Jon recalls Taiwan’s crowdsourced COVID-19 response. Instead of controlling information, the government announced three design principles—fast, fun, fair—and invited citizens to co-create solutions. A child’s suggestion to make pink masks cool sparked a national campaign that turned stigma into pride.
For Jon, this wasn’t a cute anecdote—it was a case study in institutional renewal. “They tapped the ideas, energy, and resources of everyone,” he says. “That’s what happens when institutions become conduits of collective intelligence instead of owners of solutions.”
Starting With What’s Strong, Not What’s Wrong
When crises hit—wars, earthquakes, pandemics—people organize themselves first. Jon calls the opposite reaction elite panic, citing Rebecca Solnit: when authorities rush to control what they don’t trust. History shows that communities already possess resilience and creativity; our job is to amplify it.
The simplest rule? “Start with what’s strong, not with what’s wrong.” See the self-organizing networks that appear after disaster not as chaos but as early signs of regeneration. The UN’s role, Jon suggests, could be to feed those sparks—with resources, legitimacy, and global connection—rather than override them with "solutions" conceived and designed elsewhere.
Living in Two Loops
Jon borrows from the Berkana Institute’s Two Loops model to describe how large systems - and indeed whole societies - need to transform in this moment in time. Every institution sits between a dominant system—built from an old logic—and an emergent system growing quietly in the cracks. For UN staff, that means accepting both realities: working within today’s constraints while nurturing tomorrow’s possibilities.
He offers three simple design cues—his “three Ps”: Purpose, Platform, Prototype.
-
Purpose: Reframe your mandate as a question—“How might we help this society flourish, with its people?”
-
Platform: Create conditions that make participation meaningful and joyful.
-
Prototype: Start small, learn fast, and build in public.
Transformation, he reminds us, rarely starts with reform at the top. It starts with small green shoots that demonstrate a different way of working.
Democracy Under Good Conditions
Jon is also known for championing Citizens’ Assemblies—capital C, capital A. These are randomly selected, demographically representative groups of citizens who deliberate on key issues, with experts “on tap, not on top.” His favorite example: the Irish Citizens’ Assembly on Abortion, whose recommendations later passed by public referendum.
For Jon, such processes embody democracy under good conditions. They could even help the UN re-contract with humanity, inviting people everywhere to co-author new global mandates—perhaps even a renewal of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “Rather than defending what thirteen people wrote eighty years ago,” he says, “we can invite the world to write the next chapter together.”
From Big Mother to Messy Beautiful
Asked what he would do as the next UN Secretary-General, Jon resists the idea of building a “Big Mother”—a centralized system to save humanity from itself. Instead, he imagines a “messy, beautiful” future where coherence of values meets distributed power.
In that world, the UN is no longer a monolithic structure sitting on top of the world but a pollinator—the interstitium that connects, nourishes, and amplifies. A web that helps local regenerative efforts talk to one another across cultures and scales.
The Closing Note: Trust People
Jon’s message lands simply: trust people. Make institutions porous to the intelligence already present. Create the conditions for contribution rather than compliance.
In his words, “If we tap into the ideas, energy, and resources of everyone, we can do wonderful things very quickly.”
That might just be the new story the UN—and the world—needs to tell.
Connect with Jon on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-alexander-11b66345/
Learn more about Jon's work: jonalexander.net
Listen to the Full Episode:
Youtube:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0EydzxHO171EeE3UdSxOFp
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/from-consumer-to-citizen-falling-back-in-love-with/id1841851629?i=1000731649945