Carsten Claus: "Citizens are not marketing material for tourism and investment promotions, but actors with a say"
Summary
In this interview with Government Tomorrow Forum, Carsten Claus, a German business anthropologist working on culture and company building from core to customer, provides insights into the changing landscape of governments, the role of narratives, the distinctions between citizen-government and customer-company relationships, and the primary challenges governments face today. Carsten begins by discussing the evolving nature of governments and their increasing detachment from citizens due to fragmented political landscapes, polarization, and lack of cultural grounding. He highlights the impact of short-term thinking and overreliance on social media for information dissemination, which hinders the establishment of unified and lasting progress.
Moving on to the importance of narratives, Carsten emphasizes that governments, like companies, should construct specific narratives to provide context and direction. Narratives, he believes, help highlight possibilities, aspirations, and strengths, creating a sense of purpose and direction. However, he stresses that narratives must be transparent and aligned with the intent to avoid manipulation or distraction. He acknowledges the challenge of finding common themes that bridge differing perspectives and promote unity.
Carsten draws a distinction between citizen-government and customer-company relationships. He points out that governments are fundamentally accountable to citizens and their long-term welfare, while companies serve customers with the flexibility of ending the relationship. He highlights the complexity of balancing citizen and business interests, particularly for governments, which require efficient services and value orientation. He underscores the role of culture, mindset, and effective action in both domains.
When asked about the three main problems governments face universally, Carsten outlines challenges related to trust, long-term thinking, and balancing stability and progress. Trust is a core element, critical for citizens' confidence in government actions. Long-term thinking is often undermined by the rush for quick results, and the struggle to balance stability with progress can lead to outdated structures and thinking. Carsten underscores the significance of maintaining trust, integrity, and the separation of powers to ensure effective governance.
He also discusses the threat of erosion of democratic fundamentals, emphasizing the importance of vigilant defense against forces that seek to weaken democratic institutions. Carsten identifies the influence of social media, activism, and ideological conflicts as significant challenges to moderation and plurality. He notes the rise of extreme polarities, lack of compromise, and "unskilled rushing" in decision-making as obstacles to effective governance. Carsten concludes by stressing the need for sincerity, competence, and a balanced long-term perspective in addressing the complex challenges governments face today.
— What is your general take on the governments of tomorrow? In what way will they be different from the ones today?
Today, citizens are more dissatisfied than satisfied with their governments. In many democratic countries, we see either moving from one strong party or coalition towards multi-party coalitions or hyper-dichotomic two-party rivalry. What they all share is an erosion of common cultural grounding.
Logically, a large portion of citizens feel detached from government work. It feels alien to them, and the question is whether they want to tolerate political aliens or not. This alienation, fuelled by decontextualized snippets on social media in a more rapid environment, makes it difficult for both to build and recognize something of substance, something unifying.
Those diverging interests seem hard to bridge. We see a starker landscape fragmentation and cultural polarization. When governments have to moderate and maneuver along such a diverse spectrum, they spend much of their energy keeping themselves afloat. It comes at the cost of getting substantial progress that is widely accepted and thus has a chance to last. Short-terminism seems to accelerate; arguments like „no one could see this coming“ or „we have no/too little time“ are more and more common.
Also, everything we do or use daily has become a political subject, and I feel common sense is retreating - there seems to be little „Factfulness“, to quote Hans Rosling´s book title. So whether you have a mere two-party or several-party government, both configurations have to deal with profound polarization, where some actors even question democratic fundamentals. I do not see this going away.
The themes underlying the dissatisfaction with governments are the perceived (or actual) lack of capacities and capabilities to shape the conditions for living well. What this means differs by which lens you look at it. You might also add here the problem of a lack of integrity. The former fuels a sense of purpose and belonging, and the latter generates trust. The immediateness and real-timeness do not go along well with policies where effects manifest themselves over the medium or long term.
At the same time, too many governments seem detached from people’s problems. Connection and confidence in its actions are missing. But we have to see in which dilemma governments are. A recent example from Germany: the government wants to vastly improve the railway system in the face of climate challenges. New routes and tracks are to be built or modified, like between Hamburg and Hannover, which is 160 km distance. Now, a member of the same party who wants to drive this on the macro level in Berlin is blocking this on the micro level in its county - because one possible train line would run through his election district. NIMBY-mode kicks in. Thus, the same citizens now pleased on the regional micro-level may be dissatisfied with the overall lack of progress on the national macro-level. As things like this happen country-wide, all over Europe, and beyond, we do not need to wonder when incoherent action appears driven by a flavor of the moment but does not seem thought through.
