Is inviting everyone to the meeting holding back global cooperation? | Qahir Dhanani

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2:45The idea was that we would pool our expertise to assist in the implementation of federally mandated reforms to the police department. Together, we asked questions like, how can there be more trust between police and local community members? How can we ensure that law enforcement doesn't violate people's constitutional rights? Obviously, these were complicated, difficult questions. But it was pretty transformational for me to see what happens when you bring a dynamic group of people together to address a major challenge like this. Our distinct points of view and past experiences made it a nuanced, thoughtful collaboration.

3:24One of the key things we implemented was regularly scheduled meetings between the police, community leaders, and community members. We held focus groups in different neighborhoods to understand their varied perceptions of the police, where changes were needed, where the police department was getting it right, and where it was getting it wrong. These small forums created an opportunity for people to feel like their voice mattered and that they were being heard in a way that wouldn't have happened in larger group settings. And some really good ideas came out of it. I'm Madhupa Akinola. This is TED Business, a podcast from TED.

4:03Our speaker today, international collaboration expert, Kahir Danani, knows we're living in a time where people across the globe are having a hard time trusting public institutions. So to meet this moment, he's saying, it's time we rethink what global collaboration looks like. And instead of massive groups that mean well, but move slowly, Kahir makes the case for smaller, focused coalitions that can bring about big change and build the trust needed to tackle the world's toughest challenges. Then after the talk, how can you apply his message to your own workplace? But first, a quick break.

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7:11and now kahir danani takes the ted stage the next time you take an international trip do me a favor take a look at your passport on the cover there's your country's coat of arms and then you open it and there's your photograph the best one you've ever taken right on that page there's two lines at the bottom letters and numbers. That's called the machine-readable zone. Those two lines are magic, the product of international cooperation. Because without them, you wouldn't be able to get on that plane. You wouldn't be able to cross immigration. You wouldn't be able to travel the world, see your family.

7:59Now, what I find fascinating is that those two lines came about in 1980 when the International Civil Aviation Organization set about standardizing passports. At the beginning, only three countries adopted the standard. Today, just about every single country has that standard. This is international cooperation at its best. And it doesn't stop there. Did you know that 160 years ago, 20 countries came together to lay the foundations of our global telecommunications networks. They founded something called the International Telegraph Union, or the ITU. It's still active today, although it's moved on from the telegraph.

8:44Even in times of conflict, global cooperation continues. In the midst of the war in the Ukraine, representatives from the United States, China, Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Russia were sitting in the same room at the ITU, continuing to negotiate things like internet protocols or global digital governance. Did you know that time zones exist because of a multilateral agreement? Or that green means go because of a multilateral agreement? Our lives are made better when countries collaborate. It is the infrastructure of the modern world, and we can't live without it. But today, we're facing a crisis of trust.

9:34Trust in the international system. I see this every day because I work with international organizations and their leaders, trying to make them more effective. And I'll be the first to admit that talking about multilateralism and effectiveness in the same sentence sounds a bit complicated. Many think about these organizations and they see a mesh of red tape, or they see endless bureaucracy or political posturing. They wonder, is there any tangible impact? It's making people lose faith in international organizations. I get it. In our constantly changing world, is it any surprise that the institutions crafted around the geopolitical realities of the end of the Second World War 80 years ago, that those organizations are struggling to keep up, it's making us ask, is international cooperation even worth it?

10:30Well, I'm here to persuade you that it absolutely is. I implore you, take another look. And I give you a fair warning that staying in the arena and giving multilateralism another go means one thing for sure. We cannot continue with business as usual. It is time to rethink, to reevaluate, to recalibrate how we collaborate on a global scale. And in my humble opinion, this starts with rebuilding trust. How? Allow me to offer something rather provocative. We must stop insisting on inviting everybody to the meeting. Sounds a bit hard, I know. But hear me out. Imagine trying to get your slide deck together, or your project budget or your memo written with 200 of your most well-meaning colleagues working with you on it.

