I know, I know, I said I wasn’t going to write about the UK political situation again. Let’s say I’m just using it as a convenient example of the importance of understanding the ABC’s of slogan design.
Despite the delusional politicians and media continuing their futile efforts to pin down the ‘root cause’ of the catastrophic performance of the Labour Party in the election, I’d like to add an additional contributing factor to the story.
Someone in the Conservative Party – in all probability taught by the Trump campaign team (or Steve Bannon) – understands ABC. No-one in or working for the Labour Party, sadly for them, appears to have the first clue.
Autonomy, Belonging and Competence are the three core human emotional drivers. Good slogan designs need to tap into as many of them as possible. A great slogan taps into all three. The perfect slogan taps into all three using three words. Three single syllable words.
The Conservatives came close with their four-syllable, ‘Take Back Control’ in the Brexit referendum. And this election they matched it with ‘Get Brexit Done’:
The Labour Party, on the other hand found themselves stuck with something akin to the antithesis of good slogan design, ‘For The Many Not The Few’, which maps onto the ABC story something like this:
No Autonomy connection, no Competence connection, and they somehow managed to get their Belonging words to cancel one another out. And they took seven syllables to do it.
Hopefully, someone tells them the ABC trick in the next five years. Or maybe make that ten, since its looking like it’s probably going to take the first five flushing out Corbynism. Maybe they could use their newfound slogan-writing skills to help with that job? Drain The Marx? Lock Marx Up? Just a thought.
Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, by most accounts two of the smartest philosophers in modern history, only met once. The occasion was a meeting of The Cambridge Moral Science Club – a discussion group for the university’s philosophers and philosophy students – held on the chilly evening of Friday October 25 1946. Popper was the guest speaker, up from London to deliver an innocuous-sounding paper, Are There Philosophical Problems? Wittgenstein, chairman of the club, was one of the attendees. And if the Popper/Wittgenstein combination wasn’t enough for the lucky students, also present was Bertrand Russell, a man who for decades had been a household name as a philosopher and radical campaigner.
It quickly became apparent that there was a fundamental disagreement between the two main protagonists. One felt that there were only problems; the other that there were only puzzles. The discussion became heated. Wittenstein, finally exasperated, picked up a poker and started brandishing it wildly, shouting, ‘Popper you are wrong! You are wrong!’ The rising tension was only released when Russell, apparently, stepped in to intervene and persuade Wittgenstein to put the poker down. At which point, Wittgenstein stormed off in a huff, never to return.
The first moral of the story is that even extremely intelligent people can find themselves married to a view and no amount of facts or argument will dissuade them. Rather, they will wave a heavy iron weapon at anyone who challenges their outlook.
The second moral is that the world of philosophy had, by 1946, essentially devolved to become largely meaningless. Smart people arguing vehemently over the wrong question.
Sadly for Popper, Wittgenstein and Russell, another philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had died just over a century earlier. Arguably, his death signalled the last breath of meaningful philosophy. Not that anyone in the philosophy community seems, even today, to have recognised or understood the fact.
I’m pretty certain that had Hegel been basking in the firelight in that dusty Cambridge meeting room he’d have metaphorically banged Popper and Wittgenstein’s heads together and shouted, ‘it’s not either/or you blithering idiots’.
Had Hegel lived another hundred years and done a bit of Descartes-channelling, he might have gone a step further and drawn this picture…
And if they still didn’t get it, I think he would have been well within his rights to ask for the poker. If – thwack – the – thwack – question – thwack – contains – thwack – or – thwack – implies – thwack – the word – thwack – ‘or’ – thwack, thwack – it’s – thwack – the – thwack – wrong – thwack – question – thwack, thwack, thwack – dummy.
For every complex problem, there is a clear, simple, wrong answer. As the UK swiftly follows the US, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, Turkey, The Phillipinnes and others down the slippery slope of political populism, it is rapidly becoming clear that it is eminently possible to have a democracy in which the liberal rights of the individual tend to zero. Similarly, in many ways a large part of the Brexiteer argument against the EU, it is also very possible to have highly liberal institutions which are at the same time highly un-democratic. Achieving liberal democracy, in other words, is quite difficult. It is difficult because – counter-intuitively – ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’ are in conflict with one another. This is the essential premise of Yascha Mounk’s already-classic 2018 tome, ‘The People Versus Democracy’. The premise builds on Mounk’s attempts to restore the original definitions of the two words:
Democracy: a set of binding electoral instruments that effectively translates popular views into public policy.
Liberal: effective protection of the rule of law and guarantees of individual rights such as freedom of speech, worship, press, and association to all citizens.
Under these two definitions, and a clear me/we conflict becomes apparent. In that, what ‘we’ collectively want as a society is rarely the same as what ‘I’ might want individually. Taken together, we can draw a liberal-democracy 2×2 matrix looking something like this:
This is the sort of picture I’ve normally found to be quite re-assuring. It means that if we wish to get the best of both worlds – liberal and democratic – we need to solve a contradiction, and, if we want to solve contradictions, there’s no better way than through using TRIZ and Systematic Innovation.
The other, perhaps more subtle, ‘re-assuring’ part of the picture is the blue either-or line, which, if we angle the matrix a few degrees begins to look something like this:
… a blue ball sitting at the bottom of a bowl means – re-assuringly – that the further we try and move the ball left or right, the more the walls of the bowl try and bring it back to the middle again. While we might not be totally happy with the ball sitting at the bottom of this bowl, it is an awful lot better than being at the extreme edges of the bowl. The shape of the bowl is such that the whole system is stable. The more things try to move to an extreme, the more surrounding forces seek to return matters to the middle.
