In November 2000, as the new millennium dawned with unprecedented technological promise, Nico Heller registered CourseWriter.com Limited – a venture born of the era's defining belief that the internet could democratize everything it touched. His mission was ambitious yet typical of its time: to create learning software that would "democratize education" by making knowledge universally accessible via the internet – an early expression of the democratic impulse that would later define his work.
The optimism proved short-lived. Within months, the dot-com crash swept away entire industries built on digital hype, while Nico's German partners at GMD-Forschungszentrum (the German National Research Centre for Information Technology) merged with Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, halting all development. Yet the setback became a crucible. Rather than abandon the vision of democratization, he reframed the proposition: if the internet wasn't enough, what else might meaningfully democratize? This question reflected Nico's artistic sensibility – an instinct for reconfiguring relationships rather than merely creating new tools.
By 2002, the company had evolved into MutualGround Experts Limited. Its focus shifted from developing educational software to democratizing social research. Since the latter was harder to communicate, software development remained a useful vehicle – but no longer defined the company.
At the time, much of Britain's social research was commissioned by local authorities, typically in response to perceived risks or planned changes. Here, MutualGround saw an opportunity: instead of treating research subjects as passive sources of data, they would be engaged as active participants with joint ownership of both process and outcome. The researcher-subject relationship would be reconfigured, turning research itself into a prefigurative act of democratization – embodying in practice the very relations it sought to create, revealing possibilities already present within existing arrangements.
His first major breakthrough came in 2003, when Tower Hamlets commissioned CivicAction.info (since decommissioned), one of the UK's earliest interactive consultation platforms. Local politicians, inspired by its potential, began seeking closer relationships with their communities. Senior figures in local government started to recognise something distinctive in Nico's approach.
Soon after, he began designing and delivering bipartisan programmes for local politicians. What had started as a technical venture became a relational and political practice, and in 2005, MutualGround Experts Ltd became Democracy School Ltd.
This foundational period marked more than organisational growth – it marked a crossing of thresholds. Nico's artistic sensibility toward relational reconfiguration found political expression. An approach initially rooted in rebalancing dynamics between artist and audience now re-emerged in the researcher-subject, and soon also in the politician-citizen relationships. These early experiments prefigured a theoretical framework that would take decades to fully articulate, but was already present in practice: narrative prefiguration as the underlying lens through which both Nico and the Democracy School would come to engage with the world.
Part II: 2005–2010 Testing Boundaries
Between 2005 and 2010, the Democracy School developed rapidly, refining its methodology in continued partnership with Tower Hamlets Council. Early success led to national recognition, and within three years the School was working with local authorities, the Local Government Association, and the Home Office on democracy-promoting initiatives across England.
Building on the success of CivicAction.info, which had demonstrated how digital platforms could reconfigure civic relationships, Tower Hamlets sought a more ambitious application of this approach. They commissioned an intensive 18-month leadership development programme for local, primarily Muslim councillors. Funded by the Home Office under its Prevent Violent Extremism strategy, the initiative unfolded within a climate marked by post-9/11 Islamophobia, heightened surveillance, and political mistrust.
Local Muslim politicians were caught in a double bind: speaking out against the perceived criminalisation of their communities risked being labelled extremists by the media and central government, while aligning too closely with official narratives risked alienation from their own constituencies. The programme sought to help participants navigate this tension, articulate their positions, and develop a grounded political voice under increasing scrutiny.
Working within the still-developing framework of narrative-based action learning, the initiative was structured in three phases. The first focused on mapping the narrative ecology – the interconnected stories shaping perceptions – surrounding violent extremism, as expressed by community members themselves. These insights informed a series of scenario-based learning sessions co-developed with stakeholders from refugee organisations, youth clubs, mosques, and informal networks, and co-chaired by local councillors. Each session centred on a specific issue, with a dual aim: to deepen understanding and find a councillor to act as political liaison and community voice.