So for tomorrow, I see the fragmentation going on, plus I see it as even more ideology-driven as opposed to putting more effort into seeing what the other side means. It is often a matter of language and communication rather than the idea itself. It leads to stigmatizing „the other“ and blocking shared efforts, and is unfortunate.
The TikTokization and similar short-attention-span-formats are also an issue. Overconfident content machines like ChatGPT (or whatever will be there in the future) might lead to even more erosion of the one social glue we need: trust. What and whom we can trust seems increasingly questionable — this can seriously damage social coherence. Governments will be even more in fire-fighter mode if this continues.
— You work with brands and narratives for companies and territories. Should governments and public institutions also construct specific narratives, and why?
Should they? I think so. Narratives can add context and direction and thus add more meaning to what a government or an institution wants to achieve and why it wants to achieve it. This is why they exist. Stories draw us in — for the best and the worst. Stories and narratives behind them are powerful, and we sometimes forget that we can barely live without them. Essentially, they structure our lives and the concepts we live by. For human connection, they are indispensable.
Trust, existing or absent, is vital to governments’ functioning. It determines if a narrative leads us in a good direction or manipulates citizens into a direction against their will and interests. Therefore, we must work to make nation-wide narratives explicit. It makes them easier to handle and to prove correct or false. It is more about the transparency of intent - what the narrative and its storytelling practices are out to produce. They cannot be separated from the intention and political agenda: is it a narrative to capture the essence of something that leads to progress for its society and economy — or is it used to distract from shortcomings? So the answer to your question is "yes," but narratives must be treated with care.
Also, citizens have cultivated quite a mistrust towards gloomy stories and framing aspects. Some people made it a practice to look at what is unsaid and untold and create a counter-narrative to highlight what is „hidden.“ So, every narrative creator needs to be conscious about what to include and not to include in it — and foresee which counter-narratives might fire against it and how. It requires a bit of scenario thinking here. It is imperative to understand how serious an issue for citizens is, what drives and structures their culture, thinking, and behavior, and what world the narrative encounters when it meets its recipient. Understand who, where, what, and why it addresses.
Why? Because a well-crafted narrative helps focus and highlight possibilities, potentials, and aspirations.
Places, and thus their governments, have to cater to their broader economies — which I see is different for a company that has to cater to its business, which is more niche in comparison. Governments are a sort of meta-environment for citizens and companies, encompassing a life space and a life process. For these two elements, citizens and companies need to find the right environment and conditions. For a place, it is more complex, and for a big place, it is more complicated than for a small one. Governments need to balance what citizens want and what businesses want while elaborating on assets and cultivating strengths. What is crucial is to lead by example, which is only done by doing what one preaches.
It is crucial to understand that narratives are not strategy. Strategy is about where to take action and for which purpose. It is a deliberate „yes" and „no“ - why this over that and what action needs to be taken in which setting. And neither narrative nor strategy can replace effective action. Nevertheless, narratives can provide context to the aspiration and manifest a sense of purpose.
While a narrative itself is too unspecific for being a strategy, it is great to bring the story and the why across. A strategy itself, in return, is often pretty uninspiring because it lacks soul. They both need each other, and the primary issue I observe is that almost always, one gets discounted in favor of the other, like putting together a team with only defenders or only attackers. It just doesn’t work.
The capacity to imagine is crucial; a narrative can help to do this job and show how the world is not static. Every government represents its country or region in the world and its markets. Some boundaries are produced, such as policies, and others are given, such as geographical conditions and resources. Those that are not fixed can be re-imagined and developed. Look at where many of today's hi-tech nations stood 50 years ago - and where many industrial countries from 50 years ago stand today.
Often, scarcity is seen as a bad thing. But it often breeds creativity and a more purposeful choice, as well as allocation and combination of means. So, a lot is possible over time. The essential words here are: Over time. It often takes decades, which is at odds with electoral cycles. Narratives can help reinforce a sense of direction, perspective and to remind: we have come quite far. So they can help to facilitate belonging.
— Is there a systemic difference in citizen-government relation compared to customer-company one?