I now see, however, that my re-assurance by this stable-bowl model has not been well-founded. What Mounk’s book has taught me is that today the ball and bowl actually look more like this:
In this view of the world, the ball is very definitely not stable. As it nudges left or right of centre, it is more and more likely to keep going. The extremes, in other words, become not only much more likely, but actually inevitable.
My image of the bowl orientation has been wrong. Or, perhaps (no-one likes being wrong!), the self-stabilising bowl has somehow managed to become inverted. I’m still not sure which of the two is right, but I’m pretty certain that a lot of the societal feedback loops that helped the bowl stay upright and thus make the ball stable have recently, thanks to social media, Fake News and the deliberate (Russian) de-stabilisers of the world, disappeared or become perverted. Extreme-avoiding negative feedback loops have now become highly unstable positive ones. Just as in the pop-music charts, where the higher up the charts a song is, the more it is likely to be played on the radio, and so even more people go out and buy it, extreme politics increasingly begets even more extreme responses.
I’m too late I know, but I really hope that when UK citizens go to the polls this coming Thursday they take with them even the faintest inkling that a vote for a populist politician or party is a vote for massive instability in the coming months and years.
Anyone that knows me knows that inside my gruff glass-half-empty exterior is an equally gruff but nevertheless glass-half-full interior. Deep inside, I remain confident that there are always winners even during the biggest, fastest slide down the slippery slope and off the slippery cliff, but, boy, on the outside, I’m starting to wish I had a lot more fingers I could cross.
Three weeks in to an utterly tawdry squabble of election campaigns by all the current political parties and it has become crystal clear the UK political system is completely unhinged and not fit for purpose. I think the clincher was the Conservative candidate that decided to share some of the hate-mail she’d received. Apparently she deemed it no gruesome enough so took the liberty of adding a death threat. No-one expects politicians to be honest, but, really? So somehow, we find ourselves with a serial lying sociopath for a Prime Minister, and a time-warp crypto-communist hijacker as leader of the Opposition. Which in effect means, in our dysfunctional first-past-the-post election system, no party is worthy of anyone’s vote.
The crypto-communist party is currently standing on a platform of ‘real change’. In theory this sounds like the sort of thing we need as a country. Unfortunately, what ‘real change’ seems to mean in their case is a return to the early 1970s. The decade of powercuts, three-day week and uncollected refuse by the sides of the road. Good idea. Personally, I was kind of hoping for the sort of change that might help the UK get out of its ongoing tailspin decline.
I live in a constituency with a chasmic Serial-Liar Party majority. Meaning that I’m effectively dis-enfranchised. I have (postal) voted, but I might just have well flushed my voting paper into the septic tank at the end of my garden.
The party I would have liked to have voted for doesn’t exist. So I decided to sit down and think about what that party might look like, what their manifesto might contain.
Here’s what I got.
1) The way the current political system is set up, we inherently get the wrong politicians. A desire to ‘make a difference’ is a necessary but not sufficient condition to hold public office. Guiding the country requires a number of critical skills and wisdom, and as such, no prospective politician will be allowed to stand for office until such times as they have acquired the requisite skills. As time progresses, these same skill requirements will pass down the hierarchy from national to local level in such a way that progressively more decision making power in society can be devolved away from the centre and towards those closest to the immediate stakeholders. The requisite set of skills is described in the blog article preceding this one, ‘Minimum Viable Politician’.
2) The public has lost all trust in the political classes and as such, any person wishing to enter public life will be subject to synchronous veracity monitoring (SVM) technologies. Such technologies will indicate, for the benefit of any viewing/listening member of the UK public, whether a politician is lying and/or bullshitting on a topic they don’t understand. SVM will be activated whenever the politician is in public. The right to privacy for any citizen is sacrosanct, and as such, when a public figure is away from the public eye, they re-acquire this privacy right. The foundations of the SVM technology solution idea are described in ‘Making Sense Of Fake News #2 – Solution Generation’ in the February 2019 issue of the SI ezine. As can be seen from what’s happening in China, the technology already exists.
3) Several key sectors of UK society have suffered enormously from the disruptive oscillations caused by left-right shifts in political power. The biggest sufferer has been the Education sector. The main reason being that the time required to educate a child is considerably greater than the current five-year election cycle. As such, Education will be taken out of the political ping-pong arena, and Education policy will instead be determined by a permanent all-party coalition. The education of future citizens is simply too important to be subject to games of political table-tennis.
4) Measurement. One of the main reasons for societal dysfunction is the use of inappropriate measures and metrics. The Government has been consistently guilty of measuring what is easy rather than what is important. Education league tables, healthcare targets, GDP, etc have caused enormous unintentional harm to their respective sectors and the country as a whole. Measurement is an important precursor to improvement and to ensuring the country is moving in the direction that citizens desire, but only if said measurements are fit for purpose. It is often said that the most important numbers are ‘unknown and unknowable’, but we also now know that there is a science that underpins an ability to measure what is important. All current metrics used by the Government will be reviewed and, where necessary, be replaced with measures that are meaningful. Starting with Education and Healthcare. Our PanSensic tools might have a role to play here.
