First off less than 2% of Congress totaling 535 members, have professional backgrounds in science, whereas there are 222 lawyers.

When in 1987 the Federal Communications Commission removed the fairness doctrine of how difficult or controversial news was reported it open the door to more extreme punditry, take a bow Rush Limbaugh. And we have witnessed an increasing line of anti-science perspectives from Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, with the whip held by Newt Gringrich.

And Otto argues right now science is under threat by anti-climate change organisations – between 2009 and June 2010 the energy industry spent half a billion dollars fighting climate change legislation. He writes that 96 of the 100 newly elected Republican members of Congress deny outright that climate change is real or are voting against it in one form or another.

That said Otto argues there are complex forces that are shaping the debate on public perceptions towards science, ‘the moral ambiguity createdafter the dropping of the Atom bomb and living in a nuclear MAD world’, or some of the terrible excesses of toxic pollution that killed and maimed ordinary people – coupled with the culpability of government, the effects of postmodernism on the one hand and the rise of fundamentalist religion on the other smashing into each other. A deep distrust arouse around government and science.

This is the volatile cocktail that combines – commerce, science, truth and politics and results says Otto on an assault on American science that is unprecedented. Though the Barack Obama administration does not get away with it scott free

President Obama’s not much better. Running strong on climate change in 2008, he has since totally de-prioritized it, apparently marginalizing his scientist appointees like Chu, Holdren and Lubchenco, all of them outspoken on climate change, and now appears to be moving ahead with offshore oil drilling, lower air pollution standards, poor carbon standards, and the Keystone XL oil pipeline. In a time when the science has only advanced further and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences says anthropogenic global warming should be “regarded as settled facts” — a time when China’s leapfrogging ahead on clean energy investments in the next economy, that’s not going to take America where we need to go.

Finally Otto refers to ScienceDebate2012 as he describes it, ‘a grassroots campaign for a presidential debate on science, technology, health, medicine and the environment’. Which was born out of Science Debate 2008 which was the largest political initiative in the history of American science.

We are on a journey from a linear world to a non-linear one (click here for more information) and we need good science to come with us. To attempt to shout down science, diminishes us all and limits the possibilities of our world.

For more information on Otto’s perspective read New Scientist October 27th 2011 (subscription required) or the Huffington Post- The un-American war on Science.

Shawn Otto has written book called Fool Me Twice: fighting thee assault on science in America

Why Andrew Lansley is not talking to people like Mohammad demonstrates why BIG GOV struggle with designing for a better world. Its not top down with lots of expensive consultants. Designing for transformation is flat, emergent and networked. And the clue is in the name of Mohammad’s company PATIENTS KNOW BEST. Better thinking, better world. Its about blending technologies of cooperation, with data, platforms and people. Designing around people, for people, not inspite of them.

Mohammad’s story is the reason a patient knows best is because they are the only one who goes to all the consultations. So Mohammad has come up with a simple program so a patient can access their health records.

That quote has always resonated with me. As it leads to the question, what makes work worthwhile? And how do we define work? This thought cropped this morning reading an article that Per Håkansson had flipped over to me. It was Douglas Rushkoff musing on the mantra of jobs, jobs, jobs Are Jobs Obsolete? – yes he agrees we all want to be doing useful things – but the jobs our current politicians describe he feels are built on a dying age, an industrial age. Perhaps he suggests we could envision a far better way of filling our time…

This sort of work isn’t so much employment as it is creative activity. Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations. We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another — all through bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff.

Its a great big idea and some I guess are already doing that. The big issue is also that jobs have come to define us as people. “What do you do?” is the line of interrogation that goes when first meeting someone perhaps for the first time. Brain surgeon or bank robber? Work and identity become hugely important.

In a post entitled Modern Life is Rubbish I refer to the work of Richard Sennett,

In, The Corrosion of Character: The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism. Richard Sennett describes how the sense of hopelessness, and isolation, deconstructs our character in the workplace, with ultimate tragic consequences. For Sennett, “character” is defined as the capacity to construct and keep commitments – not just in marriage, but also in friendships, communities, and workplaces – and the ability to provide continuous, coherent narratives of personal experience. In Sennett’s view, the “unfettered capitalism” that describes our recent history in labour markets, work schedules, institutions, and technology – renders “character” impossible. Contemporary capitalism demolishes the social and cultural foundations of “character,” and upholds instead the punishing ideal of incessant change.