Oh, for sure. One main difference between companies and governments is that companies have customers — or not. Governments have citizens — always.
As a citizen, you are part of a country's tax base, and there is a lifelong contract issued by one side. And depending on the government, it might not even end when you move away. Whereas with a company, you can terminate the relationship and very often nowadays with just a click by the end of a month. You can even tell them to "delete me from the database." I doubt this would be a fruitful request towards governments!
Sure, some companies behave like poorly managed governments, but this is rarely in their long-term favor unless they provide utilities we can hardly bypass. Some governments adopt practices from the private sector e.g., for managing projects or making administration efficient. My driver's license went missing a few years ago, and I had to apply for a new one. I live in Hamburg, Germany, where I looked for a time slot at the traffic authority to request a new one. It was available just two days later, and the process went smoothly. Of course, doing all this online would be even better, but in a country where fax machines do a lot still, I was almost impressed. For fun, I looked up how it would be in Berlin, known for being notoriously inefficient compared to practically any other place. Within the next three months, there was not a single slot in sight. If Berlin were a company, it would have to go out of business. As governments are to service people, they owe efficient means to deal with tax money. Here, government bodies are expected to work more like companies in terms of being service- and value-oriented, simply by removing friction for citizens on interacting with government bodies and being treated at eye-level.
In general, companies have it easier: whom they serve is more specific, and they are closer to market realities. Often, they are more skilled because they invest more in people and their education, as well as the technologies they work with and the structures they operate within. They understand the culture and conventions of their market and then deliver accordingly. Narrative, strategy, and effective action go hand in hand. Not all, but some companies excel at this repeatedly.
Governments have to balance more interests, and so when it comes to narrative, their task if complicated. Commonly, place narratives are dull. I have not counted them, but it seems more places call themselves "Heart of X" than there are actual places in any given X geographical zone. It often results from "death by committee" when "everything" needs to be considered. Whenever a country or a region uses a narrative too detached from reality, it is ignored, cynically laughed at, or it backfires with protests. Therefore, the stakes are even higher when a national government does it.
A topic that companies and governments or their institutions often share is the question, "What are we?" The danger here is to use corporate examples such as Uber, Apple, and the other usual suspects. The reflex will often — and rightly — be, "Yeah, but that is not us." Then the question becomes, "What are we then? and who and what do we exist for?" It is a question that goes to the very core and relates to the sense and culture of belonging. It carries a social and even spiritual dimension.
The spirit of a place, a nation, as well as that of a company, is what people sense and connect to. Even investors do so when deeming a place or company attractive because it seems to show a good perspective. For both companies and places, it takes diligent efforts to identify assets and ways to make them valuable for their stakeholders. I have seen over and over again that companies and regions that succeed over time have developed unique sensemaking skills of the role they can play in the world. They are capable of producing and re-imagining the required capabilities and capacities. It is not rocket science but an honest yet imaginative outlook with an aspiration to shape your future.
Furthermore, companies can (and should) focus on specific segments. Governments have a more complex task as they must consider so many interests simultaneously. However, when it comes to nurturing and playing out strengths to position themselves in markets, government agencies can act more like companies and do so with a long-term horizon.
The other day, I visited a client in the Ruhr area in Germany, which used to be the heavy industry backbone. After dinner, we drove through some areas when he told me that Gelsenkirchen (home of Schalke 04 football club to give a cultural marker) once was the wealthiest city in Germany. Today, it is a social care case, unfortunately. The city's entire economic base vanished and won't return in the same form. The industry is gone. So, their outlook is dire for the near future. But I see little alternative to finding an aspiration, an idea about the future and how to get there, for everyone. And linking it to your culture and the good traits and capacities that help you get there, is what narrative does. The question here might be very much about "What is motivating and realistic at the same time?" And I argue that it is a matter of culture and mindset of how governments and authorities deal with this question.
A huge difference between companies and governments is also that citizens often want to avoid being seen as part of a product or treated as objects — at least not when it is not congruent with their interests. Just look at many local initiatives for or against government plans in certain areas. Very often, it is about infrastructure and its implications. Or spray tags in cities that ask to get Airbnb out of their neighborhoods as it drives up rents. It is all delicate and about balance. And sometimes, the long-term collective interests seem to run against short-term local interests. Citizens are not marketing material for tourism and investment promotions but actors with a say. Places are cultured ecosystems that also evolve and change — the question is over which period they do it and which agency citizens have on which part of that process. But I think such potential for friction is a feature of democracy, not a bug. It is a slow, iterative process with majorities shifting over time.
