When Rachel Reeves takes to her feet in the Commons to deliver her spring statement next week, she will try to pull off what her inner circle describe as a “re-education” exercise over how Labour has used its early days in power.
“We want it to be a re-education on all the good things we’ve already done in office,” said one, listing achievements including increasing the minimum wage, cutting NHS waiting lists and improving workers’ rights. “We want everybody to hear it.”
Few Labour MPs believe there is much reason for cheer, as there is little sign of the economy improving anytime soon, with growth forecasts expected to be downgraded again next week and Reeves announcing the biggest spending cuts since austerity.
The despair came to a head this week after Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, announced £5bn of cuts to disability benefits. Despite No 10 arguing that it had a “moral case” for welfare reform as well as an economic one, many Labour MPs responded with dismay.
There is a simple method for solving actual intractable-problems of things like urban-planning & civil government, as identified in “The Heretic’s Guide to Best Practices”.
It is issue diagramming.
They wrongly call it dialog-mapping, but dialogs are of people, & so political-possessions, whereas issues just stand on their own, & so can be independent-of-political-possession.
Also, they have a deranged infatuation with doing it sideways, calling that a “Capitola Pathway”, but … they’re ivory-tower people, so that’s fine for them.
Take a portrait-format page & lay it down at one’s toes, & where does the “next step” part of the page happen to be?
Right above one’s toes, right?
Where does the far-end-of-the-path, the Goal, happen to be on that page? The far-end, the top, right?
THAT is the right orientation for an Issue-Diagram, not sideways.
IF every issue gets solved as an externalized ( didn’t Stephen R. Covey identify DECADES ago that the top-3% most-effective people ALL externalized their goals?? that isn’t “mere coincidence”! ) Issue-Diagram,
with the structure of the problem displayed as a visual-spacial diagram, showing the connections and dependencies & showing IF this, THEN that connections…
THEN people gain much more complete understanding, much quicker.
People’s keeping it in our heads, & just trying to muddle-to the “right” answer through our feelings, can’t work for either entrenched-political problems OR for too-complex problems.
This method-for-getting-past-our-innate-unconsciousness-and-inability was cracked years ago!
It works, too.
( visual-spacial cracking-of-problems has been discovered to be not only key to cracking urban-planning, civil-problems, it has also been proven to be able to convert a massive-failure-rate among complex software development problems, to an actual-success-rate, instead.
Wrong-representation for the required critical-thinking is a fundamental error that we keep making.
I think it may be related to the fundamental-error of doing-the-same-thing-harder when what the actual-context-requires is changing-what-we’re-doing, that was identified as a race-wide mental-defect in the book “The Design of Everyday Things”, a book which is partly responsible for the instigation of the “Mythbusters” franchise, when Savage discovered, through that book, that if a system’s operation wasn’t intuitively-obvious, it may well be its user-interface was engineered-wrong, & ALL the users have the same problem, because of that… )
Anyways, it was an English mathematician whose video, on software development, clued me in that the visual-spacial cracking of problems & communicating what they are, is THE key to actually succeeding, in ALL such cases…
& then I understood that “Heretic’s Guide to Best Practices” was actually just doing a variant of that, in a specific domain…
The method’s sound.
Have every component-decision identified,
have what brings the decision’s result contributing to the goal be identified on 1 side of it, as a + ( or above it ),
have what variant of the decision would obstruct the gaining of the goal on the other side of it, say below it, as a -
& let people see the tradeoffs, & decide for themselves how these tradeoffs should be managed,
instead of just “authority decided for you”, ( it should be obvious that the contempt-of-the-population inherent in that stance has political-consequences ) & never bothered including all the required perspectives anyways ( which is the political status-quo, globally ).
CHANGE the METHOD to change the results!!
A sentiment of Einstein’s “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”
While it’s unlikely that people will choose to survive if that requires us to stop letting unconscious-habit rule our world, … it’s possible that somebody will actually do-so, for some small portion of this world…
Otherwise, nonlearning … has fatal consequences.
Globally, now.
Political-parties, though, why shouldn’t they just continue obliterating our viability?
Nothing competes against the political-party-system, right?
Therefore the political-party-system doesn’t need to learn, or change, or adapt, in any way, right??
Only when something is competing against a something, directly, CAN it learn?
Not as-in when the Trump-cult is competing against the Democrat make-belief, obviously that changed nothing…
but as-in when something’s competing against the current system of misgovernment-by-political-parties, then the political-parties might temporarily show a little integrity … until they removed the threat…
( anybody remember when the banks in Canada were temporarily behaving in an upright manner, because the trust-companies were competing against them … until they were all bought-up by the banks?
this is what I’m talking about: inter-bank-competition changed nothing, but outsiders-competing-against banks did, until they were obliterated from significance.
I expect exactly the same results with political-parties.
No change due to inter-party-competition, ONLY possible-change when something threatens the political-party-regime-system )
Anyways, IF you value your municipal, or federal, or any between-level viability of some government, PLEASE use externalized, visual-spacial, Issue-Diagram style depiction of problems, leaving-out nothing-significant, to SHOW the actual decision-structures that have to be decided-between, & let the entrenched politically-motivated non-thinking fail to compete with your work.
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