5) Meta-Data. The Magnificent Seven ‘Big Data’ companies have demonstrated the value of data, both in monetary and influence terms. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in particular may be said, by optimising their algorithms to grab and trap maximum user attention, to have played an already significant role in destroying democracy. Billions of users have given these companies enormous amounts of information for ‘free’, and the companies have in turn monetised that information for their own benefits. Given the harm already committed as a result, the Magnificent Seven will be taxed and made to pay for the damage they have caused. Data provided by UK citizens will be ‘nationalised’ and each citizen will own the rights to any and all of their past, present and future data. The Government will have access to anonymised elements of this data for the sole purpose of measuring what is important to help steer the country in the directions desired by citizens.
6) Climate Emergency. The UK contributes only 2% to overall global emissions and as such there is only a limited amount of direct impact we as a country can expect to have on reducing climate change. That said, the UK’s core strengths continue to be creativity and innovation, and as such we have an enormous opportunity as a country to pioneer the creation of environmental technologies that will not only accelerate the de-carbonisation of the UK, but also open up the potential to create world-changing export markets. We will, therefore, seek to make a positive impact on the global emissions story that goes way beyond the 2% we can directly control. It is not known how real and deep the climate ‘emergency’ is. The large majority of the scientific community says there is a problem, but it is not clear how much their thinking is subject to poor assumptions and confirmation bias. As a matter of priority, therefore, we need to build far more comprehensive simulation models that remove the linear-extrapolation fallacy found in all current models and build in more coherent effect-interaction models in order to build more meaningful predictions of how our climate will change in the coming decades. That being said, we also need to be cognisant that risk is a combination of likelihood and consequence. Better models will allow us to be more precise on the likelihood side of the risk story, but whatever the likelihood story turns out to be, the potential consequences of getting the calculations wrong are utterly catastrophic. And because that is so, until such times as the simulation models tell us otherwise, we act assuming the climate emergency is a real and imminent threat. We do this in recognition of the fact that current generations have an obligation to the generations yet to come. All of our duties involve leaving the planet in a better state than it was when we arrived.
7) AI and other digital technologies look set to have enormous impact on large swathes of society, with, in particular, the threat of enormous disruption to the labour market. We should use these technologies to assist in the elimination of meaningless work in society. The work that people do brings – or should bring – important meaning to life, and as such, as a country we should be actively working to not just eliminate the meaningless, but to promote and open up opportunities for new meaningful work in the coming AI revolution.
8) The Small State. Government bureaucracy needs to be kept to a minimum, and in many ways the shift to a more digital, AI-driven world enables this to happen. ‘Nanny-State’ thinking is inconsistent with the desire to create an AntiFragile society. That said, the world is at a point now where the ability of advertisers and MNCs to manipulate individuals to act against their best interests means that the fight between freedom-of-choice of the individual versus sellers is no longer a fair fight. In the same way that politicians and those individuals that choose to live a public life will be required to use SVM technologies, any and all advertisements will be subject to the same technologies. The public has the right to eat as much fast-food as they wish, but at the same time they have the right to know that they are being manipulated. The ‘Snowflake & The (Magnificent) Seven Dwarves’ blog post describes this fight between MNCs and the individual in more detail.
9) Unearned versus earned income. The gap between haves and have-nots in the UK has reached unprecedented and now de-stabilising levels. The capitalist system, unfortunately, creates self-reinforcing cycles in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The tax structure in the country reinforces these cycles by penalising earned income (principally work and entrepreneurship) and rewarding unearned income (principally land and property ownership). This happens in large part because historically it has been easier to tax the former. This is fundamentally unfair, and as such the country will progressively shift the tax system in the other direction. Rent-seekers and rent-seeking behaviours are not good for the country. Workers and entrepreneurs, on the other hand, people with ‘skin in the game’, are our future lifeblood as a nation, and as such income taxes will be progressively lowered and land and property taxes correspondingly increased to reward those invested in creating our future success. Our desire as a society should be to reward those that are actively working to improve our standing in the world and not those that inherited a property portfolio.
10) AntiFragile. The endemic shift towards ‘continuous improvement’ in both public, private and NGO sectors has realised great increases in efficiency, but, we now know, at the expense of massively impaired effectiveness. We have unwittingly evolved nearly all of our institutions to be very fragile, and therefore – as we saw in the GFC of 2008 – very vulnerable to disruption when stressed. There is now an urgent need to build greater resilience into our institutions. This does not mean compromising on efficiency, but it does mean recognising that not all ‘waste’ is waste. If an enterprise is unable to innovate and respond to external changes because it has trimmed staff and resource levels, they have trimmed too far. A key objective of Government policy and action should be to assist our institutions to attain resilience and, ultimately, antifragility. The more the UK is stressed, the stronger it should become.
11) AntiFragile II: Health. The UK can be rightly proud of the NHS. It has, however, largely evolved to become the National Illness Service. This in turn has created a downward spiral of increased capability to fix more medical problems, increased demand on the system, and increased cost to provide the services. All the time with there being little or no incentive to improve efficiency since every time there is a budget problem, eventually citizens will lobby and the Government will provide a bail out. The inefficiency problem is in part due to the use of inappropriate success measures (see Item 4), which has in turn lead to the creation of an enormous cadre of ‘managers’ who, in addition to adding no clinical benefit, have expanded exponentially to service the ever more resource-hungry dysfunctional measures. The NHS needs to transform into a genuine Health Service again, which means a much bigger focus on prevention rather than cure, moves to keep patients out of hospitals they don’t want to be in, and moves to introduce ‘self-organising’ healthcare practices requiring less ‘management’ and re-establishing the ability of medical staff to feel pride in the amazing services they provide to patients. During any kind of transformation, the system has to service current demands in addition to taking on additional one-off costs to enable the transition to the new system to take place. Additional transition funds will be provided to enable the required transitions to take place. Throughout and beyond, the NHS will continue to provide healthcare services free at the point of use for all UK citizens.