The concept of belonging reappears here again. For example, think about the question, "Who belongs to the city?" The answers can fill weeks of debate. But as said above, space for debate is crucial, and by debate I mean a process with the goal of getting somewhere, not of preserving something that will remain the same regardless of the intensity of discussion. The question is once more about integrity. It is finding common themes that help build bridges and create a narrative to weave together all the elements.
What both companies and governments share, though, is the sensitivity to activism, be it citizen movements or activist investors — and the impact it can have on decisions, sometimes fundamental ones. In both cases, voting, in various forms, calibrates the structure: elections in one case and sales and stocks in the other, both with consequences on governance practices. Governments and companies generate their internal underlying culture as an operating system that responds to their environment — sometimes in good, sometimes in not-so-good ways. But those that survive and thrive are necessarily essentially feedback-based systems.
Finally, on a human level, when citizens, employees, and customers do not feel heard and seen and can not make sense of decisions and direction, they get irritated. An approach I use for companies especially is what I call "Culture and Company Building." It starts with understanding one's worldview and how it translates into what and why a company or an institution is doing. There is always a way of thinking, a take on a concept of a given phenomenon that gets approached differently by different cultures. It structures the way a company behaves and acts and on which grounds. And it is similar to how institutions or nations do it — simply because it is a very human thing to do so. Culture indeed works like an operating system: iOS, Android, and Linux all follow very different approaches to how an environment is structured and governed, and all have the same goal: to make us better use our devices. Within this life operating system, the culture, grows our experience. Substance and narrative need a match to make sense. And a good first step is to become aware of this.
— What do you think are the main three problems today in the way governments function, independently of geography and culture?
In a nutshell, I see the main issues for governments:
First, gaining and sustaining trust and confidence in government action is low — sometimes for good reasons.
Second, long-term thinking is needed but stays unrewarded and replaced by unskilled rushing.
Third, balancing stability and progress often stabilizes outdated structures and, sometimes, thinking.
A challenge for all governments is to have a way of governing that helps to ensure progress and endurance of the governing system. How exactly this can be done is very context-specific: size, region, history, culture — these vastly differ across nations. Plus, you have the democratic versus non-democratic or secular versus religion-based systems.
Other essential areas such as economy and education, healthcare and social security, safety and overall security, climate... all contribute to critical challenges. And how those are addressed within the governance framework drive confidence and trust in democracies or obedience in non democracies.
So, no government should be analyzed isolated. All countries have relationships with others and a class in certain market arenas. Even non-democratic states need to prove themselves as credible and trustworthy partners.
Another important thing is that any government exists only in relation to the population. Here, trust is a core element that can't be separated from all the challenges a state faces, because trust reduces complexity. It is the society's operating system, so to say.
For governments all over the world, be they democratic or not, it is just two sides of the same coin:
In democratic systems, trust in people elected and institutions representing the system as a whole is essential. The focus is on enabling a framework for merely autonomous decisions.
In non-democratic systems, governments establish a method where no one can trust anyone or anything. Here, the focus is on enabling a framework for maximum control.
In either case, gained trust in the former and the manufactured absence of trust in the latter are mechanisms to maintain the system's stability. In democratic systems, the trust of citizens in the government is the fuel it uses to function. If trust is misused, the government loses credibility and may lose elections. Often we see it happening simply through inconsistent messages and actions, like promoting one thing and then doing the other.
In the last years and just these days, we see populations standing up against their elected leaders and governments when they fear or see misuse of entrusted power. It happens when a government or its leaders aim to establish a law that works against the very principles of a democratic system. So, the utmost challenge I see is someone being in charge for too long, which nurtures the temptation to transform from being a servant to citizens to being a ruler without proper legitimation. What follows is the downfall of the components for effective government action: capabilities, capacities, credibility, trust, and legitimacy, in that order.
The first point of attack always tears down the boundaries between legislative and adjudicative. The goal is to make the former unquestionable and the latter ineffective or even powerless. And, this important, these changes are then aimed to be for good. To be clear, I am not talking about legislation around taxes, retirement ages, or carbon emissions - all those can be revoked after new elections if they find a majority. I am talking about legislation explicitly aimed at the judiciary so it can be overruled. It is not about moves in the game - it is about the rules of the game.
