Complexity Society
Newsletter – August 2007

20 minutes with Gordon

I sent out an email asking you to consider the following “thought experiment”:

Given your personal understanding of the principles of Complexity, if you were to get a 20-minute audience with Gordon Brown, what key messages would you try to get across?

Carol Webb:
First of all I'd want to tell Gordon Brown how impressed I was with his 5 new eco towns initiative, and say 'more of that kind of thing please'. I'd want to ask him to aim to encourage openness, transparency, trust and inclusive social norms during his term in office, and to try and inculcate this in his own way of handling things as a prime minister, as well as in the cabinet office and society at large. I'd want him to re-open a debate on diversity in order to be pro-diversity and actively working towards a tolerant society, where real multilateral consultation could take place to give real creative, bottom-up solutions a chance to emerge. I'd want him to concentrate on creating an enabling, empowering social environment in the UK, where social inclusion, education, health care and social responsibility were high on the agenda. It would be important to stress that only paying lip service to 'listening' to people was not enough, people do have to be given a voice, but that is just a start, this then has to be channeled effectively. Multilateral creative decision making across the boundaries of diversity is the route to explore with vigour. I'd like Gordon to also play a bigger role in UK affairs than Tony seemed to, and to not place people's lives at risk in wars in the future anywhere in the world. More than anything though: be genuine.

Chris Ragg:
A distinct or overlapping possibility might be for each of us to look at the 2nd edition of Systems Failure by Jake Chapman (free download from Demos) and pick the bits they would use or build upon in assembling their shot for Gordon Brown. (Who, incidentally, just yesterday laid the foundation stone for the Digital Lab at Warwick http://www.warwickdigital.org.uk/home and http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/wmg/mediacentre
/wmgnews/gordon_brown_unveils/

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