12) Education. The long-term success of the Nation is critically dependent on the presence of a population possessing the requisite skills and knowledge to thrive in a turbulent, often chaotic world. As such our Education system is the bedrock upon which all else stems. The current education system is 150 years out of date, and the problems of the sector have been exacerbated by poorly designed success metrics (Item 4 again). In addition to the rapid re-design of said metrics, we will embark on a major transformation of the way we educate our country’s children. Rote learning and the teaching of ‘answers’ makes no sense in a world where most answers can be Googled. Emphasis needs to shift much towards the teaching of critical-thinking skills and how to ask the ‘right’ questions. Answers are easy; finding the right problems to work on is what we now require.
13) Veracity. Item 2) is designed to begin solving the UK ‘internal’ trust problem. In a globalised economy, we cannot ignore the bigger problem of ‘external’ veracity. It is a well established fact that certain foreign states are actively seeking to de-stabilise other states through deliberate mis-information campaigns, driven largely through social media. It is a universal human trait that ensures ‘bad’ news travels seven times faster than ‘good’. An emotion-provoking lie travels seven times faster than the boring-truth. Such traits are difficult to change, but this should not stop us from working to actively counter deliberate mis-information campaigns coming from antagonistic states, and as such this will be a high priority for the Government. In a complex, rapidly changing world, citizens need to be able to be confident they have access to knowledge that is true and correct. As such we will work towards the creation of society-wide veracity-establishing and cyber-security capabilities that will be available for use by any citizen in relation to information entering the UK from outside our borders.
14) Dead wood. Too many Institutions -public and NGO sector in particular – have outstayed their usefulness and have become self-preservation societies that add no value to our nation. Such entities will be incentivised to shut themselves down once their original missions have been achieved. Every institution has a shelf-life, and society needs means by which redundant entities in the public domain cannot be allowed to outstay their usefulness. This is in many ways related to the idea of removing meaningless work: no-one wants to work for an entity that serves no useful purpose.
15) Written Constitution. UK citizens will, for the first time, be provided with a written Constitution. This Constitution will be designed to make clear the rights and responsibilities of each of us. First key amongst these responsibilities will be acknowledgment that the success of any resilient society comes from the diversity that it contains. We can see this clearly by looking at the last 5000 years of the country’s history, and that today we are one of the most diverse, multi-cultural societies on the planet. Second key amongst these responsibilities will be a requirement that every citizen is legally obliged to vote in elections. Every citizen, at the same time, is, of course, perfectly entitled to spoil their ballot paper. There will be fines for non-voters.
16) Elections. The first-past-the-post system is wholly unsuited to the complexities of the global economy the UK must operate within and will thus be re-designed to operate in a manner that enables every citizen’s vote to count and count fairly. Advocates of the first-past-the-post system have previously claimed that other voting systems don’t give a clear majority for government. When there have been such majorities, however, the actions of the in-power Government have generally been in direction that have not served the long-term needs of the country well. In this sense, if the results of an election require coalitions to form, this should not be seen as a bad thing. Some form of proportional representation system will be designed, and, at a local level, the opportunity for secure on-line voting will be created in a similar manner to that found in Switzerland.
Transitions
Key to the implementability of any kind of manifesto is a clear recognition that it is not possible to ‘start again’. Utopian ideas for re-inventing that seem to appear periodically all suffer from the problem of ‘can’t get there from here’. Step-change transitions require careful management, and must fundamentally start from where we currently are. The ongoing challenges of the moment cannot be ignored while bigger-picture transitions are being undertaken.
The start point for this manifesto is the creation of a new generation of appropriately skilled politicians and the necessary education of a first cohort of candidates will take two years. With this in mind, the term of a first Government will be two years, at the end of which will be an Election with parties able to field the newly eligible political candidates.
During this two-year term the Government will:
a) Conduct a nationwide survey of all UK citizens to invite contributions to inform the design and content of the new Constitution. A big part of this survey will be to understand how we collectively see our rights and responsibilities, what we believe our UK ‘values’ are and should be, how we collectively see our place in the world, and what we think our future goals and objectives should be relative to the rest of the world.
b) Put our new Constitution into law by the end of the first year of the Government
c) Urgently re-design the dysfunctional critical measures that we currently use to mis-guide our public institutions. Top of the list will be education and healthcare targets, since they are the things creating the largest levels of societal dysfunction. Measures are easy to change. The shift in the behaviours that emerge from them will, of course, take time
d) Mature and prove the SVM technologies such that they are fully functional, commissioned and in place after the next election.
e) Create strong incentives to encourage the creation and development of novel environmental and renewable energy technologies.
f) Introduce new legislation that will force the Magnificent Seven MNCs to return UK citizen’s data, and pay taxes to compensate for the damage they have thus far caused.
g) Introduce legislation to shift the current tax regimes away from earned income towards unearned income.
h) Introduce legislation to take the education and healthcare sectors out of party-political hands and into the hands of a permanent cross-party coalition.
