New democracy

February 4, 2012

Having discussed the topic of participation a lot recently, it was amusing to read the editorial of the current edition of Philosophy (Volume 87, number 339, January 2012) on the subject of ‘Greek Democracy, Old and New’. The New Democracy in question is the Nea Demokratia party in Greece that agreed the EU bail-out and denied a referendum. Professor O’Hear then goes on to compare old-style Athenian democracy where the assembly was open to all entitled to vote and its council made up of 500 citizens drawn by lot annually and not permitted to serve more than twice. O’Hear suggests that with modern means of communications something analogous should be possible and suggesting a new political party – Archia Demokratia – Old Democracy – to pave the way for it.

What is clear is that democracy may be the best we have but it could certainly do with increasing representation and the tools we are developing may assist, if only they were used by the politicians.

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Systems thinking, control charts and philosophy

May 30, 2008

Spent an interesting few hours on the 29th May at a meeting of the ‘north of england transformation network’ meeting in Brighouse, West Yorkshire – www.net2.org.uk – thanks for the invite, folks!

Bizarrely, the talk by Dr Mark Wilcox entitled ‘Predicting performance – our debt to Shewhart’ was a fascinating journey through the sources of thought in both Shewart and Deming and brought up Heraclitus who I mentioned in an earlier item. Mark was relating the link with the philosophical school of Pragmatism, popular in the USA in the early 20th century, along with A.N.Whitehead. It appears that both Shewhart and Deming had read C.I.Lewis’s book ‘Mind and the World Order‘ on multiple occasions. Since Shewart was originator of the control chart, which is a fundamental aspect of systems thinking, hearing the part various other authors helped to play in its development demonstrated to me how it all came together and was still developing.

I also tested out my theory, that dissatisfaction would make a suitable metric for customer service in local government despite my inability to express it as a variation, without any serious disputes with some of the other attendees.

Perhaps some things are becoming clearer to me, if they weren’t before?

  • Those seeking to improve services before, since and during the e-government era, continue to do so!
  • Whilst seeing better ways of doing things, they might have failed to join up in a crusade against the promoters of targets (in practice) but are able to be joined up quite nicely around the theory.

Why I’m taken with this is that the promoters of lean thought argue for the sorting out of processes initially with the customer involved, then we do the IT stuff!

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