Rushkoff concludes, “for the time being, as we contend with what appears to be a global economic slowdown by destroying food and demolishing homes, we might want to stop thinking about jobs as the main aspect of our lives that we want to save. They may be a means, but they are not the ends”.

The nature of work and identity appear in the forthcoming book No Straight Lines: making sense of our non-linear world

We can see that things could be done better – but the question is how. Is it right to use free market thinking as an invasive form of ideology into all aspects of the fabric of British Society? My view is that its a form of toxic creep. Cameron stated he would, and I quote verbatim, ‘that his government would ring-fence the NHS’. It hardly looks like that to me. Also, because of the research conducted over the last 7 years on No Straight Lines, we can see that people like Andrew Lansley and this government, are struggling with complexity, and trying to take an old model which has failed and attempting to apply that to a new paradigm. The fact is there are enough great answers to these problems which in fact are far superior in the service they deliver, at a fraction of the cost but are in Lansley’s view unorthodox, so therefore cannot be looked at seriously. As John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing, “what you see is defined by what you know.”

Not far from where Andrew Lansley lives is Cambridge, there is some very interesting innovation happening in healthcare in Cambridge. For example Patients Know Best enables people managing long term chronic healthcare to engage in a more meaningful dialogue with clinicians, which can deliver far better, for far less, and avoid wastage in unnecessary hospital visits which happen for a whole host of reasons. in Ontario, through a Participatory Leadership programme, the entire community and healthcare system are engaged as participants in working on evolving a more relevant form of healthcare service – without the need for consultants, with their flip charts and powerpoint decks. (more on this in the No Straight Lines book). This is an entirely different form of innovation, that has an entirely different though common sense approach to solving wicked problems.

In No Straight Lines we look at the problems of a US led style healthcare system, its unfairness and its entire design based upon procedures done to patients (which is how private companies make their money). More procedures = more money. This is what Lansley does see – its machine age thinking, its linear, its not networked, nor design led. Its not human centric, its money centric, and as my Grandfather used to say, “when ready money changes hands some always sticks”.

In a paper I received yesterday entitled: Liberating the NHS: source and destination of the Lansley reform

The authors write, The Financial Times Public Policy Editor has noted of the current NHS reform: 

“what is still missing is a narrative that explains how these changes, carried out in this way at this time, will help the NHS to address its central task – making £20bn of efficiency savings over the next four years in order to meet rising demand within a budget that is flat in real terms. Instead, the opposite is more likely.”

 A narrative for this reform, far more transparent than the double-speak of the White Paper, can indeed be located. It is described in the following pages. It maps a move away from the tax-funded NHS based on the principles of contribution according to ability to pay, and use according to medical need. It takes the NHS towards a US-style arrangement of individual health insurance with access to care based on payment of health insurers at a level based on the insuree’s state of health. In other words it removes the pooling of risk which underlies the post-war social solidarity compact, involving subsidy of health care for poorer and less healthy citizens by richer and healthier compatriots. A plan for the end-state system to be jointly funded by the state and the individual solves the perplexing riddle of how the new system could generate £20 billion of savings, given that it involves more providers, fragmented procurement, more complex administration, the marketing costs involved in market competition, and multiple layers of profit extraction from the NHS budget,. Cost reductions will be achieved through de-skilling and poorer employment terms for medical professionals as the NHS hospitals which employ them are shifted into the private sector.

You can read the rest here – and share it with those that you believe should be reading it.

Liberating the NHS: source and destination of the Lansley reform

People are often mourning the loss of a way of life in which they were part of a community that had grown organically over the generations… Unlike the planners and architects who moved them around as if they were pawns in a chess game, they understand that communities are not created by ordering removal vans simply to transplant people from one location to another – not if they are to have a cohesiveness that makes sense to those who live within in them.

So wrote Gilda O’Neill, who is sadly no longer with us. She was referencing her life experience growing up in the East End of London.

