Architectural Democracy podcast #18: Win-Win Democracy: Perry Walker’s Participatory Playbook

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By the time most people have settled into retirement, Perry Walker is still plotting how to get strangers talking.

“I sometimes describe myself as a recovering economist” he told the Architectural Democracy Podcast in May 2025.

But it’s not finance that defines his second ac, it’s the art of conversation. Not the scripted kind, but the messy, improvisational, empathy-fueled process of collective deliberation. “I look for approaches that could reach widely into society. I’ve never been that interested in citizens’ assemblies,” he said, “because they often feel like democracy done by experts, not with people.”

Walker’s career is a study in evolving engagement. After stints in Malawi, the UK Treasury, and at the John Lewis Partnership, he discovered facilitation, a term he hadn’t even known existed, and never looked back. Since then, he’s helped design and test dozens of democratic formats that blend theatre, role-play, storytelling, and debate. “Large-scale processes always start small” he said. “That’s the part I’m best at. And then the challenge is: how do we scale it without losing the soul?”

His latest contribution? A proposal for a pan-European Festival of Democracy, a people-powered initiative where citizens don’t just consume political content, they co-create it. “People could organise their own events, from kitchen-table conversations to large public debates,” he wrote in a letter to Opus Independents.

The idea is as open-ended as it is scalable: upload your discussion topic, borrow role cards, host your event, and share your group’s common ground. Then? Others across the continent vote on which statements resonate most. It’s participatory democracy meets Eurovision.

This spirit echoes Walker’s long-held belief that democracy is a three-legged stool: voting, representation, and conversation. “Talk is the shortest leg of the stool,” he wrote in his book Democracy Begins in Conversation. “We’ve over-invested in representation at the expense of dialogue.” His experiments, from the gamified Win-Win Workout to the Democs conversation kits now translated across 20 languages, are attempts to rebalance that stool.

It’s easy to romanticize conversation, but Walker doesn’t. He’s seen its failures up close. In Richmond Park, a proposal to ban cars devolved into ideological trench warfare because “there was no space for civilized discussion.” But he’s also seen breakthroughs. “In a good conversation,” he writes, “people don’t just express preferences, they explore shared values. And that’s where ‘win-win’ decisions come from.”

The key, as always, is design. In a recent school exercise using three simple character sheets, Rory Stewart, Priti Patel, and Angela Davis, students explored radically different visions for prison reform. The debate didn’t end in agreement. But it did end in understanding.

Walker’s work offers a subtle rebuke to the way much political discourse is structured. “Polarisation happens when conversation becomes a ping-pong match,” he says. But his processes are built on what planners Kate Blystone and Jennifer Maydan, leaders of Lahaina’s post-wildfire recovery, call “deep listening.” As they put it: “Very rarely in a career are you dealing with people who are traumatized collectively. You need a completely different energy.”

Walker agrees. His work is less about being right than about being open. “We’re not looking for perfect consensus,” he says. “We’re looking for statements that feel just true enough that a diverse group of people can say, ‘Yeah. I can live with that.’”

That’s not consensus by compromise. It’s consensus by exploration. And for Perry Walker, that might just be the most democratic thing of all.

Pedro Aibeo & Mark Linder, Helsinki, 2025