Demos: Telling a story, creating ideas

Demos is one of the most unusual think tanks in the UK. Founded by radical Marxists, the Demos staff were influentual advisors to New Labour. But Demos argues it’s not affiliated with a particular party and is now working on a project with the Conservative Party. I spoke with Demos’ spokesperson Peter Harrington on the power of story telling, involving people in think tank research and the dissemination of ideas.

Demos is hugely successful: only a few years after its foundation in 1993, the first researchers moved to 10, Downing Street and advised the Prime Minister. Why is Demos so successful and what is different with Demos than with all the other think tanks?

I think that the success of a think tank depends a lot on the context and on the environment at the time. The reason why Demos caught the imagination was because it came to existence with a critique of politics as it was at that time. We had a very, very clear and strong message about what is wrong with politics and that message is still relevant and accurate today.

Our critique was that we were then living in a post-Soviet, rapidly globalising world, while politics was feeling almost like a declining sector of industry and became less and less relevant to everyday life. As knowledge and our ability to communicate increases, the government no longer holds all the answers to all the problems in the world. Suddenly, government is just one amongst a lot of different actors in society that is trying to solve problems. Also, there was this feeling that politics – especially in the UK – uses structures and is speaking in a language which is meaningless to the ordinary people.

So all of these observations animated Geoff Mulgan and the other people who were involved in setting up Demos and they still animate us now because a lot of these criticisms of politics are still true. The idea was that the best ideas come when you cross-fertilize – you need to knit academics, policy-makers and civil servants together so that together they form ideas which derive from different perspectives. Demos was at the forefront to get policy-makers listening to practictioners. Demos’ message resonated with the New Labour project and that’s why Demos became the place New Labour looked to for new ideas.

Would you rather compare yourself to a campaigning NGO like Amnesty International than to a traditional think tank that produces academic policy papers?

There is no hard dividing line between these sorts of organisations, they all exist on a spectrum. But I would not say that we are like Amnesty because Amnesty is a donation-funded charity which mostly campaigns. Still, it also does research, so it’s not a million miles away. Demos certainly has a normative view of the world. Demos does not do research for its own sake, nor should any think tank do so. You do research to change the world and make it better. And obviously, your vision is contested, it’s political, people agree or disagree with different parts of it. That’s how Demos sees its role. So in some ways, it’s comparable, in some ways it’s different. Obviously, much more of our work is research, much less of it is advocacy.

You’ve been associated with New Labour but you also have a projecte called “Progressive Conservatism”. Did you feel that being associated with a single party is risky for a think tank?

I don’t think Demos has ever had a strategy or an intention of being associated with a particular party. Sometimes think tanks do so, but Demos is different in that sense, it was actually funded by radical Marxists. It’s the ideas that matter and the good ideas have no preordained political home, the don’t belong to the Left or to the Right or to the Centre.

We are interested in progressive ideas that give people more power and improve their relationship with politics. Also, the traditional division of Left an Right is breaking down. Politics is becoming very blurred and confused, but the party structure is clinging to an old model of Left and Right and the tribal divisions. We are not interested in this. We want to be political, but not party political. There is an interesting point there that Demos is always interesting for the party in opposition because parties in opposition want big ideas, big narratives, they want to look ten years ahead, wheras parties in power need practical, technical solutions to immediate problems and that’s less what Demos does.

Demos is well-known for its ability to make headlines with its policy proposals. What is your way of dealing with the media? How do you interact with the media in order to start a public discourse while remaining a reputation as a serious institution?

The point of our work is not to research but to communicate. The research is our ammunition which gives us the bullets to put into the gun. But really the point is to communicate because Demos’ model of change is to get ideas out and to create public discourse. Ideas can really change the world and so we must communicate them as far and wide as possible.

When it comes to our relationships with the media, we need to distinguish between mainstream media and new media. The way that Demos can really realise its vision is through new media, particularly through the internet. That does not mean that the traditional media is not important, but the media environment is changing hugely. Ten, fifteen years ago you just had big boulders on the beach like the BBC and the Times and Newsweek, and now you’ve got lots and lots of smaller stones and pebbles like blogs etc. which are starting to build up around those big boulders. It’s a challenge for us as we need to look for new ways to communicate ideas where we can tell that layered story that we want to tell instead of mangling it for the sake of the nine o’clock news on TV.

Do you think you can reach your audience as well with new media as you could with mainstream media?

If Demos would only reach out to newspapers, we would reach a particular audience, actually a relatively narrow audience. The readership of newspapers is getting smaller and smaller. Think tanks tend to think that their audience is people in government, policy makers, and academics, but I think we have a much more radical idea about audience. Demos’ audience is basically anybody who is interested in ideas. So we need to give just as much importance to the 14-year-old on YouTube as we do to academics.

That’s why everytime we do a piece of work we will package it up in as many different ways as we can  for all the different people out there who might be interested in it. For example, we did a report about online video making and how it can have an impact on politics. We took the central idea, made a three minutes video and put it on YouTube. Suddenly it’s packaged in a way that is attractive and palatable to a totally different audience. That video had 200.000 views.

But for the new media, it’s less about PR work around each report, it’s more about how we talk about what we are doing and provide a constant commentary. You don’t only want to see the finished product, you want to see how it is made, you don’t just want to watch the film, you also want to watch the DVD extras that show the making-of. There is this desire to see how things were done and I think we need to take that on board and show how we do things.

The next step would then be to allow people to make contributions to your research …

Yes, that’s something we tried and it’s harder to make this work than it sounds because it takes a lot of time to incorporate things. We want to make the process as open as possible because we generally believe that the more people are involved in something, the better it is – look at Wikipedia for example. Making our policy and our research a bit more open source – I think there’s real value in that.

But if you do that, you also have to take time to sieve through and get out all the spam and the destructive swear words. A few rules and some restrictions give you a better product. But yes, we really need to look at ways to make research not just transparent, but to allow people to feed into it. It takes time to do that – you need time to build up people‘s trust. When the government in this country does consultations and then in the end everybody realises that they have already made their mind up before they started the consultation it’s actually worse than if you had done no consultation at all. So we have to make sure that if we do this, it has got to be meaningful and rewarding and we don’t waste people‘s time.

So you are still looking for the right model?

Yes, we are still looking for the right model, I am not going to pretend that we are there yet. We have done a lot of work on our website this year to try and improve this, but it’s going to take a lot of time.

What are the skills that a think tanker needs to be a good policy advisor?

Obviously, strong formal academic credentials really help because a lot of think tank work is similar to academic work. Also, an understanding of the way this big abstract academic ideas relate in practice is useful. It takes time to develop that but I think that’s quite important. A think tank needs people that are interested in the world, who arent’s just experts in one particular area. The most powerful thing a think tank can do is to tell a story. You can’t just be sealed of in a room reading from the computer or reading from a book. You’ve got to get out there and get an interest in the world.

As for Demos, I think we are interested in people who are passionate about ideas, it’s less about the experience, it’s more about the indivudal. Are they ambitious, hard working persons, are they social? As a person working for a think tank, you will probably find yourself in situations with very experienced people talking to very senior politicians and you have to be sure about what you say and just go for it.

What do people do when they leave Demos?

Such a variety … I think Demos is a bit unusual in that sense. From the last ten people that have left, one went to become a civil servant in the home office, one went to work in the Royal Society, one went and started a farm, one went and became the tour manager of Snow Patrol, one went to work for a climate campaigning group, another one who went to academia – it’s so unpredictable …

The interview was conducted in April 2009 in London.