In the Miracle of Hudson Street by Malcolm Gladwell he talks about Jane Jacobs,

In the early nineteen-sixties, Jane Jacobs lived on Hudson Street, in Greenwich Village, near the intersection of Eighth Avenue and Bleecker Street. It was then, as now, a charming district of nineteenth-century tenements and town houses, bars and shops, laid out over an irregular grid, and Jacobs loved the neighborhood. In her 1961 masterpiece, “ The Death and Life of Great American Cities ,” she rhapsodized about the White Horse Tavern down the block, home to Irish longshoremen and writers and intellectuals – a place where, on a winter’s night, as “the doors open, a solid wave of conversation and animation surges out and hits you.”

Her Hudson Street had Mr. Slube, at the cigar store, and Mr. Lacey, the locksmith, and Bernie, the candy-store owner, who, in the course of a typical day, supervised the children crossing the street, lent an umbrella or a dollar to a customer, held on to some keys or packages for people in the neighborhood, and “lectured two youngsters who asked for cigarettes.” The street had “bundles and packages, zigzagging from the drug store to the fruit stand and back over to the butcher’s,” and “teenagers, all dressed up, are pausing to ask if their slips show or their collars look right.” It was, she said, an urban ballet.

And why was it a miracle?

The miracle of Hudson Street, according to Jacobs, was created by the particular configuration of the streets and buildings of the neighborhood. Jacobs argued that when a neighborhood is oriented toward the street, when sidewalks are used for socializing and play and commerce, the users of that street are transformed by the resulting stimulation: they form relationships and casual contacts they would never have otherwise.

And going further Gladwell expands

The West Village, she pointed out, was blessed with a mixture of houses and apartments and shops and offices and industry, which meant that there were always people “outdoors on different schedules and… in the place for different purposes.” It had short blocks, and short blocks create the greatest variety in foot traffic. It had lots of old buildings, and old buildings have the low rents that permit individualized and creative uses. And, most of all, it had people, cheek by jowl, from every conceivable walk of life. Sparely populated suburbs may look appealing, she said, but without an active sidewalk life, without the frequent, serendipitous interactions of many different people, “there is no public acquaintanceship, no foundation of public trust, no cross-connections with the necessary people–and no practice or ease in applying the most ordinary techniques of city public life at lowly levels.”

Gladwell’s point is about space, proximity, communication and trust in the context of the failure of the office vs. the success of Hudson Street.

Following on from my post about Cumbria’s DIO (Done It Ourselves) community, The People’s Supermarket again demonstrates an alternative way of getting stuff done. In a way that perhaps is more realistic and more humane, where once again people, and community, and commerce can be more equal partners. Arthur Potts Dawson, who was behind London’s environmentally sound, award-winning Acornhouse restaurant, the mission statement is “for the people, by the people” which in practice means a not-for-profit co-op. Pay a £25 membership fee and sign up for a four-hour shift once a month and you become a part owner, have a say in how it’s run and receive a 10% discount on your shopping.

There is a C4 programme on its way to a TV/iPad/laptop screen near you in April.

Liz and Max Haarala Hamiliton have been photographing the people and their store.

Photographs by Liz and Max Haarala Hamilton: http://haaralahamilton.blogspot.com/

Alice represents a small group of young people who are choosing a career on the land. She will tell us how and why the work captured her and perhaps even challenge our notions of what it means to be a farmer and our image of farms themselves. Having had her hands in the earth for almost a decade she will share what she has learned about the soil, agriculture, scale, ownership and carrot inspiration.

What makes Do so amazing is its willingness to bring divergent and multiple perspectives to the world we now live in.

SMLXL on living an authentic life

A substantial number of people exhibit social preferences, which means they are not solely motivated by material self-interest but also care positively or negatively for the material payoffs of relevant reference agents. We show empirically that economists can fail to understand fundamental economic questions when they disregard social preferences, in particular, that without taking social preferences into account, it is not possible to understand adequately (i) effects of competition on market outcomes, (ii) laws governing cooperation and collective action, (iii) effects and the determinants of material incentives, (iv) which contracts and property rights arrangements are optimal, and (v) important forces shaping social norms and market failures.

