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"I know people are going to say 'Oh, your polls are wrong, you don't know what you're doing,'" said Bozinoff.  "But in my mind, the Liberals kind of dropped the ball and the Tories just, you know, beat them at their ground game and got their supporters out."

A pollster is telling us that there's nothing wrong with the methodology they use to forecast election results - it's the people who simply don't get how the system is supposed to work.

Why does this sound familiar?  Oh wright - it's because we've heard this same message before:

"But the methodology does work," Wright told the Star in a telephone interview form the Ipsos head office in Paris.  "We do $2.6 billion of research a year out of this corporation, and if it was all broken no one would be using it."

A confident salesman, that Wright; he knows just what to say to convince us he's boss at this prediction stuff.  Of course, it's sales, not polling, that's his primary function - he does what he does to make money first, to provide useful information for public consumption second.  The win comes before accomplishment; the what comes before the why.

Know where else this is common?  In politics.  Politics, too, is about sales; politicians are competing for votes and Parties are competing for seats in much the same was as puffed up peacocks compete for the attention of peahens.

Politics is no longer about debating policy, it's about besting opponents.  Democracy has become pugilism; the last man standing gets declared winner, regardless of what they did (or didn't do) to get there.  Capitalism is free-market economics; if we strip out regulation and focus on competition, the best of whatever will clearly emerge as victor.

Right?

If aggressive competition is the best way of doing things, why do we have a democratic deficit and a growing wealth gap?  Why have we come to a point where the success of the economy has been deemed of higher value than the well-being of the people it's meant to support - resulting in structural deficits and healthcare woes?

"We can no longer trust in the unseen forces and the invisible hand of the market."

The Pope, a man who serves as the head of the Catholic Church, theoretically a conduit to God, is telling us we can no longer trust in the invisible hand.

The sellers of the world are becoming increasingly aggressive, increasingly belligerent at the same time as the services they sell are increasingly failing to achieve their objectives.  The system that is supposed to raise all ships is instead lighting the kindling of revolution.

And the people we look to to tell us everything is alright are increasingly telling us we're on our own.

We are on our own, but we're not alone.  After all, we have each other.

Many hands make light work, when they work together.  That's the big secret, the answer we keep searching for.  

We need only become conscious of it.

Catholicism and the Circular Serpent

"We do not live better when we flee, hide, refuse to share, stop giving and lock ourselves up in our own comforts," he writes. "Such a life is nothing less than slow suicide."

Well said, Pontiff.

I'd add just one note - that suicide is cyclical.  There's a way to break that cycle, but we're not there yet.

I See You

"Look at me", we say.  Look at me.

Look at my problems.  Look at my needs.  Look at what I can do, what I can't do, what I have to offer, what I want from you.

"Look to yourself", we say.  

Sort our your own problems.  Be your own agent.  Prove to me you've got something worth my time, but don't waste it.

We expect the world to function from the outside in, with us at the centre.  We often expect others to function the same way, putting themselves at the centre of their own worlds.

Yet we live in one world, on common ground.  When an each man for himself approach doesn't work,    we get frustrated the world isn't fair.

But ask yourself - how often do we see each other?

Flip the circle; start from where you stand and start exploring beyond.  Live consciously.

We aren't each the centre of separate universes.  We're part of something much bigger than the sum of its parts.

Pope Francis Cribs Jack Sheppard

"We can no longer trust in the unseen forces and the invisible hand of the market."

 - Pope Francis

Just think about that for a second.  

The Pope is blasting the idolatry of money like it's the new golden calf and criticizing the tyranny of capitalism - putting in to sharp words concepts we've heard from every level.  

When you put money first, you put people second, which is what we have done.  There is more focus placed on the strength of "the economy" and more faith placed in those who generate wealth for themselves than there is in that nebulous concept of the people the system is meant to serve in both sickness and health, in good times and bad.

Individuals are being told they need to be more aggressive, more sales-oriented, more driven and work longer hours to make more money.  Only by dedicating their entire existence to the pursuit of wealth and the propping up of the economy can they be deemed successful.  

Those who can't are discriminated against, no matter what barriers of geography or caste, body or mind may impede them.  Those who are competitors are equally discriminated against.  Those who seem to play by different rules are deemed threats to the established order.  

It's survival of the fittest, except wealth has become the new metric for fitness.

Except far too many of those wealthy, successful people are being exposed as charlatans, rule-breakers who made money by bucking the system at the expense of others.  

There should be no surprise in this.  Survival of the fittest isn't about pushing everyone to excel; it's about eliminating the weak so only the strongest pass on their genes.  Only we aren't eliminating the weak, are we?  Everything from eyeglasses to antibiotics gives us unnatural advantage.  Across the board, acceptance of inherited wealth as a legitimate benchmark for success is being being rejected, just as the divine right of kings was before it.

