The Hidden Power

The first statutory duty of straight speak for politicians and officials shall apply also to the media. With photography and news stories, it's hard not to view what one is seeing - as reality. And yet these stories and images are mostly taken out of context, and elements are suppressed and magnified, and if reality remains in the final image - it is distorted. Less of an issue when multiple persp...

Statutory duties for the behaviour of politicians and officials at work, including the duty of straight speak, shall be set. If you stopped, for even a second, to wonder what might increase trust in government, or any governance, you might start with Being Trustworthy. This week (mid April 2021)in the UK, a Welsh MP - Hywel Williams - referenced a bill put forward in 2007 by Plaid Cymru ("Plyed Ki...

" A fourth separation of powers shall be incorporated in every system of government for the independent feedback of results through a Resulture or Feedback Branch of Government. " You might imagine that for all the debate at the heart of government, there might be some function to check up on the outcomes of these debates. And in some cases there is. In many, even in most cases - nothing. Maybe a...

Central government only undertakes tasks or makes decisions which localities cannot or which require uniform regulation. The gravitational pull of power to the centre is one of the things designers of the German constitution had in mind at the end of the Second World War. Germany had a certain fundamental and rather paradoxical advantage the UK lacks - they were defeated, along with Japan, and so...

A right to deliberative referenda shall exist; specific issues shall be resolved through Engage–Deliberate–Decide. How are decisions made? If we cast our minds back, not just to Priti Patel's "Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts" Bill, but to numerous policies including Grenfell Tower fire cladding and the Poll Tax - we see a pattern: Decide, Announce, Defend - or DAD. And the result is, in many,...

It may seem like a trivial point, that elections should be representative - are they not already? Well they may appear to be - but they're not, really, in the UK. Boris Johnson's government took power with less than one third of the electorate. So two-thirds of voters would have preferred not to have the Conservatives in power. But this is nothing in comparison to the take-over of the Conservative...

...as to what is in and what is out of the Commons, ie - what is commonly held. Is this about property, or value generation? These simplifications mask the vastness and complexity of human life, and in this episode we explore where common ownership might be effective, and what it takes to make it work. List of Talking Points: What is the commons? The Tragedy of the Commons ...as it relates to the...

All lifestyles are accepted – within the constraint of not harming others or the biosphere. Rather than restate what we have been hearing, our focus here is on the logic of diversity from a governance standpoint - why blind-spots are self-destructive and the embrace of diversity is so enriching. Talking points: Pluralism and truth Neoliberalism and consumerist monocultures Roots of logic of divers...

Its decisions are binding. Just because we don't live in a perfect world doesn't mean we can't improve things. If events surrounding the death of Ruth Bader Gainsburg in September 2020 left you despairing at the US Supreme Court, perhaps the Supreme Court of the UK's blocking of Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings' attempted prorogation of parliament gave you hope. However a constitutional court is...

Anyone following current affairs will see how the rule of law is often stretched to its limit by autocratic leaders seeking to either evade it or bend it to their will - and while this has come to the foreground in the US and UK since 2016, it is a long-running theme in many parts of the world. However the rule of law is not only about holding the powerful to account, it's also about a fundamental...

Not all players convey links - find us on Acast if this text is not clear. Sovereignty - we've heard a lot in the UK about both sovereignty, and "taking back control" - but this taking back of control in the context of leaving the EU has so far barely extended to us as citizens. Why and how is the current UK system so paternalistic? What are the roots of the widespread and long-standing political...

The first and fundamental principle of this series - and indeed this entire way of looking at things - reflects the unseen, creeping processes causing catastrophic climate change. Why do we need this? How are we to think about it? What can we do? Talking points: industrialisation limits on human behaviour secondary effects of climate change our personal relationship to the biosphere self-harm as a...

Welcome to The Hidden Power Podcast, Series 2 - Pre-flight Checklist , where we - Ed Straw, and Philip Tottenham - examine conditions necessary for a comfortable and flourishing life on Spaceship Earth, on the far side of the current climate emergency. In this nice, concise episode we revisit and draw some of the connections from series one - governance, systems thinking - and explore how, through...

Special episode on the Doomed Career of Dominic Cummings. Dominic Cummings has been seen as a controversial and divisive figure, but as with so many people at the political extremes, significant parts of his analysis can be agreed upon by disparate factions across the political spectrum. In this special episode we unpick the good and the less good from this lauded and demonised character, assess t...

For this final episode of series 1, I wanted to build on Buckminster Fuller's idea of our planet - our habitat and life-support system - as being like a spaceship - Spaceship Earth , as he calls it - and building on this idea to use two related models for our discussion: the post-crash analysis and the preflight checklist First we look at the globally used post-crash analysis as a model for invest...

Dr Piret Toñurist, Systems Thinking lead at the OECD's Observatory for Public Sector Innovation talks about the sense of powerlessness at the heart of leadership. She discusses how the pandemic has offered an opportunity for change, and what transformation looks like. She characterises systems thinking as a neutral zone where the ideology of what has to be done doesn’t exist. Themed on this questi...

John Naughton, tech columnist at The Observer Newspaper, talks about that great Wild West of our time - Cyberspace. From its roots in “permissionless innovation” to the staggering dominance of a very small number of companies over most aspects of our lives, he surveys the absence of governance, and how two effective sovereigns - Apple and Google - have appropriated powers normally associated...

Where is the power? Julian Corner used a process of local ‘action enquiry' to bring about effective social change. This in places where, as he puts it, a system of ‘care' is effectively a system of oppression - siloed, systematised, and more focussed on privileging its own rules than on the value of human care.  In this episode he talks about these challenges, and how this ‘act...

Professor Eileen Munro turned decades of inadequate child protection on its head with one simple question: are we helping or hindering the front line? In this episode, she reflects on the successes - and revealing failures - of her review into child protection. Eileen covers a lot of ground in a short space of time. It is fascinating. Talking points: Centralised processes can't protect children, a...

This episode introduces the experience and current thinking of my co-presenter, Ed Straw. We talk about his journey from being an engineering graduate to consulting at the heart of Westminster, how he encountered power and the confusion surrounding it.  Then we get into his current thinking - he’s now a research fellow at the Open University’s Applied Systems Thinking in Practice Group, and h...

New release date - Saturday October 10th - Episode 1, Ed Straw on the Hidden Power. We live in confusing times - and a lot of that confusion is about where power lies. With Ed Straw, former chair of Demos and consultant to government, & Philip Tottenham. In 2017 the UN, the WHO and the OECD all called for the use of Systems Thinking to deal with highly complex problems. But what does that mean...