Honest and objective insight
I’ve worked in the public and private sectors, been employed and self-employed and have invented things, so, from a business perspective, that’s provided me with varied experiences. I’ve worked with some amazing people over the past three decades, but I’ve also worked with some who could do much better.
While society celebrates achievements and achievers, we don’t acknowledge the ‘doers’ (more on that another day) and we often ignore or overlook problems because it’s inconvenient and boring. In my blogs, I’ll be banging my head against the wall to raise the importance of fixing problems properly to deliver visible and sustainable improvements to benefit society. Someone’s got to.
Reflecting on my 11 years as the communications manager at a council, I could have been called a spin doctor. But I took a different approach – we focused on honesty and integrity in our communications and that included how we dealt with difficult problems. This differs significantly from what we saw in recent years with the recent Conservative government in the UK, where lies and gaslighting had become the norm. Guess what happened with the honest, fact-based approach we adopted at the council? Satisfaction scores for the council shot up year-on-year. I think we can all agree that the same did not happen for the previous government. I wonder why? 🤔
A scientific and objective approach
Similarly, I want to address problems with a fact-based and scientific approach. In the two years that I worked at Campden BRI, I worked with many, super-bright scientists. As scientists, they had problems presented to them and solved them. They didn’t just have an opinion; they used their skills to determine facts. But science isn’t just about men and women in white lab coats. You can, or rather you should apply science to any problem-solving to deliver the best possible solutions. The Science Council defines science as ‘…the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence’. Sounds good to me.
What will I be covering?
So, over the next few months, I’ll be covering issues such as climate change, public services, business, the NHS, things that annoy me and a host of topics that I hope to spread the word about that you may not have seen or be aware of. I’ll be publishing a couple of papers to make the public sector genuinely more efficient and effective, and I’m also interested in tackling the status quo in the business world. We’re slaves to Google and the social media companies. We shouldn’t be.
Additionally, we live in a society in which people have busy lives, so they’re not interested in the news and what is going on in the world. That’s a little depressing. The human condition and the media are both constantly obsessed with ‘the next big thing’, meaning that important problems are just ignored because they’re not interesting enough to satiate our desire to be stimulated. At times, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the war in Ukraine was over and that climate change was just a fad. Let’s face it, we just move on… so is there any hope? Again, we need to fix problems; not pretend they don’t exist.
Anyway, you get the point – I’m a miserable git. But, on an optimistic note, I’m a miserable git who wants to improve things. This brings me to a question. Have politicians given up? In the run-up to the 2024 UK election, the opposition (Labour) party’s slogan was ‘Change’. In 2008, Barack Obama also ran on a platform of, you guessed it, ‘change’.
The thing is… I don’t want change. I want ‘better’. Maybe I’m not such a pessimist after all?
(By the way, sorry about the Spin Doctors and Status Quo links. Couldn’t help it!)