i) Introduce legislation to replace the dysfunctional first-past-the-post election system to the new every-vote-counts system such that the election to be held at the end of the two-year period of this Government will by run using the new system.
j) Introduce a series of (quarterly) sense-of-progress delivering low-hanging fruit changes to resolve a number of current unfairnesses. These will include: removal of VAT on sanitary products, scrapping of vanity projects like HS2, and re-investment of the released funding into the creation of improved local public transport services, free TV licenses for all pensioners, initiating the sell-off of the tens of thousands of empty Government-owned properties on redundant military bases, fining house-builders failing to comply with agreed proportions of social housing within the sites they are developing and using the fines to build more affordable homes, provide tax incentives to re-use brown-field sites to convert ex-industrial buildings into affordable homes.
k) Within the first three months of Government, hold a ‘people’s vote’ referendum to determine whether we wish to withdraw or remain within the EU.
In retrospect, instead of my (pointless tactical) postal vote, I should have crossed the whole candidate menu out, added a new row, ‘None Of The Above’ at the bottom, and put my cross in that box.
Maybe next time… probably around 12 months from now?
The current UK General Election campaign seems to be hammering the final nails into the coffin of British politics. The choices put forward to the electorate effectively coming down to the smug, self-serving liar, the incompetent Marxist, or the rabbit-caught-in-headlights fudger. Whatever the outcome, the future doesn’t look bright. The underpinning problem (Brexit) won’t have been solved, and we’ll be no nearer to solving it. Insert image of a political can being kicked down the road here.
Thinking ahead a few years, to the time when we really hit crisis and decide it is time to re-invent the political system, one thing I’ll be pushing for is a minimum set of skills that anyone standing for election must be able to demonstrate. I’m thinking it needs to be a Masters degree. One that anyone in the country can undertake, paid for by the State. One that is the polar opposite of the sort of ‘political science’ degree on offer to students today, the curricula for which, I note with horror, appear to have a lot to do with why we’re in the mess we’re in right now.
This need for a Masters degree-worth of the right kind of knowledge is not about elitism or meritocracy or any kind of prejudice against ‘non-academic’ people (I firmly believe that everyone is born with the same basic brain physiology that they get to deploy in the direction of one or more of a myriad different kinds of ‘intelligence’ – whether it be IQ, EQ or any of the other thirty-plus different Qs). Rather, it is about ensuring the country is run by people with the requisite set of skills required to do the job. In the same way that I wouldn’t expect a random person off the street to come and re-wite my house, I’d want a qualified electrician. Specifically what I want is to solve the issue first discussed by W. Edwards Deming in his quote, “Best efforts and hard work will not suffice, nor new machinery, computers, automation, gadgets. One could well add that we are being ruined by best efforts put forth with the best intentions but without guidance of a theory of management for optimization of a system.”
A lot of politicians, in other words, enter politics with an admirable level of intent to make a positive difference to the world, the country and their constituents, but have zero knowledge regarding how to achieve those differences. Ditto the civil servants hired to support the politicians. As a consequence, things end up going backwards rather than forwards. Poverty-reduction initiatives that increase poverty, healthcare initiatives that make people less healthy, new education targets that make kids dumber, etc.
Best efforts and hard work often comes across as ‘passion’. Passion without knowledge, unfortunately, as we are all now beginning to see very clearly, is a shortcut to de-stabilisation of not just the political system but the country as a whole. Trust goes down, people don’t bother to vote, extremists rise to the fore, and hey presto, pretty soon no-one can talk to anyone from a different political perspective any more. Which removes even more trust and serves to perpetuate the downward spiral.
It’s perhaps a little harsh to pick out individual examples, but if I had to pick a couple, I’d opt for dilettantes from opposite ends of the left-right political spectrum, Jess Phillips and Mark Francois. Neither could be accused of not being passionate about their beliefs. But both, I believe, are so fundamentally lacking in the necessary knowledge of political, human and societal systems that they become devastation time bombs. There’s a fundamental contradiction that needs to be addressed here. One that looks like this:
Creating a critical mass cohort of political Doyens will undoubtedly be a tough nut to crack. One that will take time. Part of that time, I believe should be spent ensuring that a person is only allowed to stand for election (or take on a supervisory role in the Civil Service) if they possess the requisite skills. Here’s the curriculum as I currently see it. Twelve Modules and a dissertation:
Module 1: Complexity
Complex Adaptive Systems, Cynefin, Complexity Landscape Model, Systems Thinking, Emergence, Law Of System Completeness.
Module 3: S-Curves & The Dynamics Of Discontinuous Change
S-Curves, Tipping Points, All Systems Hit Limits, Types Of Step Change, Pulse-Rates, OODA, Hero’s Journey
Module 7: Direction & Directionality
Ideal Final Result, Convergent Evolution, AntiFragile, Start-With-Why, Critical-Mass-At-The-Critical-Point
Module 8: Where Have All The Leaders Gone?
Bravery, Wilful Blindness/Plausible-Deniability, Risk-Management, Managing-The-Unknowns
Module 9: How To Measure Anything
(Measuring what is important rather than what is merely convenient), PanSensic, Big-Data-Analytics, The-Meta-Data-Never-Lies-But-You-Need-To-Listen-Differently,
Module 10: The Science Of Reading Between The Lines
Zaltman Metaphor Themes, Culture-Codes, Cultural-DNA
Module 11: Ecology & Environment
Building Meaningful Scenario Models, FMEA, X-Cycles (Carbon, Water, etc), Eco-system Design, The Wide Lens
Module 12: Putting It All Together
Policy Design, Communication-In-A-(Too)-Transparent-World, Re-Thinking History (when we understand complex systems, history and the ‘lessons of history’ need to be completely re-thought), Seven-Habits-Of-Highly-Effective-Politicians
Dissertation: A real-world, get-your-hands-dirty, project, solving a genuine community-based problem using zero (financial) resources.