11:25Sounds pretty difficult, right? Which is why trying to negotiate anything with 193 countries at the outset and trying to achieve global consensus on that issue will deliver one thing for certain, if anything at all. And that is the least objectionable outcome. but to rebuild trust and take on the most difficult challenges of our time, we cannot settle for the least objectionable outcome. We need the most ambitious, the bold, the transformative outcomes. So let's take an alternative, an augmented path forward, one that is rooted in the art of diplomacy, one that has served us for over a century, but one which we seem to have lost.

12:16Let's unleash coalitions of the willing to show what 21st century multilateralism and cooperation can and should look like. I define coalitions of the willing as small, dynamic groups of like-minded and sometimes not so like-minded actors coming together. They can be some combination of countries from the South and the North, the East and the West, civil society organizations, academic institutions, religious organizations, and, and this is important, businesses. They come together with shared purpose to solve a problem larger than themselves, a problem that requires genuine collaboration and co-creation to solve.

13:03Problems that require a committed group to act first and to act boldly. The coalition takes on the risk. It serves itself up as the guinea pig. It proves the model. It makes it easy for others to join in. And it pushes the snowball down the mountain. This is how we've done diplomacy for decades. We've just forgotten. I love this example from the 1950s when banks started issuing credit cards. There was one problem. Some cards were small, some cards were large, some were made of paper, some of plastic. There was no interoperability. So a few of them came together, American Express, Diners Club, and a few others.

13:47They came together and they adopted a uniform standard for a credit card. So what you have in your wallet today is standard. It has your name and a number on the front and a metallic strip on the back. and then they worked with countries to enshrine this in the international standards organization so today when you go to a restaurant and you tap your card or you go to a an ATM machine and you take out some cash if people still do that you trust that it's going to work but you don't attribute that to multilateralism or to the ISO or to a coalition of the willing But that's how it started. Imagine we had to renegotiate or start afresh negotiating what a standard credit card looks like today.

14:37What would that look like? Insisting on inviting everybody to the meeting. Well, the idea would be put to a committee. The committee would run consultations, endless consultations with hundreds of actors, those that are super relevant and those that are less relevant. Then it would craft a convention or a resolution or a compact and put that forward for 193 countries to negotiate. There would be co-facilitators appointed to run this process. Their objective would be to reach global consensus among 193 countries. And the result? The least objectionable outcome. Which is why today we need to start with coalitions of the willing to make things work ambitiously for the future.

15:30I would be so energized to see the United Nations or other multilateral organizations invite coalitions of the willing to take on some of our most difficult challenges. AI governance, migration, food security. It's not happening at the rate we want it to happen, but it is actually happening, and I have a lot of hope. One example that gives me a lot of hope is the LEAF Coalition, the Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest Finance Coalition. It started with a handful of countries that were donors, a handful of countries that had forests, a handful of corporations, and a handful of civil society organizations.

16:13organizations they all came together and they sat at a table a small table and they tried to figure out what do we do about deforestation how do we protect biodiversity and so they didn't wait for 200 countries to negotiate the last clause of a treaty they acted they put billions of dollars on the line and they created a new market for protecting nature and now everyone is rushing in to join that coalition. This is what 21st century multilateralism and international cooperation can and should be. And so we have a choice. Should we stay together and take this new path forward? Or should we walk away?

17:01I hope we stay together. Thank you.

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19:08That was Kahir Danani at TED at BCG. Even if you're not a global leader or a leading global expert, I think there's a lot of useful information in this talk that we can all learn from. Namely, that it might be useful to identify coalitions of the willing in your own workplace and that smaller, more dynamic groups could solve big, unwieldy problems. So I want you to identify a problem in your organization that has long needed to be addressed. Is there a way you could devise a small coalition of the willing to address it directly? What would that look like? Who would you assemble? What kind of expertise would you pull from?

19:50And what would be the outcome you'd hope for? Sometimes this kind of advice can feel intuitive, but implementing it is a whole different matter. Hopefully this talk feels like the first step towards making change feel possible. That's it for today. TED Business is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced by Hannah Kingsley Ma, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact-checked by Julia Dickerson. Special thanks to Maria Ladias, Farah DeGrange, Daniela Ballarezzo, Tansika Sangmanivang, and Roxanne Heilash. Nola, thanks for listening.

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