Collaborative Political Intelligence (CPI)
How do we become better at influencing lasting systemic change?
Political systems communicate through behaviour. Every response reveals how power, incentives and relationships are adapting.
The challenge is turning those responses into shared political judgement.
THE REALITY
Political systems don’t stand still.
Power, incentives and relationships continually adapt, revealing themselves through behaviour.
THE CHALLENGE
Behaviour creates new information.
The difficulty is collectively interpreting what those responses mean before deciding how to move forward.
THE CAPABILITY
Collaborative Political Intelligence helps groups transform political behaviour into shared political judgement and adaptive action.
From Political Analysis to Political Navigation
Political analysis has transformed how we understand power, incentives and institutions.
But political systems continue to adapt through behaviour.
The challenge is continually interpreting those responses while deciding how to move forward together.
Political systems continue to adapt after the analysis is complete. Behaviour provides the earliest evidence of how power, incentives and relationships are changing.
Political behaviour generates a continuous stream of new information. The challenge is not collecting more evidence, but collectively interpreting what those responses reveal.
As political systems adapt, strategy must adapt with them. This requires a shared capability to learn from political responses and continually navigate uncertainty together.
What is Collaborative Political Intelligence?
Collaborative Political Intelligence is the capability that helps groups navigate political uncertainty by collectively observing, interpreting and learning from political behaviour.
It treats action not only as a way of influencing political systems, but also as a way of learning how they are responding.
By collectively interpreting political responses, groups develop the political judgement needed to continually adapt strategy and navigate towards lasting systemic change.
Building Collaborative Political Intelligence
Collaborative Political Intelligence is not a methodology to follow. It is a capability developed through three interconnected practices that help groups continually learn from political behaviour and adapt together.
OBSERVE
What behaviours are emerging?
Groups begin by collectively observing the behaviours emerging across the system.
Resistance, selective compliance, unexpected alliances and new patterns of interaction all provide early evidence of how the political environment is adapting.
INTERPRET
What do these behaviours reveal?
Groups compare interpretations, challenge assumptions and explore what these behaviours reveal about changing power, incentives, relationships and opportunities for action.
ADAPT
How should we adapt?
Collective interpretation only becomes valuable when it informs adaptive action.
Groups refine their strategy, observe how the system responds and continue learning as political dynamics evolve.
Developing Collaborative Political Intelligence
Collaborative Political Intelligence is being developed through research, practice, visual thinking and shared learning. Explore the ideas, experiments and resources shaping its evolution.
How do groups make better political judgements together?
From Collective Intelligence to Collaborative Political Intelligence- CPI is a capability for navigating political uncertainty, extending existing thinking on collective intelligence and political economy.
How do we know when systems are really changing?
What matters when systems start to shift? Explore how practitioners distinguish meaningful political adaptation from activity that merely appears to signal change.
Why do understanding and sensing need to work together?
Understanding the landscape and sensing how it moves shows how structural political analysis and continuous sensing compliment one another to support adaptive decision-making.
Democratic Republic of Congo- seeing the system together
Shows how Political Economy Analysis can become a continuous capability for collective interpretation and adaptation, rather than a one-off analytical product.
Why Collective Intelligence Isn't Enough
Better information does not automatically produce better decisions. Lasting systemic change depends on the collective capability to interpret political behaviour and adapt strategy together.
Collaborative sensemaking- deeper conversations in complex systems
Explore how systems thinking and structured dialogue helps groups move beyond competing perspectives to develop shared understanding in complex environments.
This early work foreshadows many of the ideas that later evolved into Collaborative Political Intelligence.
Complex political systems are difficult to understand because different people see different parts of them.
These visual models help groups connect observations, reveal underlying patterns and build the shared understanding needed for collective sensemaking.
Connecting Political Perspectives
Introducing the Estuarine Framework: No one experiences a political system in the same way. The Estuarine Framework helps groups connect fragmented perspectives into a shared understanding of the patterns shaping change.
Seeing System Patterns
Why do reforms still produce familiar outcomes? By visualising recurring behaviours and their relationships, groups can recognise the underlying patterns that political systems continually reproduce and identify what those patterns reveal about how the system is adapting.
Finding strategic leverage
Not every behaviour has the same influence on how a political system functions.
These visual models help groups identify the relationships and behaviours that sustain wider system dynamics, revealing where strategic engagement is most likely to create meaningful change.
Adapting Strategy
Political systems continually respond to intervention. These visual frameworks help groups interpret resistance, compliance and adaptation as political intelligence, enabling them to adjust strategy as uncertainty unfolds continually.
Reading List:
Ideas, articles and resources
Collaborative Political Intelligence has developed through conversations across political economy, systems thinking, governance and complexity science. These articles and resources have influenced my thinking, challenged my assumptions and continue to shape the development of this work.
extending the Conversation
In dialogue
Recorded conversations, interviews, and sessions with practitioners and researchers working at the edge of political economy and systems change.
Collective Inquiry
Collaborative sensemaking in fragile political economies
A conversation about what collaborative PEA actually looks like on the ground – the DRC experience, what worked, and what didn’t.
Governance Transition Inquiry
How do governance systems become structurally different, and what makes those changes durable?
The Governance Transition Inquiry, in collaboration with the Si Network, brings together practitioners, researchers, and innovators to study real governance transitions, compare experiences, and identify patterns across different contexts.
Recorded session
Three capacities for systemic change: a sensemaking conversation
A recorded session with practitioners working across governance architecture, systems-led collaboration, and political economy analysis.
Guest Piece
Contributions from the field
Practitioners and researchers working on adjacent questions are invited to contribute reflections, challenge propositions, and extend the conversation.
ABOUT
Dialectiq explores how we become better at creating lasting systemic change in politically complex environments.
Over the past two decades, political economy, systems thinking and complexity science have transformed how we understand change. The next step is developing the collective capabilities needed to navigate political complexity in real time.
Dialectiq exists to contribute to that next step – bringing together ideas, visual models and practical capabilities to help build a new generation of politically intelligent systems.
Zahed Yousuf
Founder
Zahed has spent more than fifteen years working at the intersection of political economy, systems change and governance across Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
My work is driven by a simple question: how can we become better at creating lasting systemic change in politically complex environments?
Miguel Pantaleon
Director
Miguel has over 10 years of experience structuring complex problems to enable strategy and policy design in the public, private and third sectors.
He has worked on a variety of issues such as regional strategy and governance on depopulation and training strategy for volunteers of an international charity.
Sufia Bonass
associate
Sufia has worked within areas of journalism, policing, politics and jurisprudence.
Our Partners:
Dialectiq
Developing the collective capability to navigate political complexity.
Political systems will continue to adapt. Our challenge is learning how to adapt with them.
Join the Inquiry