Questions for you:
- Are there decisions in your organisation that have become gridlocked because the people empowered to make them have too much invested in particular outcomes?
- How much of the difficulty in resolving contentious issues is attributable to the positions people hold publicly, rather than genuine underlying disagreement?
- Where do you assume that expertise or seniority is required for a decision that could in fact be made well by any reasonably informed person?
Organisational applications:
Sortition as a remedy for positional entrenchment: The Irish politicians could not recommend legalising abortion because they had publicly opposed it; the randomly selected citizens could consider the evidence without that history.
Many organisational deadlocks have the same structure: the people empowered to resolve them are the same people whose prior positions make resolution politically costly. Bringing in a disinterested group, whether randomly selected or simply drawn from people with no stake in the outcome, changes the dynamic. The jury principle transfers readily to corporate governance, dispute resolution, and strategic review.
Random selection as a structural defence against groupthink: Committees assembled through conventional means reflect the preferences and networks of whoever convenes them. Randomly selected groups from a defined population are more likely to surface perspectives that a self-selected group would filter out.
Organisations that use random selection for internal review panels, customer advisory groups, or strategic challenge sessions tend to produce more robust deliberation than those assembled through voluntary or nominated processes.
The conditions that make sortition work: Random selection is not a shortcut to good decisions. The Citizens’ Assembly succeeded because the deliberative design was as careful as the selection mechanism: structured process, evidence from multiple perspectives, and sufficient time.
A randomly selected group given poor information or a badly framed question will produce poor decisions just as reliably as any other poorly designed process.
Further reading
On sortition, citizens’ assemblies, and deliberative democracy:
Against Elections: The Case for Democracy by David Van Reybrouck. The most accessible argument for replacing or supplementing electoral democracy with sortition-based assemblies, drawing on historical precedents and contemporary evidence from Ireland, France, and elsewhere.
The Luck of the Draw: The Role of Lotteries in Decision Making by Peter Stone. A more academic treatment of when and why random selection is the appropriate decision mechanism, covering jury selection, political appointments, and resource allocation.
On deliberative democracy and group decision-making:
The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. Surowiecki’s argument for the conditions under which diverse, independent groups outperform experts is the theoretical foundation for why randomly selected assemblies can work — with the caveat that independence and diversity are necessary conditions rather than automatic consequences of random selection.
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein. Documents how conventional group processes amplify individual biases, and what structural interventions reduce that effect.
On meritocracy and the limits of expert selection:
The Tyranny of Merit by Michael J. Sandel. Explains why random selection feels so counter-intuitive, and why that resistance may reflect assumptions about expertise that do not always hold up.
The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits. Covers how meritocratic selection processes systematically produce less diverse and less representative decision-making bodies than their proponents claim.
About the image
An Irish flag that, in a wonderful piece of serendipity, got a recolouring palette of the colours of the Irish flag.
Photo montage and photo by Matt Ballantine, 2026
Random the Book 