I’m thinking the whole thing – like our new on-line Systematic Innovation Masters Degree – can be done through distance-learning, the whole thing broken down into bite-size chunks that people can work through during lunch-breaks and after the kids have gone to bed.
I’m also wondering whether journalists also need to complete the programme before they’re allowed to publish. Seeing as they seem to be a big part of the political problem too.
Last week I read Arthur Schopenhauer’s book, ‘The Art Of Always Being Right’. Don’t ask.
I’m still not sure whether it was serious or meant to be funny. That was probably the point.
A good part of the thinking seemed to centre around the idea that it was important to win an argument irrespective of whether you were right or not. In that sense, it feels like it must be compulsory reading for the current crop of self-serving, truth-shy politicians. I’m guessing it plays a big part in the curriculum at places like Eton too.
The book contains ‘the’ thirty-eight ways to guarantee winning your next argument. In a lot of ways the strategies are similar to the ideas found in The Art of War. Not as evocative or well-described, but similar nevertheless. Which in turn means there must be a fair amount of overlap with the TRIZ Inventive Principles. In that an argument – irrespective of whether one or both parties is ‘right’ – is a contradiction, and if it is a contradiction, the only way to ‘solve’ it, according to TRIZ at least, is through one or a combination of the 40 Principles. I thus had my fingers crossed that Schopenhauer might have something to add to the contradiction solving story.
So I went through all of ‘the’ thirty-eight strategies to see if there was the flicker of insight. Some of Schopenhauer’s strategy titles weren’t exactly obvious, so the exercise meant literally reading the whole book. Even when I found myself tutting with frustration. Here are his thirty-eight strategies, so you can see what you think:
Extension
Homonyms
Generalise The Specific
Conceal Your Game
False Premises
Postulate What Has To Be Proven
Yield Admissions Through Questions
Make Your Opponent Angry
Question In Detouring Order
Take Advantage Of The No-Sayer
Generalise Admission Of Specific Cases
Choose Metaphors Favourable To Your Proposition
Agree To Reject Counter-Argument
Claim Victory Despite Defeat
Use Seemingly Absurd Propositions
Use Your Opponent’s Views
Defence Through Subtle Distinction
Interrupt, Break-up, Divert
Generalise The Matter, Then Argue Against It
Draw Conclusions Yourself
Counter With An Argument As Bad As His
Beg The Question (use circular reasoning)
Make Him Exaggerate
State A False Syllogism
Find The Instance To The Contrary
Turn The Tables
Anger Indicates A Weak Point
Persuade The Audience Not The Opponent
Diversion
Appeal To Authority Rather Than Reason
This Is Beyond Me
Put His Thesis Into An Odious Category
It Applies In Theory, But Not In Practice
Don’t Let Him Off The Hook
Will Is More Effective Than Insight
The Vicar Of Wakefield
A Faulty Proof Refutes His Whole Proposition
The Ultimate Strategy (personal insult)
When mapping the full descriptions to the TRIZ Inventive Principle, it rapidly became clear that some of the strategies actually contained several different strategies, or sub-strategies, or combinations of strategies, but lest I come across as trying to build any kind of suspense, all of the variants fitted very clearly into the long-established Principle taxonomy. The eventual score looked like this:
Twenty-five of the TRIZ Principles had a Schopenhauer corollary, leaving fifteen Principles that Schopenhauer never thought of. Assuming the listing is in the chronological order in which Schopenhauer thought of them (I can see no evidence of any other kind of structure), when you learn that Strategy Thirty-Eight – the ‘Ultimate Strategy’ no less – is essentially to shout personal insults at your opponent, I’d have to say that he was getting somewhat desperate towards the end of his analysis. Which I have ultimately taken to be good news. Next time you find yourself on Question Time or in the Question Time audience, if you know some TRIZ you have a fifteen strategy advantage over the Public School educated charlatans on the panel.
Plus, contradiction-wise, you ought to have a far better chance of being right as well as winning.
For the most part I can’t watch Question Time anymore. To the pointless either/or debates we now have the added dis-incentive of knowing that the audience selection strategy is no longer fit for purpose, and that half the people asking the questions are some kind of an axe-to-grind plant. Last night, noticing that cyclist (cyclist??) Chris Boardman was on the panel, I thought I’d check out what was happening.
There was a question about the NHS. There’s an election coming, so this wasn’t such a great surprise. Neither, then, was the inevitable left-versus-right claptrap argument. This time around it seemed to devolve into a race to see who could make the most ridiculous claim about how much more money they were planning to throw into the Service after they were elected. ‘The Tories have given us 10 years of austerity, have stripped the morale out of all the staff and their new policy is just about putting back what they took away’. ‘Labour’s plans are un-affordable utopian nonsense’. You say tomayto, I say tomarto. Same old blather.
Then it was Chris Boardman’s turn to talk. He decided to take the discussion down a different direction. There are 20 million inactive people in the UK, he said, and if we change the way they move, everyone wins. People get fitter, we reduce pollution, we spend less money, everybody wins.