Such protests arise when citizens see it not only as a law but as a weakening of the system structure and a threat to their future and the country's soul. Or as one person in a country where this is happening put it: "It is a betrayal of the contract the government has with its citizens."
Dealing responsively with entrusted power is a key term here - and I observe that it becomes more and more difficult for democracies as forces that want to ax the pillars of democracy to gain unrestricted power become stronger. That's why I stress the combination of losing trust by misusing entrusted power is a core challenge that democracies are facing. It is the base of all other problems.
We often look at countries without democratic structures and wish they switched. But we sometimes forget that existing democracies must always defend themselves against outside — and inside forces. It is hard work, often frustrating. This frustration opens doors for thoughts, discourses, and movements that aim to push plurality away and to establish more fundamentalist views. And then such forces, once in charge, work on dismantling the separation of powers. A pattern I see starts with the judiciary weakening in favor of the legislative. Checks and balances, supreme courts, and all democratic power control bodies are weakened — then muted.
As I said, we can not look at governments in isolation but always need to see them in relation to citizens, the governing systems at work, movements, and their agendas.
Another observation: this demolition happens slice by slice. When a civil society in a democratic state sniffs this, it mobilizes. All protests we see have one thing in common: the fear that those entrusted with power will misuse it to undermine the very conditions that got them elected in the first place.
We can see if the system has a stable fundament: The Democracy Index. It shows if the idea of entrusted power as a legitimation for the government is healthy. To check if the house that is built on the fundament is in order, we can look at the Corruption Index. The two are highly correlated. Simply put, every rank up is progress, and every rank down is regress.
And these days, we see powerful, well-organized, and orchestrated groups steering anti-democratic interests and agendas at work. Social media that favors decontextualized information is then used as a weapon.
Another observation is that the media's discussion is often about left vs. right - but we can often see a secular progressive versus religious regressive movement underneath. And the latter is often described as right-wing, which I see as misleading. Essentially, it is either secularism against religion-driven ideas of what the country, and its government, shall be.
All governments are confronted with gaining or decreasing freedom for all or most citizen groups in favor of or against an ideology. Whether the argument for it is secularism versus religion or socialism versus capitalism — each system is made up of a set of shared beliefs about the world.
In democracies, the challenge is about the peaceful coexistence of ideas and freedoms — above, I referred to it as moderation.
To focus on building bridges instead of ideological islands and burning bridges and to work for plurality versus radicalization of discourses. It is about the idea to hold up different and even conflicting truths at the same time - and to stand the temptation that one group's truth is to rule all others.
What I see emerging across the board is a lack of such moderation: We can see a swing between the ends of extreme polarities with common grounds eroding. The narratives fight against each other - often neither side really has a strategy or things about feasibility. It is all about addressing emotions and then pressure against the other side. I am not suggesting to always embrace the other side's wish but to understand what drives it and to create a better alternative. Maybe this is what companies and governments also share here, something that can be taken from the job-to-be-done concept: To really understand an issue, to really understand the struggle with existing conditions and solutions and then try to get to the best possible alternative. But easy to say when standing on the sidelines of culture fights these days.
In line with the lack of moderation is insularisation. By shunning the other and reinforcing one's own bubble we enter a collective prisoners dilemma. Being completely closed without room for compromise, like owning the absolute truth is neither helpful.
What follows then is what I call "unskilled rushing": decisions and actions based on narratives alone and without sound understanding of the terrain and its evolution. Governments need to take the role of taking the long view and do it with moderation. Otherwise, it nurtures all sorts of myopia. Often, important decisions have been laid off when there was ample time. But it seems only decisions relevant to the next big headline are considered important. And then little gets executed well or at all. This works against the perceived legitimation and subsequent acceptance. No one enjoys this at the end. And many lose energy and hope - which turns into either depression or aggression. I can't see that being helpful.
The primary task for governments is to be sincere and to skill themselves up for what they must do — this differs from area to area, depending on location, resources, capabilities, and culture. And then to build the framework for citizens and businesses to strive as much as possible. This often takes time to construct, and sometimes, the cost is what runs well today. So, I understand the dilemma when it comes to forthcoming elections.