There are those who stand against public services and public healthcare and believe in tough justice measures.  These are forces looking to identify and target "the other" as threats to stability.  Rob Ford is defiantly one of these, despite his come-to-Jesus moment.  He, like many angry people out there, just wants undesirables to disappear.   

Until these folk get called out sinners themselves, that is - then they beg for forgiveness or reject justice entirely.

When justice fails, what then?

Either we all deserve empathy or we don't.  Each person for themselves has been demonstrated not to work - not in a social context.  We can live together, or die alone.

We may be strangers to each other - we come from different places, different cultures and different languages, we see the world through different lenses.  But we're all here now, not cast upon separate islands but standing on common ground.  

And to an increasing degree we're all feeling like outcasts in our own land.  

At all levels, we recognize the burning platform closing in around us.

Yet, everyone is talking about how the system is broken like it's someone else's problem, like someone else is supposed to come and fix it for us.  The implication in this is that we don't need to change what we're doing; after all, we're only human.  There's someone inhuman who is at fault for our troubles - they just need to be identified and punished and what's ours needs to be restored.  Which brings us back to discrimination.

What does this remind me of?

It's been six days and we're all still waiting.  Waiting for someone to come.  But what if they don't?  We have to stop waiting.  We need to start figuring things out.

We're not lost; we've simply forgotten to look around.  The world hasn't closed off to us, it's been laid bare in increasing detail.  What we seek will not come down from on high; it will emerge from within.

Confidence Vs Trust: Lessons from #AskJPM for Canada's Consultations

Twitter is like a party where you can't just show up and say it's yours and take over.  You don't walk in and say 'Hey, JPMorgan in the house!  Ask me a question.' without first looking at who's in the room.

What is the difference between confidence and trust?

Confidence is a projection; it's a way of presenting yourself that is meant to tell people you know what you are doing, they just need to step back or follow directions and let them do their thing.

We have a lot of confident people running the show in government, in the Private Sector and in bridging fields like Public Relations and Government Relations.  These are people who are absolutely convinced they have the answers and/or the fortitude to make things happen.  The flip-side to this equation, however, is that they feel a sense of entitlement to the levers of power; they are smart, we are dumb.

These kinds of people don't ever make mistakes - how could they?  That would undermine the confidence people are supposed to have in them.  Instead, mistakes get off-shored, downloaded or thrown under the bus with convenient scapegoats.  Equally, when presented with a question they can't answer or aren't prepared to answer, it's considered bad form to say "I don't know" - to admit you're not omniscient is to admit weakness, a no-no when it's confidence that defines your brand.

Confidence is fundamentally about superiority - feeling more important than others and communicating that message to the public at large.  In the workplace, the confident people are the boss - no need for the team to think, because they have all the answers.  

In public consultations or any sort of service transaction, the same holds true - people are consumers and the confident men are sales agents; when discussing new policies or system reforms, the trick is to sell, with confidence, the changes you are making to their world, not to get input.  

One of the most successful businessmen I know, who in the grand scheme of things is really just a middling player, once gave me this nugget of advice: "you don't have to know what you're talking about, you just need to sound confident while you're saying it."

Stephen Harper is really good about sounding confident on everything from the soundness of his economic strategy to his lack of knowledge about the Senate Scandal.  Rob Ford is equally confident, even ebullient as he talks about not being a user of crack cocaine and having never missed a day of Council.  

The truth behind all these statements is being chipped away at, but these confident men hold true to notion that so long as you keep your message simple, say it often and say it with confidence, people will eventually just go along with it.

But people aren't going along with it.  They hear the voices of single-minded confidence and see the world around them increasingly at odds with what they're hearing.  

This is our community; without us, there's no community.  If we can't get what we want, I'm sorry, but we need not work with you guys.

There's a reason why voter turnout is decreasing and why decision makers are increasingly viewed with disdain in our country, and in countries around the world.   The jig is up; partially thanks to social media, the behind-the-scenes sausage-making process of politics is increasingly coming to light.  

We're seeing that the confident messages we're hearing are empty.  We're told to trust our leaders, because they have all the evidence that matters, but we're also seeing not only how they don't have the evidence, but are discarding any facts that don't fit their message.  Sometimes, they are contradicting themselves, with the new message delivered as confidently as the old one, despite the fact that they are completely the opposite.  

Harper's stance on who knew what when in relation to the Senate Scandal is a great example of this.  It doesn't matter if he tells us his position has been clear all along, with confidence - we can see that's not the case simply by stacking his various statements up against each other.

In business, the usual suspects are lining up inside of fragmenting fields, like Public Relations, insisting they have the expertise to message better than competitors in this changing field, focusing on the confidence piece.  Yet they're using the exact same language as any of their peers.

The public has grown wary of confident tones - we have grown sceptical of righteousness.  We no longer believe the talk when we hear politicians promise new eras of transparency, because we've heard that line before.