This was what I call a third-way solution to the problem. Not a total solution to the problem, but rather one that jumps out of the either/or psychological inertia debate and points us in a direction in which we end up with a better overall solution: an NHS that costs us less money, one that has less patients to treat, and one that delivers better outcomes because when people do become ill, they get better, faster. A step in the right direction. A step that tells us, hey, look, we can do this, let’s now go and look for other win-win solutions.
Unfortunately, that’s not quite the way the audience heard the answer. Most seemed to hear it from their ingrained either/or-think perspective, ‘why isn’t he answering the question?’ The others went down the cynical vested-interests track. One snarky, Tweeting either/or prat of a politician wrote, ‘man who sells bikes thinks everyone should use bikes. Quelle surprise.’ This is how far we’ve now sunk.
Generally speaking, given the choice between defending the Snowflake Brigade or the ‘Man-Up’ Army, I tend to veer in the latter direction. Mainly, I think thanks to my exposure to the first of the Generation Z apprentices we’re being asked to train by some of our clients. I’ve never met a cohort of people so ill-equipped to handle the everyday stresses of getting out of bed and arriving at work on time. No longer is it possible to set exercises like, ‘find a problem you’d like to work on and use the tools…’ because no-one seems to understand the concept of ‘problem’. Which I take to mean that, should anything out of the ordinary have happened to this cottonwool-wrapped generation, helicopter-mom or bulldozer-dad will have stepped in and fixed things at the first flickerings of anxiety. I suspect this doesn’t bode well for the future.
I’m not sure it is connected, but, for the first time in my life, recently I’ve found myself starting sentences with the words, ‘in my day…’. Which I suspect also doesn’t bode well for the future.
In my day… work was pretty much sink-or-swim. I was given big scary jobs and told to get on with it. I think I’m a better person as a result. Apart from the tendency I now have to be something less than patient when it comes to encounters with people that have had a smooth pathway mapped out for them wherever they go.
I know, too, that this occasional impatience is also unfair. The world is a more turbulent, faster changing, more complex world to the one I was expected to learn to swim in back in the late 1970s. Its very easy for all of us to feel overwhelmed. Ten minutes watching the News these days will usually do the job. I get it.
What I also get is that any kind of too-hard-too-soft Snowflake-versus-Superhero debate is also the wrong question. It’s a contradiction, dummy. Should society be laissez-faire or ‘Nanny-state’? It should be neither. And both:
That said, I’m also increasingly conscious of the fact that these kinds of over-protect/under-protect contradiction occur in a world that is now fundamentally different to the one that existed five or ten year ago. It used to be a fair fight. Now it isn’t. It used to be snowflake-versus-snowflake. Now its snowflake-versus-The-Magnificent-Seven.
There are several ways of interpreting who this Magnificent Seven is. Per one of my presentations earlier this year, one of the interpretations is that they are Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Tencent, Baidu and AliBaba. The industrial mastadons that increasingly own all of the world’s data. The giants that know more about us than we do. And, for the most part, are more than happy to sell what they know about us to anyone anywhere with a desire to sell their stuff to us. Against this kind of foe, Johnny Snowflake stands essentially zero chance of success. Johnny Snowflake is going to buy whatever the Magnificent Seven tells her to buy.
Take food. The ‘Man-Up’ brigade, acting on behalf of the supermarkets, fast-food restaurants and big-data analysts from the Magnificent Seven, tell us that we’re free to choose not to super-size our order. But at the same time, they know we’re increasingly powerless to resist. The marketing psychologists know precisely – for every one of us – which buttons to press to ensure that more often than not we find ourselves acting against our own best interests and instead acting in theirs. In this context, there is no ‘free-will’ anymore. We’re puppets. We can’t see the strings, but they’re there, tugging and yanking our catalogue of quirks, biases and weak spots. Even though we’re continually being told we’re not, we’re actually all snowflakes now.
Another way of defining the Magnificent Seven we snowflakes have to battle against is in the context of the technologies behind the Magnificent Seven enterprises: sensor technologies that increasingly measure everything there is to measure about us; surveillance systems that mean we’re always on camera; the micro-niching technologies that allow advertisers to laser-guide their campaigns onto the most vulnerable; digital-design technologies that allow them to perform thousands of invisible experiments to optimize how to manipulate individual users; meta-data analysis algorithms that assemble our big-picture, no-hiding profiles; the commercial technologies that automatically connect these profiles to the next provider looking to extract their share of revenue from us; and finally – the coup de grace – the self-learning algorithm technologies that continually allow the other six technologies to get progressively better and better at doing their job.
And then there’s a third way of thinking about who the Magnificent Seven are. Take matters down to first principles, and it looks like there are seven critical cognitive biases every individual on the planet that the Magnificent Seven organisations are able to use the most easily to work out who we are and to make us vulnerable to exploitation:
Like I said, this is no longer a fair fight. The snowflake increasingly has no chance. The contradiction needs to be solved. We need citizens that are able to stand on their own two feet and live a meaningful life. And the only way this can begin to happen is they know when and how third parties are trying to manipulate them. And then know what they can do to call foul and fight back. In the short term, society might have to manage the contradiction through legislation. The Magnificent Seven will no doubt argue that all they’re doing is serving their customers and trying to serve them better than competitors. That’s what capitalism is all about: the person that serve the customer best wins. But capitalism, crucially, doesn’t understand the word ‘enough’. And that’s where legislations comes in. As a temporary scaffold that sticks around just long enough for the snowflakes to work out how to get the systems we rely on to serve our needs act in our long-term interests rather than serving our short-term limbic-driven whims.
