‘Democracy is the worst form of government’, Winston Churchill famously said, ‘except for all the others that have been tried’. Which is to say that, despite the fact it is currently stuck at the limits of its current capabilities, it has done a pretty good job of increasing the quality of life for a large majority of citizens. The current swathe of wobbling institutions, though, perhaps indicates that we’re not too far away from some kind of a step-change. What such a discontinuity might look like is still massively uncertain. Much less uncertain is the fact that many of the underlying contradictions are very plainly visible. One of the biggest of them is the growing mismatch between the growing imperative to build long term sustainable solutions and short election cycles. The latter forcing political parties to promote short-term, expedient vote-winning measures to help improve their chances of being re-elected. How to solve this contradiction?

Here’s what the Business version of the Contradiction Matrix has to say about the problem:

Principle 9, Prior-Counteraction doesn’t appear very often in the Matrix, and appears as the most frequently used Principle in only a handful of places. So, to see it heading the list in the Design Risk versus Stability box means we have to have collected several thousand examples of it being used to tackle the conflict. Here’s one of them: the Welsh Government’s creation of the world’s first ‘Future Commissioner’:

With a remit set out in law to be “the guardian of the interests of future generations in Wales”, Sophie Howe’s role is to provide advice to the Government and other public bodies in Wales on delivering social, economic, environmental and cultural well-being for current and future generations and assessing and reporting on how they are delivering.

Sophie took up the post in 2016 and has led high profile interventions around transport planning, education reform and climate change challenging the Government and others to demonstrate how they are taking account of future generations. Described by the Big Issue Magazine as one of the UK’s leading Changemakers, her interventions have secured fundamental changes to land use planning policy, major transport schemes and Government policy on housing – ensuring that decisions taken today are fit for the future.

Fingers-crossed they’re using TrenDNA to help decode what the future might look like. Or at least remembering that there’s a difference between long term planning and long term responsibility. That the former is largely futile, but not using it as an excuse to give up on the latter.