Trust is not about projecting uber-confidence and convincing people just to follow along; trust is about competence.  As such, particularly now when people have so lost faith in decision makers, leaders can't walk in to a room, talk boldly about their abilities and expect people to immediately line up behind them.  Trust has to be earn and for that, competence and commitment need to be demonstrated.

There are several consultations going on right now at the municipal (Toronto) and provincial (Ontario) level; these consultations are meant to solicit public feedback on how to better present public services, how to do Open Government and how to create an actual dialogue between citizens and policy makers rather than a one-way message track.

Few people are ready to believe these processes are sincere - why should they?  Sincerity has never been part of the equation before.  Studies released today are bringing forward the same recommendations raised in the last several cycles of studies, meaning the recommendations found within have not been acted upon.  We see structural deficits growing, we see the strangulation of the middle class and yet we hear policy makers saying they have all the answers (and their opponents have nothing but harmful, self-serving agendas).

But there are also an emerging pocket of leaders and teams that aren't focused on hyper-partisan, hyper-confident message tracks and who recognize that trust must be earned and that the best way to lead is by example.  

The people behind the Open Ontario and Toronto Strong Neighbourhood Strategies are conscious about the perception challenges they face.  As such, they are working hard to be open, transparent and to actively listen.  They even realize that who they put forward to engage in conversations sends a message to their prospective audiences and are trying to match people to the crowd.  

This is not a one-off project for them, a paycheque they collect and move on from; open governance and citizen engagement is a passion.  People like Fenicia Lewis-Dowlin, Zeena Abdulla, Leslie Church and even Don Lenihan have recognized we are at a turning point in society, a culture shift that they want to play a positive part in.

But they realize it's not something they can do alone.  If anything, they recognize their job is to be crystals to focus attention, stones in the collaborative soup.

That's the key difference between confidence and trust, which is the same difference between being a boss and being a leader;

Bosses project confidence and demand subservience.  Leaders work hard to earn trust and empower their teams.

Communication is a tricky business; it means thinking differently, challenging your own point of view and thinking laterally, which is the exact opposite of what we've been taught to do in a goal-oriented society.

It all comes down to this: we need to start figuring things out.  We need to figure out how we're going to survive here.  We may have been strangers before, but we're all here now, together.  If we can't sort out how to live together, we will die alone.

Acquarian Conspiracy Redux: In a Healthy Society, There Is Justice For All:

"Too often, their (adolescents and young adults) first opportunity to access care results from an encounter with police or a trip to the emergency room.  Enabling young adults to get help early will reduce the chances that their condition will lead to substance abuse or attempts at suicide."

A lack of proper real-time interventions and proactive supports leads to unsustainable stresses among young and old alike.  As the pressure cooker boils over, the resulting behaviours end up getting noticed by police officers who are often as not are the first and last contact Emotionally Disturbed People (EDPs) have with the system.

The surveillance team, one source said, was under strict instructions to "box in" the mayor if they suspected he had been drinking.  Some had nightmares about a drunk-driving mayor killing an 8-year-old while under police watch.

Police have unusually high divorce rates.  There are many reasons for this - they work variable shifts and can be called in on emergencies, meaning that they are, by the nature of what they do, married to their jobs - spouses can feel like they are the third wheel in the relationship.

It's all well and good to tell police they need to be virtuous, disciplined and calm all the time and that what their ultimate reward is the service they provide.  It's still a hell of a sacrifice to make with nowhere near enough public recognition.  

We're far more interested in focusing on the negative, Sammy Yatim side of policing - what matters to us is where our rights are infringed moreso than how they're upheld.

Tikkun olam is not achieved by treating symptoms and growing frustrated at their growing complexity. We realize a healthy society by identifying the disease and curing it.

It might not feel like it, most days, but that's a process underway right now - not only in the justice system, but in the way governance works, the way human and social services are provided, the way people are empowered and included within society.  

The picture emerging is promising, though there is now a definitive race between those trying to fix the system and those agitating to burn it down.

It's a cycle we've seen before; when you're lost, after all, you do tend to walk in circles.  Time will tell if the stars are finally aligning to provide the direction we have been waiting for.   

Should It Not Always Be Thus?

Among them:

Police, correctly anticipating intense media interest, carefully wrote and partitioned a lengthy affidavit detailing their investigation into the mayor’s friend Alexander “Sandro” Lisi and Ford so that contentious parts, such as wiretap evidence, could be cleanly censored without affecting the narrative.

Detectives conducted a “by the books” investigation, led by a top homicide detective, anticipating that all of the details could potentially become public through the courts.

Police sought out a respected, moderate judge to handle search warrants and properly escalated their surveillance tactics as required, knowing that any overstepping might cause later problems.

A surveillance crew was given strict orders to “box in” the mayor if drinking and driving was suspected.

I know that it's difficult to be at the top of your game, all the time - that's a flaw in job descriptions and workloads.  If there are employees at any level, in any position that are considered to be going above and beyond by following the rules, something is amiss.