Kate Pickett writing a review of of Will Hutton’s new book Them and Us: Changing Britain – Why We Need a Fairer Society, writes

What Hutton offers beyond a detailed description of the rise to and fall from grace of the financial sector is an examination of the role of fairness in the creation of prosperity and the good life. We’re taken on a gallop through the history of western philosophical thought on fairness, proportionality and luck, from Plato to Adam Smith to Marx, with side trips into behavioural economics and psychology.

What emerges is the centrality of fairness to human instinct, morality and social relationships. When society is fair – and, just as importantly, seen to be fair – in its procedures as well as in its systems of reward, all works well. Fairness fosters trust and democracy in virtuous circles, and these in turn foster the openness and reciprocity within society, institutions and markets that create successful capitalism. Fairness is therefore, says Hutton, “in the vanguard of the march of civilisation and the evolution of prosperity”.

Kate Pickett is co-author, with Richard Wilkinson, of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.

We are today, as social philosopher Richard Sennett argues; seeking too recover something of the spirit of the Enlightenment on terms appropriate to our time.  Indeed, Stephen Heppell considers the 21st century to herald the ‘learning age’. In the 20th century, he argues, we built big things (railways, universities) but the focus for the 21st century is ‘helping people to help each other’. In his view, “The old stuff won’t do any more”. And Larry Elliot, economics editor of the Guardian remarks that though Osborne uses the word fairness – his “fiscal orthodoxy is considered dangerous” by Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz – both Nobel prize winners for economics. Which leads to the question are we creating a fairer society through the Big Society.

But of course we face a significant conflict – enough of society is in flux for it to be melded into something more substantial that can serve us more humanely – without it becoming wimpy pimpy – yet there is and will continue to be a great deal of resistance to change.

Pickett again

The final third of Hutton’s book sets out a wide-ranging menu of proposals and reforms, aimed at unlocking innovation and enhancing the capabilities of all citizens, including financial regulation, strong support for universities, devolved authority to local government, school reform, and so on. There is a huge smorgasbord of good ideas in there to chew on, worthy of serious discussion and debate. But what we really need for change, Hutton says, is “intellectual conviction, social support and political chutzpah”. He ends by hoping that Britain has turned a corner.

I wonder whether that is true – though I see in my own region (East Anglia) a grassroots engine beginning to warm up which is not waiting for the ideology of any political party to put us on the right path. What we make is up to us. Carlota Perez in her book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital – says that there comes a point in time when;  old institutions are found wanting, and the old frameworks of society insufficient to respond to the needs and demands of society.
At this moment we seek a new language, a new common sense that allows us to remake the world afresh.

Patrick and I met earlier this year, when he overheard me. discussing the No Straight Lines project with someone in a coffee shop in Cambridge. So Patrick contacted me, and this is what he had to say.

What you seem to be talking about runs in parallel to much of the social theory being used within archaeological theory today. Basically, many archaeologists are now beginning to realise that the behaviour of people (I am referring to stuff that was going one about 20,000 years ago when mobile art, figurines and parietal – cave – art largely first appeared in Europe) had much to do with building and maintaining networks, not just with people but also with other elements of the world). Of particular interest is that some archaeologists are now discussing the role of possessing and interacting with mobile (e.g. animal) figurines as a means of creating and maintaining human identity. Much of the ethnographic data suggests that these people actually thought of these objects, and other things in the world, as actually being part of them in a very real way. Thus, when objects such as these are exchanged, it is not simply that they represent the identity of a person (e.g. relative): they actually are part of the person. Archaeologists are also beginning to employ social theories such as Actor-Network Theory to explore such concepts.

What I have now realised is that the way that people engage with objects and media (e.g. mobile phones) in the Western’ world today is not so different to 20,000 years ago. I am not saying that people thought about the world in the same way. But what seems to be apparent, especially with the enormous rise of social networking today, is that human identity is embodied with in the very objects (real and virtual) that people use, and when people communicate with each other it is not simply a matter of communication, but it is in a very real way part of themselves that is being sent/communicated. This is very interesting, because human identity then becomes something which is not confined to the immediacy of the person and the immediate surrounding world, but is distributed throughout the world in the form of pictures, emails etc. Interaction with these things (both real and virtual) then becomes a matter of necessity, as it did during the Palaeolithic, as their identity or personhood is embodied within these things. No longer can be people be socially secure (i.e. interact with important elements of the known world on a regular basis) through normal modes of communication: in order to maintain a sense of social cohesion people must now continually interact with elements of their identity that are distributed throughout the globe via objects (e.g. phones). Social cohesion becomes a matter of remote rather than direct interaction.

