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

**Modupe Akinola** (0:00)
Back in 2016, I had the privilege of serving on the Cleveland Police Monitoring Team. The task force consisted of people from the local community and national experts from all over. Law enforcement professionals, social scientists, lawyers and professors, all working to tackle specific challenges the Cleveland Police Department was facing. The 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. One 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 Modupe Akinola. This is TED Business, a podcast from TED.
Our speaker today, international collaboration expert, Qahir Dhanani, 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, Qahir 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.
And now, Qahir Dhanani takes the TED stage.

**Qahir Dhanani** (2:32)
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. Now, 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. Even 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. Trust 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?
Well, 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 re-evaluate, to re-calibrate 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. Sounds 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.