Training Political Staff (UPDATED)

“If there’s a clear indication that they should have known better, if there’s a clear indication that they did not provide any kind of guidance, that type of thing, then there should be responsibility attached to the political party and that might take legal measures.”

Two things emerging out there that, to me, are worth paying attention to.

One - Canada has a recognized training deficit.  This is a big problem; traditional low-training required jobs, like manufacturing, are moving to places where the labour is cheap and employer responsibilities are minimal. 

The current Conservative government feels the solution to this problem is to reduce mandated employer responsibility and weaken unions on the one hand while bringing in more already-trained foreign labour on the other.  The desired end-goal seems to be the opposite direction most industrial economies head; weakening the local workforce and an increased reliance on foreign-trained labour.

How they feel that's sustainable is beyond me, but it fits well with their overarching policy scheme.  A reduction in employee rights and stiff competition with cheaper, better-trained foreign labour is only going to encourage employees to take unnecessary risks (resulting in avoidable injuries and related health costs/rising health premiums employers will eventually want government to deal with) or a backlash against foreign workers just looking to make ends meet.

Plus, it makes us less competitive in the Knowledge Economy.  Why on earth would you embrace horses and bayonets when the market is increasingly demanding a bit more value add?

Two - thanks to social media, the dumb mistakes of political staff resonate more, last longer and are increasingly tied to Party brand.  As is the case with Members themselves, the inclination is for top-down management and tightly-controlled messaging. 

It's ironic in the extreme that Parties who advocate free speech, liberty and decentralization for their country provide the exact opposite internally, but I digress.  Given the quick turn-over of political staff, nobody's ever felt that internal human resource development was worth the effort; it's far easier to see labour as disposable and focus on replacement, not investment.

Until now, that is.

Here's where the two strands connect:

Government, for better or worse, leads the country and sets the standard; whatever government is seen to get away with, the Private Sector is going to try to get away with, too.  The reverse is equally true; if government raises the ethical bar, they get to hold Private Sector players to the same standard.

Given the fact that there will be increasing pressure (for political gain by some, for headline traction by others) to hold Parties to account for staff, the traditional methods of circle-the-wagons or throw-under-the-bus aren't going to hold water; not if you want to get keep retaining the best talent.  The advantages one gets working for government will quickly be outweighed by the chance of getting a criminal record. 

The same, oddly enough, will likely hold true for political suppliers like polling firms and phone banks who might start pushing government to provide stronger regulation as a way to cover their own skins.

Necessity being the mother of invention and all, we could quickly get to a point where government is forced to train and account for their staff.

Of course, if Political Parties wanted to be proactive on the training/internal HR piece, they could get ahead of the curve and craft an example, scoring themselves a win out of this emerging picture.

Instead of waiting for the hammer to drop, Parties could invest in their future and put together internal training programs, peer support processes and staff transition strategies.  This would do a couple of value-added things:
- reduce the risk of poorly-considered decisions/actions burning the brand

- increase Party loyalty among staff both during their tenure and in whatever career path they follow next

- facilitate best-practice sharing

- institutionalize internal knowledge and experience, ensuring that wheels don't endlessly need to be reinvented.

More to the point, by setting a training example, Parties could more easily lean on Private Sector employers to do the same thing.  In fact, if governments wanted to get creative, they could play the role of stone in the soup and nurture a public-private partnership to develop an online training platform that would allow every citizen to beef up their skills.  From there, all kinds of possibilities emerge.  This in turn would feed in to the efficiency and access benefits to be had from e-government.

Of course, taking a proactive approach requires an acceptance by decision-makers that they aren't the best at what they do right now, something many ladder-climbers simply don't have time for.  It's far easier to download the problem than it is to take responsibility for the solution.

At least, it has been.  How the Michael Sona story plays out might encourage a few people to change their minds. 

They can wait and take their chances or they can plan ahead; how they choose to manage internal resources is always a great indicator of how they'd manage public ones and the public will be watching too.

UPDATED 23/11/13: As the event of this week have demonstrated, emails are becoming to political scandals what DNA evidence is to crime scenes.

But one way or another the episode stands to change the way governments conduct their backroom business - forcing their operatives to either seek even more clandestine means to manage crisis or to stick to arrangements that can withstand the light of day.  It would be nice but probably overly optimistic to hope they opt for the latter.

No promises, Ms. Hébert, but there are still some rational optimists in politics!