My simple observation is that if we are are designing a society and world that is becoming more inherently social through connectivity, this has to relate to identity, and meaning. How we create meaning. We cannot ignore that for many people modern life is rubbish, or that the shopping mall really is Van Diemens land. As I wrote in that post

For me this is the backdrop to perhaps some of the biggest, and perhaps intractable problems of our current society. Loss of identity, belonging, and community – with all its subsequent fallout.

In the issue of identity in a post modern world, psychologist Sandra Harilld points out

Until postmodern times, we dealt with problems that had their origins in relation to the other or the outside in a concrete way and in imagination problems tended to come from people with psychosis or personality disorders. We are still getting those problems but what has changed for some people are the triggers to illness, in so much as people who do not have a strong inner sense of self tend to feel more fragmented more easily and the idea of self construction is very threatening to these types of people.

They seem to need more direct human contact to help them to define themselves and years ago would have been defined and lived within the confines of their families, villages, social classes or friends, with daily personal interaction reinforcing that. So, for instance, we see a lot of phobias and depressions, particularly problems such as social phobia that are linked to this fearfulness of how to be in the world and whether one is acceptable or not.

And in my post human nature and the need for social connection, I point out using the work of John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick, that,

Looking more deeply at the invisible forces that link one human being to another helps us see something even more profound: our brains and bodies are designed to function in aggregates, not in isolation. That is the essence of an obligatory gregarious species. The attempt to function in denial of our need for others, whether that need is great or small in any given individual, violates our design specifications.

Indeed, violating our design specifications in a profound way, “I” needs “We” to truly be “I” was the maxim of Carl Jung, as told by Charles Handy in The Hungry Spirit. The industrial age has done some fantastic things for us – but it also has stripped away for many of us what makes us human n the first place. In this context, I am frustrated with the word, “social media” as it just cannot describe the true reality of what is going on in the world we live in today. This perspective is I argue as relevant to business as it is organisations, as it is to education, and lastly to each and every one of us. Because, I think it alters the way we make things, and get stuff done. These are the drivers to the networked world where as Jan van Dijk explains,

In a mass media society, the basic units are the large collective ‘masses’. In contrast, a network society is based on individuals who form voluntary connections with other individuals regardless of location. In a network society, the network becomes a basic unit of organization at all levels (individuals, groups and organizations). Online social networks, media networks and technology networks act as the catalysts for a networked society

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7577137@N04/2923238790

The economist Herbert Simon, once wrote,

What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention… The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.

May I have your attention please? – Linda Stone – SIME 09 from Ayman van Bregt on Vimeo.

Someone comments on Linda’s presentation,

Technology sets me free and enslaves me. Look at us. You read this message and I get your partial attention. But don’t blame yourself. I wrote this message with partial attention too. My phone was ringing, the music was playing, my neighbor was commemorating a soccer game his team won. I guess. Another message. Tomorrow we have two meetings and some of my colleagues will be during the meeting answering mobile messages and emails. It is normal, and they don’t think it is disrespectful at all. Do you? I watch this video with my partial attention. A minute, a colleague is calling via MSN. Oh, shit, my mother is writing a blog and I can’t keep up with it. My friends are throwing a movie and food party next weekend. Another message. And my partial attention. That moment, our moment, and your partial attention. What is personal? What is private? What is intimate? When everything matters nothing matters anymore. Do you connect with me? Do I connect with you? Hey, you only add me and I add you back in a list of noise. We live in a really noisy world and we are trying to stay in the top of it, like a bunch of hyper-alert anxious multi-taskers who are constantly over stimulated. What is next? This noise is overwhelming. Can you keep up with it? Am I a better person? Are you?

What would be good she says, is “engaged attention”…