Settle in, this one looks like its going to be a tough, long-haul battle.
Spend more than a couple of minutes on the human cognitive bias Wikipedia page and it become very clear why so many of us struggle to make sense of the world. We’ve basically evolved a 175-ingredient primordial soup of different ways our brain inadvertently screws us up. Now some lovely person has taken the time to translate the original alphabetic listing into something with rather more structure. Buster Benson is the lovely person in question, and I heartily recommend you take a look at how he went about unravelling and making sense of the catalogue: https://medium.com/better-humans/cognitive-bias-cheat-sheet-55a472476b18.
Enter another lovely person, John Manoogian III, who took the time to transform Buster’s hard work into this amazing graphic:
There is always the potential – of course – with these kinds of activity that anyone could run off and build millions of different taxonomies. So the question inevitable arises as to what might make this Cognitive Bias Codex better than any other structure we might choose to assemble?
An early test we apply in the SI research team when it comes to this kind of question is to see how well a model relates back to first principles. Like it or not, we’ve evolved to possess all of these biases for good reasons. They, collectively, serve a purpose. Albeit one that is perhaps better suited to the cave-dwelling time in our history rather than the Fake-News, cut-and-thrust of the 21st Century. But if they serve a purpose, they must also form a system. And if they form a system, they must, collectively, obey the TRIZ Law Of System Completeness.
Which, at first blush suggests a problem. The LoSC says there must be six elements and Buster Benson’s structure only contains four:
1) Too Much Information: information overload sucks, so we aggressively filter. Noise becomes signal.
2) Not Enough Meaning: lack of meaning is confusing, so we fill in the gaps. Signal becomes a story.
3) Need To Act Fast: lest we lose our chance, so we jump to conclusions. Stories become decisions.
4) What Should We Remember: This isn’t getting easier, so we try to remember the important bits. Decisions inform our mental models of the world.
In order, these four elements can be seen to clearly represent the TOOL, COORDINATION, TRANSMISSION and ENGINE of our system. Meaning that we’re missing the INTERFACE and SENSOR parts. But these, of course, are, firstly, the outside world we sense from, and the senses (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory, gustatory, etc) we use to do that. Which means we have something that is coherent and consistent with the Law. Like this:
Which in turn means we can start applying some other aspects of TRIZ to see if we can help explain why the human cognitive system is increasingly ill-equipped to cope with modern society. And – perhaps more importantly – what we might start to do about it…
It’s very difficult, I find, to disagree with everything that a person says or does. Lying Boris Johnson comes close, but even with him, I still find it difficult to argue with his point about wanting to bring a ‘can-do’ attitude back in to the British mentality.
Maybe it’s living through three years of political nonsense that has helped create the ‘can’t-do’ mindset that seems to have crept in to most segments of society. A case in point was the reaction to the Conservative Government’s recent announcement to recruit 20,000 new police officers. Now, granted, the announcement created a certain inevitable backlash from many sectors of society, since all it was essentially doing was bringing back 20,000 police officers of the 21,000 that had been lost from the police service thanks to the last decade’s worth of Conservative Government austerity. It seemed okay to me that everyone should have a 30 second moan about that fact, make a mental note to not forgive the Conservatives at the next general election, and move on.
But then the media started interviewing senior officers in the various police forces around the UK and a bigger problem became apparent. All we heard from them was how difficult the whole recruitment exercise would be, and how it wouldn’t be possible to recruit, train and get 20,000 people on board in the timescales the Government were demanding. The can’t-do coup de grace came from one Chief Constable who’s main argument against the whole initiative centred around the apparently impossible difficulty of finding enough lockers for the new recruits. Lockers. How he kept a straight face I will never know. I certainly couldn’t keep mine.
How do we find ourselves in situations like this, where even simple stuff becomes too difficult? Its not – as far as I can tell – about a lack of ability. If it was about lack of talent, then having a can’t-do attitude might actually be a good thing. Something like this:
People with low ability and a can’t do attitude present society with much needed damping. Far better that they stay home, playing on their x-box and blobbing-out on their Just-Eat app than getting out and messing things up for the wider community… which is what the ’Danger’ people end up doing. The combination of low ability and a can-do attitude is in many ways – thanks, David Cameron, thanks Boris Liar Johnson – why we’re in this mess in the first place. Seen in that light, its difficult to put too much blame on the Chief Constable who decides it is far better for his or her career to demonstrate strong ability to Dodge difficult, no-win projects handed to them by dangerous low-ability, can-do politicians.
But, then again, what we end up with is a society with a sorry dearth of Doers.
In that regard, I point back to The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity of yesterday’s blog rant. Or maybe another person that I disagree with almost everything they say. Hello, right-wing, misogynist, muck-raker, Steve Bannon. What does he have to contribute to the story? Perhaps a recognition that the people in positions of power in the world are now so dominated by Dampers and Dodgers that the only way forward is to judiciously place a few Dangerous puppets in positions of extreme power to ensure enough dominoes get pushed over to create the global chaos that will in turn kill off all the societal dead-wood and then allow the Doers to finally do their thing and set society back on track. Although hopefully along a third-way track rather than the right-wing, misogynistic muck-raking track Bannon seems to prefer.