Have a Care for Canada's Democracy

“I think the view would be if you have the Prime Minister or a minister constantly responding to it, you’re inflating the issue to a point that you don’t want it inflated to particularly given the government’s strong denunciation of its involvement in all of this,” Mr. Powers said.

The Conservative Party of Canada would tell us Canadians don't care about the Robocall scandal. They say that actual Canadians don't care about the environment. They've even told us Canadians don't care about the operations of Parliament, the most important institution in our Canadian democracy.

Of course, they aren't about democracy. They're about empire-building. The CPC doesn't seem to have a lot of faith in Canadians. Or perhaps, is it just that they don't really care about us?

A senior Tory advisor once told me that the only thing politicians care about is power and that they'll do whatever they can get away with to get and retain it. Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy if ever I heard one.

How Your Brain Completes The Picture:

Raiendg tihs? Tath’s cfaootunibaln ta paly.

If you didn't recognize word #3, ask yourself; if it was a word you were familiar with, would you have?

Connecting what we see - what we sense - with what we know and feel is patterning, relationship-building.  It comes in many forms.

Look at romantic relationships as an example; how many of them fail because one partner assumes they put in more effort than the other?  Or taken another way - how many relationships succeed because one partner overestimates the contributions of the other?

And how does this relate to politics and the robo-call scandal?

Isn't the mind a wonderful thing?

Politics of the Human Animal

Group Think

“We found that the more deceptive an advertisement is, the more you are drawn to it.”

It’s like watching a car crash, or a school-yard fight; something isn’t quite right, so we’re drawn to it. 

Ever wonder why?

If you watch herd behavior, say a flock of fish, the grouping of individuals into a collective makes it harder for a predator to pinpoint a weak link or know where to strike.  Animals like a lion or a tiger will chase a specific, small or weak animal – the one that will also get left behind when the majority groups together and rushes off.  This is how evolution works – the weak individuals get consumed, the fittest survive.  In society, we call this bullying, getting ahead or politics as usual, depending on the context.  Individual palyers don't consciously know the impact their behaviour will have on the crowd and vice versa; it's there none the less.

People like to think that we are superior to and separate from nature and therefore, justified in doing whatever we please to our environment.  Not only is this wrong; the very reasons why people think such things is biological.   

We have an urge to group together whenever there is a perceived threat, just as someone experiencing acrophobia has an uncountable urge to lie down.  We have a tendency to compete more vigorously with each other when resources seem scarce.  The more occupied our heads are, the more likely we are to skirt over what we perceive as minor issues – until they don’t feel minor any more.

Politics

“What’s interesting here is that the moderately deceptive ads cause more activity during this second stage,” Wood says. That may be because highly deceptive ads are screened out more quickly and discarded as not meriting further attention.

People are busy, so politics isn’t of major interest to us.  It’s a big mass of incomprehensibleness, so we are less motivated to confront it.  Politicians count on this – they use the “nothing to see here” meme, because they don’t want to deal with scrutiny.  Or, they shout fire and try to redirect your attention.

For their end, politicians are frequently loath to deal with the big, messy challenges of our times – the Gordian Knots of politics like urban transit, poverty reduction, mental health.

Yet, when it becomes clear that our own interests are clearly at stake either positively or negatively, we become unwaveringly engaged.  We just need enough motivation to get there.  This can be a limited number of resources available (SALE! Come buy before it’s all gone!), a significant threat to safety (trouble lapping at our shores), control (i.e. “you’re withus or with the child pornographers” polarization) or my favourie, the desire not to be l left out of an emerging movement.

The question is, where does our threshold of self-interest lie?  If you’re a cut-throat entrepreneur or a narcissist, it’s pretty high.  You’re about you all the time.  If you’re a “why can’t we all get along” heart-bleeder, it’s pretty low.  There’s a reason shame is connected with empathy and neither rest at the top of behavioural traits of the 1%.

So – Stephen Harper plays an “ends justifies the means” game because he’s a worried, worried man – the world’s a threatening place to him.  He tries to distract the public from his team’s increasingly self-serving, socially-detrimental tactics by either saying “there’s nothing to see here” or shouts fire while pointing elsewhere.  He also walks away from big, messy problems like national healthcare integration because he doesn’t see it as relevant to him.  He’s predator of the populace, prey to his own fears.

