In the Tory Leadership debate, one of the candidates, Kemi Badenoch, said that “the machine of government was “not working” and as an engineer, she was the only person who could fix it.” But although it is tempting to think of government as a machine, it leads to a number of problems. It is perhaps more accurate and useful to think of it as a conversation.
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Exercise for U3A Writing Circle. A reflection on the human propensity to constrain possibilities.
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Indebtedness is entangled in many of today’s most persistent social problems. It leads to or exacerbates unemployment, homelessness, substance abuse, mental health and poor diet. As a driver and symptom of deprivation, it even contributes to reduced life expectancy.
So, when the Rotary Club of Folkestone along with its three international partner Clubs decided to set up a project to tackle indebtedness in its hometown, it seemed like an obviously good idea. Government agencies, charities and community groups were all in favour.
But delivering the project turned out to be littered with obstacles. Charities and agencies alike lacked resources, and both practical and ideological barriers hindered the cooperation necessary to achieve effective synergy.
It took Motivation, Adaptability and Perseverance throughout a six-year period to translate good intentions into the ‘Money Matters’ service. Now, three years after its first part-time employee started work, professionally prepared money advice plans (or MAPs) and support from trained volunteers are being provided each year to fifty of those in need of support and advice. And Folkestone Rotary Club has drawn a map showing how to generate the conditions for charities to cooperate in tackling the challenge of unmanageable household debt.
Since before the dawn of history, projects have been a principal human activity. Today, projects add significantly to the world’s GDP. They have become a common form of transforming the built environment and the way many organizations manage themselves in the private, public, and voluntary sectors.
Much modern project management guidance emphasizes the principles, structures, processes and techniques involved in delivering the product, service or transformation that is the project’s intended output. Also, both research and practice acknowledge that project executives should possess ‘people skills’. But despite this, too many projects still fail to live up to expectations, which results in both economic and social waste.
As a ubiquitous example of shared intentionality, projects can be thought of as an expression of our essential nature as human beings – what marks us out from all other species. So, perhaps what is needed is more careful and nuanced attention to the people, the context and the relationships that constitute the project itself.
Netflix’s new satirical science fiction film, Don’t Look Up, set viewing records when it started streaming on Christmas Eve in 2021. It lampoons government, political and media indifference to a catastrophic threat to the survival of homo sapiens, but unsurprisingly offers no diagnosis for how humanity got itself into such a dire state. Coincidentally, Iain McGilchrist’s magisterial new book The Matter with Things was published just six weeks before the movie, and it offers a vision based in well-researched neuroscience of how humanity could return to a better way of living.
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