An open invitation to the Toha system

‘To be a leader, a rangatira, then, is to excel at weaving people together, to encourage or inspire others to go on a journey together, to exercise agency, and to light the way toward a world in which all flourish.’ 

– Chellie Spiller, Rachel Maunganui Wolfgramm, Ella Henry, and Robert Pouwhare (2019).

This is an invitation. An invitation to be a leader, to create something valuable, and to share in that value. 

After more than five years in R&D, the Toha Network is initiating an open consultation. This is to support the co-development of public digital infrastructure that better enables Aotearoa New Zealand to address grand challenges like climate change and biodiversity loss.  

Our starting point for this consultation is that the Toha system can meet those infrastructure needs and thereby create significant public impact. However, with public impact comes public responsibility. Therefore, the Toha system must itself go public. 

We need to hand over the Toha system to everyone whose interests are, or could be, affected. We need to open up the decisions on system design and strategy, as well as the responsibilities that come with them. We need to walk the talk on public value.

So we are initiating an open consultation to transition the system out of R&D and into the public domain. 

Why everyone is invited

There are three reasons for an open consultation.

Firstly, we need to harness the wisdom of the crowd. 

We need everyone’s input because – from the paddock to the boardroom, from the marae to the ministry – there are unique insights and experiences that cannot be anticipated by others. This is especially relevant to the local expertise that underpins regenerative action. Although the ecological crisis has global drivers, the risks and opportunities are inescapably local. They are specific to a particular gully, stream, forest, wetland, duneland, reef or seabed. Top-down decision-making cannot duplicate local nuance and detail. Effective action also involves real people with unique sets of skills, experiences and values, which again aren’t easy to anticipate from the outside. To implement durable transitions to more resilient landscapes, we need to unleash the know-how of frontline communities.

Second, we need to unleash radical collaboration in the face of complexity. 

The Toha system has many moving parts. Too many for a handful of Tohaitians to engineer and build. The only feasible way for the system to achieve its greatest potential – especially at the pace required – is to act in coordination with others. We need others to take responsibility for the parts of the system that they have the skills and capacity for. Further, for collaboration to be self-sustaining, these contributions should be recognised and rewarded. Realising the value of action, especially for frontline communities, is at the heart of the Toha system.

Third, we need to redistribute decision power. 

We live in a world of increasing interconnection and wickedly complex challenges. Yet our institutions are typically hierarchical, which can result in siloed, disconnected and maladaptive decision-making. It also cultivates an ideal of heroic leadership where a single individual – a CEO, a political leader – is expected to fully carry the burdens of judgment. But this leadership model results in unrealistic expectations and burnout, as well as the exclusion of diverse perspectives and the erosion of trust. To face today’s challenges, we need distributed and decentralised models of leadership and sovereignty, which enable and empower others to apply their talents.

In many ways, this chimes with te ao Māori and other Indigenous perspectives, which treat leadership as a collective enterprise. As Māori scholars have observed, leadership is ‘the role of actively being stewards and caretakers of communities and ecologies in service of the wellbeing of others, including the environment…. Each person has rangatira qualities, and in a weaving process people come forward as needed to provide expertise and move back at other times. In many ways it is the process of weaving that forges and forms leadership qualities in the individual and in the collective... Strength lies in weaving people together into a state of belonging.’

In this spirit, sustainability leadership has been defined as mobilising others to make progress on sustainability challenges and thrive. The Toha system is designed to facilitate such leadership, but this collective approach needs to be embedded all the way down, even to the development of the system’s foundations.

Towards open consultation

So Toha is initiating an open consultation to weave together the wisdom of the collective. To that end, we want open consultation to mean something more than ‘open to everyone’. This doesn’t count for much in a digital era where information is cheap and online surveys are plentiful.

We want open consultation to be ongoing and iterative, to allow people to jump in and out (and in again!) at different stages of the journey. It isn’t enough for consultation to be a single window in time, especially if critical decisions are made – before and after – without public input. We want our consultation to be an open door that people use when it suits them. 

We also want open consultation to be intelligible to a wide range of people, with multiple entry points into the conversation. The Toha system is complex and novel, so communicating its structure and functions is inherently challenging – we are under no illusions about that. But we can use different voices and modes of communication to speak to different audiences – from bite-sized social media posts, to highly detailed technical documents, to more readable explainers like this one. This way, people can see the Toha system from multiple vantage points, building up a picture that’s as detailed as they need it to be.

Finally, we want open consultation to be reciprocal, insofar as people’s contributions are recognised and rewarded. One of the core functions of the Toha system is to support work in service to nature, specifically by the issuance of MAHI tokens which each represent a unit of action at the frontline. But it is critical to recognise the surrounding work too – from data collection, to network maintenance, to system design. These activities should, and will, earn MAHI units too. Regenerative action will not be scalable and durable if it is not self-sustaining. 

Unleashing people power

In sum, we believe in the power of the people – in the wisdom of the many and the strength of shared commitment. To be authentic, we need to practice what we preach by opening up the Toha system to co-design and co-development. Because the system needs your input to be successful: your local insights, your institutional knowledge, your experience of what works and what doesn’t. Through collaboration and cooperation, we need to unleash the people-power which is vital to meeting the scale and urgency of the complex challenges we face today. 

If you want to be part of our open consultation, then sign up to our Substack here, follow us on LinkedIn here, or learn more about the Toha Network here. We’ll be keeping track of the engagement with the content here in Substack 

Further reading

vTaiwan: A decentralized open consultation process that combines online and offline interactions, bringing together Taiwan's citizens and government to deliberate on national issues.

Report of Matike Mai Aotearoa: A report by the Independent Working Group on Constitutional Transformation which emerged from 252 hui between 2012 and 2015, complemented by 70 wānanga by rōpū rangatahi, as well as targeted interviews and focus groups. Hui were held at marae, kura, hauora and social service clinics, wānanga and universities, disability centres, law offices, Trust Board offices, gang pads, and private homes.