For our part, we overlook prorogation, in-and-out, etc. because it isn’t seen as that relevant to us – it’s all an over there thing.  When it comes to robocalls, though – that’s a bit like a deceptive advertisement, isn’t it?  Now that it’s seen as a legitimate threat to our individual control, what have we done?  We’re circling the wagons.  Just as any group does when there’s a perceived threat.

The more convinced we are of our own internal sovereignty, the more we subject ourselves to unconscious, biological control.  The more we question ourselves and connect with others, the more actual influence we have.

That’s why education in general and understanding cognitive function in particular are so important.  Without knowledge, we’re slaves to our own natures.

Thinking Ahead

“for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.  To me it is a prison.”

Hamlet

 “Like everyone else, you were born into bondage.  Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch.  A prison for your mind.”

Morpheus, The Matrix

Canada is embroiled in the beginnings of an ethics/corruption scandal – some folk organized vote-suppression calls in a manner that was undeniably unethical and anti-democratic.  Shockingly, in this age of social media and information access, these calls are slowly circling back to bite the perpetrators in the ass.  Who could have seen that coming?  A bit prematurely, to be sure, but some other folks are making comparisons between this and Watergate, the mother of political scandals.  When there is so much evidence of how stunts like this can go horribly wrong, why would people continue to perpetrate them?

And why do we insist on sticking by “gate” as a suffix for any new political scandal that comes along?

Also in Canadian politics, we had a federal Minister trying to pass a security law that gives control over who pokes their noses into the e-bedrooms of the nation to unspecified parties, without much in terms of justification required.  The response has been been outrage from a generally complacent public.  The Minister reacted by telling an Opposition MP “he can either stand with us or with the child pornographers,” later denies having made the comment and eventually has to backtrack entirely.  There’s also evidence that this Minister has been aggressively defending a Bill despite not being entirely clear on the content.  What gives?

Related to the Toews Affair, a Liberal staffer took it upon himself to dig in to and expose Toews’ dirty laundry – setting himself up, robo-call like, to reap what he sowed.  Did this guy think his actions through?  If so, did he disregard the consequences and do it anyway?

Many outraged people got behind vikileaks, saying that it was okay to fight fire with fire, essentially reacting in the same way as Toews and the young staffer did; some are now suffering from an outrage hangover.  What caused the hyper-emotional reaction?

Then, there was #tellviceverything, a clever response to the Bill that invited people to overshare with Toews, making a mockery of both the Bill and Toew’s position.  #tellviceverything has been heralded as a brilliant piece of politicking and has also inspired a following.  Why?

Connecting The Dots

The global economy is in the bust part of the boom-and-bust cycle – a cycle we’ve been through before.  The Conservative Party of Canada is slowly imploding, a train wreck unfolding before our eyes, despite having the benefit of seeing the exact same scenario play out for the Opposition Liberals over the past decade.  Broadly, it’s like society is a macrocosm of Charlie Brown; we tell ourselves that this time, we’ll kick the ball and are repeatedly caught by surprise when we don’t.

How can we continuously not see this coming?

I could go on and on about history repeating itself, but that’s boring.  What we really want to know is, why?  What’s the math behind this?

By and large, people are linear thinkers.  We see life, business, even conversations as a trajectory, like a train heading somewhere.  Our carrot-and-stick approach to education, business and politics all serve to keep us on this linear track.  In reality, though, our world is a bit more like an equation – it’s multiple trains leaving multiple stations at a variety of times and speeds.  You can’t do the math if you don’t have all the variables.

If you could map out those variables, what would they look like?  Perhaps something like this:

 This is a map of a neural network.                                                 This a map of a societal network.

                                               This is a map of ideas.

 Here’s another story that’s slowly taking hold of the global subconscious; there’s a rising awareness of a mental illness crisis that’s costing us billions of dollars and impacting productivity, family life and social cohesion.  We’re trying to find new ways to treat the growing numbers of anxiety/depression cases, which is a lot like trying to cure lead poisoning.  At the same time, we’re looking for ways to make “crazy” people with conditions like bipolar disorder or Attention Deficit Disorder more normal. 

Normalizing = train wreck.

Empowering = filling in the dark corners of our cognitive, social and global maps.

By repeating the same behaviours over and over again, we’re building up social repetitive stress injuries.  On the individual level, these injuries manifest themselves as diagnoses of cognitive stresses like anxiety and depression.  On the social scale, we have protests, revolutions and a burgeoning economic meltdown.

The solution?  We need to add a few dimensions to our linear process – think outside the box, if you will.  Every journey needs a destination, but you can’t plan your trip without a map.