During this phase, it became clear – strikingly and repeatedly – that many young Muslim activists expressed a desire to "wage jihad." At the time, the term carried two dominant meanings: one, state-sanctioned, framed jihad as personal spiritual struggle; the other, as shorthand for violent extremism. Neither matched what the activists themselves intended. They sought to reclaim the term, advancing feminist jihads, environmental jihads, equal opportunity jihads – Islamic forms of civic engagement that were neither violent nor ideologically extreme.
After careful consideration, the School took the risk of affirming this reinterpretation. It publicly announced that the programme would be built around the concept of jihad – as articulated by the participants themselves. The result was immediate and far-reaching. Engagement levels surged, especially among those previously deemed "hard to reach." Most significantly, the initiative culminated in a landmark community conference, bringing together imams, youth workers, councillors, Council officers, Home Office officials, police, and intelligence representatives to openly debate issues that had long remained off-limits.
This moment proved pivotal. Narrative-based action learning, once experimental, gained institutional legitimacy. The Democracy School became a recognised actor in participatory leadership development and democratic/political education. Over the following years, it continued to collaborate with local authorities across England, deepening a practice that would ultimately form the basis of Nico's later theoretical work – developing the capacity to recognize latent possibilities within existing narratives and reconfigure them into new relations, though this framework remained implicit rather than explicitly articulated.
Part III: 2010–2020 Reconfigurations in Adversity
By 2010, the Democracy School was firmly established as an innovative force in political leadership development. Its methodology had not only achieved legitimacy but demonstrated a unique capacity to engage meaningfully with some of the UK's most contested political terrains. Yet just as the School's approach reached maturity, the political and economic environment around it changed dramatically.
The election of David Cameron's Conservative government marked the beginning of a new era, one defined by austerity, and the effects were swift and systemic. Within two years, local government budgets had been slashed by 9.4% in real terms, representing a cumulative reduction of £3.7 billion, with further reductions to follow. The infrastructure on which the Democracy School relied – namely, the discretionary capacity of local authorities to invest in community leadership and civic participation – was rapidly dismantled.
Austerity presented a double bind not unlike that faced by the School's earlier participants. Councils were now required to publicly report any expenditure over £500. While framed as transparency, this became a political liability. With essential services under threat, public opposition to "non-essential" spending intensified – even where the purpose was democratic renewal. Meanwhile, the very conditions that curtailed such programmes – rising inequality, political polarization, institutional drift – only underscored their necessity. This austerity regime, with its emphasis on quantification, standardization, and management by metrics, would later be recognized as another manifestation of the same "cubic" tendency – systems absorbing disruption while maintaining rigid structural forms.
Between 2010 and 2013, the School lost most of its UK-based contracts. Yet it did not collapse. Instead, it entered a quieter, more experimental phase. Nico broadened his focus, pursued self-initiated projects, re-engaged with the art world, got involved in the Remain campaign, the UK's official effort to stay in the EU, and supported refugee communities during the 2015-16 migration crisis. These initiatives – now mainly transnational in scope – sustained the School's practice while adapting it to new social, cultural and political contexts.
Paradoxically, contraction created space for reflection. With fewer delivery demands, Nico was able to re-examine the School's long-term purpose and structure. What began as operational adaptation soon revealed itself as conceptual reorientation. David Cameron's austerity politics not only rendered the Democracy School's social business model obsolete, but also altered fundamentally the very conditions of democratic engagement and renewal. The increasingly transactional logic of British public sector contracting stood in stark contrast to the School's relational ethos. Democracy, it seemed, had become both procedural formality and contested terrain.
By 2018, the Democracy School and Nico had relocated to Berlin, Germany, where Nico hoped to find more favourable conditions for democratic renewal work. The move represented more than geographical relocation. It marked a by then long-overdue strategic withdrawal from delivery-based consultancy and the beginning of a new phase focused on conceptual synthesis, long-form experimentation, and cross-disciplinary integration. It was during this period that the foundational logic of narrative prefiguration – long-embedded in the School's practice – began to crystallise into formal theory.
Even in retreat, the Democracy School remained in motion. What had once been commissioned became self-authored. What had been framed as service became understood as inquiry. Far from diminishing the School's trajectory, this period refined it – laying the groundwork for a re-emergence defined not by institutional dependency, but by intellectual clarity and strategic autonomy.
Part IV: 2020–2025 Integration and Articulation
By 2020, the Democracy School had repositioned itself at the intersection of art and politics and had begun focusing on systemic transformation and democratic renewal through dialogue and cultural interventions. Over the following years, this developed into three interconnected strands – commentary and debate, cultural interventions and capacity building – providing a coherent framework for enabling transformations across personal, institutional, and societal levels.
Although much of the Democracy School's work is now self-initiated, it continues to support both individuals and groups on their transformational journey though narrative coaching and narrative-based action learning. Both continue to form a significant part of the School's identity and remain central to its commitment to sustainable and regenerative social, economic and cultural development.
In 2024 the Democracy School added another string to its bow and established Unruhe Media, a publishing label and imprint which produces books, articles, and multimedia works that engage with the polycrisis – the convergence of environmental, democratic, and socioeconomic crises reshaping our world. It platforms voices from science, art, activism, and critical thought whose practices are transformed by – and in turn transform – our understanding of contemporary structural and systemic change.
The observation led Nico in his artistic practice to a specific question: how might complex systems visualise their own collapse? In early 2025, he therefore conducted an art-based, AI-powered research inquiry to explore how Large Language Models (LLMs) respond to instructions for depicting systemic breakdown. The result was unexpected and revelatory. Despite increasingly sophisticated prompts requesting asymmetrical disintegration, these systems persistently defaulted to cubic forms – absorbing instructions for chaos while maintaining fundamental geometric order. This "cube problem," as he came to call it, wasn't merely a technical limitation but a profound metaphor for how systems resist transformation from within.
The parallels to political and social systems were immediate and striking. Just as LLMs incorporate surface modifications while preserving cubic structure, political institutions absorb reform rhetoric while maintaining essential frameworks – precisely what the Democracy School had encountered during the austerity period, when metrics-based management absorbed the language of participation while preserving, in fact increasing hierarchical control. The pattern illuminated not only present challenges but also the trajectory of Nico's entire career – from his time as a theatre director and artist during the Troubles in the Belfast of the late 1980s, to his early experiments branching into local government consulting, through to the Democracy School's current positioning. Each phase now appeared not as a separate development, but as a distinct manifestation of the same underlying dynamic: the recognition that transformation requires elements that lie outside a system's internal logic.
This insight catalysed the systematic articulation of what had remained implicit throughout the School's evolution. Between February and May 2025, Nico produced four foundational papers that together established the theoretical framework of narrative prefiguration. Beginning with "Emergence of the Cube Problem" and "The Cubic Order," he documented both the specific research findings and their broader implications for understanding systemic resistance. These insights culminated in "The Concept and Methodology of Narrative Prefiguration" and "The Practice of Possibility," which show how the integration of interpretive and creative agency enables recognition and actualisation of latent possibilities invisible within conventional frameworks.
What makes this development remarkable isn't its novelty but its recognition. The integration of artistic and political practice, the reconfiguration of relationships, the attention to narrative fragments – these elements had been present from the beginning not only in Nico's artistic but also in his political practice, from CourseWriter.com's earliest days, when the dream of democratizing education through technology evolved into the practice of democratizing relationships through reconfiguration. Hence what emerged through his theorising, the articulation of narrative prefiguration, wasn't a new approach but the recognition of what had been prefiguratively present in his practice all along, waiting to be actualised through theoretical articulation.
The Democracy School now stands at an inflection point where theory and practice, art and politics, individual and collective transformation converge into a coherent approach uniquely suited to our fragmented moment. As conventional responses to the polycrisis increasingly reveal their limitations – their tendency to absorb disruption while maintaining fundamental structures – the School's methodology offers pathways for transformation that work with rather than against the complexity of contemporary politics and life. By recognising prefigurative possibilities already present within current configurations, it reveals how seemingly impossible transformations might emerge not through gradual progress toward distant goals but through reconfiguration of what already exists in latent form – bringing full circle the question that emerged from the dot-com crash: what else might meaningfully democratize?
