January 31st, 2010
I was invited to contribute a paper recently to help stimulate discussion within the British Council on the subject of ‘cultural relations: an idea whose time has come’.
There is already a lively contemporary debate about the need to upgrade our international practice to tackle the global issues of the 21st century. My impression is that cultural relations is in danger of being absorbed, or even eclipsed, in these discussions by the more recent concept of ‘public diplomacy‘ - even in the British Council’s own publications.
The British Council has been using an International Relations Positioning Spectrum - running from giving at one end, through helping, sharing, boasting and shouting to fighting at the other - to highlight the subtle and important role of cultural relations.
But in practice public diplomacy claims all of this territory short of military action and international aid.
Nevertheless, I believe that the skilled practice of ‘cultural relations’ is a core competence for the 21st century. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Cultural leadership, culture, governance
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January 30th, 2010
IFF hosted a fascinating seminar last week in Edinburgh with Professor Tim Jackson, Economics Commissioner on the UK Sustainable Development Commission and author of the controversial book ‘Prosperity without Growth: economics for a finite planet’ (just published by Earthscan).
Jackson suggests that society is faced with a profound dilemma. To resist growth is to risk economic and social collapse. To pursue it relentlessly is to endanger the ecosystems on which we depend for long-term survival.
He acknowledged that government found the notion of prosperity without growth difficult when the report was first launched (not great timing, in the midst of the April 2009 London G20 summit to kickstart global economic growth). But the reception elsewhere, across the board, has been enthusiastic and engaged. The report and Jackson’s subsequent book is ‘a call to consider the future’ and to develop ‘a new coherent vision of social progress’.
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Tags: climate change, economic regeneration, governance, growth, resilience, sustainability
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January 15th, 2010
In the next few weeks Tony Blair will appear before the Iraq Inquiry. Public interest is high, especially following the appearance of his former director of communications Alastair Campbell earlier this week. Tickets for Blair’s session are limited and will be allocated by ballot, as if this were a national sporting spectacle. One third are reserved for families of UK citizens dead or missing in Iraq.
He is scheduled to appear for a full day, giving evidence for six hours. It will be like an extended edition of Michael Buerk’s radio programme ‘The Choice’. Finally our former Prime Minister will be called to account for his actions and we will get to the bottom of his fateful decision to take us to war.
At least, that is the way it is billed. In reality we cannot expect anything quite so clear cut. We are not likely to hear anything that we have not heard before.
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Tags: complexity, constitution, governance, management, policy-making
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January 5th, 2010
UN Security Council (UN photo/Eskinder Debebe)
I liked the Washington Post’s headline for its reflections on the 2000s: ‘The decade we didn’t see coming’.
From hanging chads to the election of Obama; from a healthy budget surplus to a deficit measured in trillions; the flooding of New Orleans, the near collapse of the financial system, the inexorable rise of Google. Not to mention 9/11 and the two wars it sparked that remain unfinished as the decade turns. It has been quite a ride.
None of this was foreseen as we danced-in the new millennium across the globe and Y2K was beaten. As the Post put it: ‘history is always catching America off guard’.
The same is true closer to home. Which is one of the motivations behind a new project from Chatham House on ‘the changing dynamics of global power and influence’ over the next 20 years, against which background the UK must calibrate its own ‘international ambitions and choices’.
I attended one of the project working groups last month. The discussion made clear to me that we may well be at a crux point for the conduct of international relations. It feels like a classic moment of disruption: the existing system is failing, the new system is emerging, and we are faced with a dilemma about which system to back for the longer term.
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Tags: climate change, complexity, governance, international, management
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December 24th, 2009
Seasoned followers of IFF will recall the regular column in our journal Omnipedia giving the story behind some of our IFF prompt cards. It is still an ambition of mine to complete the stories for all 52. So this Christmas I have elaborated on three more, loosely corresponding to the three ‘thoughtful IFF gifits’ of bold, commonsense and mirth. You can see the results, and read the stories, here.
A merry IFFmas to all our readers.
Tags: IFF
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December 22nd, 2009
The latest edition of the IFF Newsletter, dIFFusion, has just been published. It provides an update on IFF’s activities during the second half of the year. Read about:
- further experience playing and developing the IFF World Game, including in partnership with the RSA and as a design tool for social innovation;
- our work on ‘Reslience 2.0′;
- developing Kitbag for children to enhance their capacity to deal with the demands of the modern world;
- the development of a Three Horizons Kit for education and for social inequalities; ‘redesigning the plane whilst flying it’ as a response to the annual winter surge in demand for health and social care;
- lots of work on health in Glasgow, NW England and further afield…
- and a host of fascinating meetings and events pushing forward our learning about today’s powerful times.
Also news of our plans to establish IFF as a charity in the US; and our beautiful handmade IFF mugs to reward supporters via our new donations page!
Tags: 3 Horizons, health, IFF, Kitbag, resilience, world game
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December 19th, 2009
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Albrecht Durer
I have been thinking recently about the rise and rise of the apocalypse narrative in how we talk about the way the world is going. It has been a potent theme in the run up to Copenhagen - the so called ‘dark green’ narrative. ’Collapse’ literature has become a new bookstore genre - and films like 2012 and The Road are picking up on the trend.
To crystallise these thoughts I wrote a pair of articles in The Scotsman this month. The first picked up on the recent floods in the North West of England and challenged us to consider that ‘getting things back to normal’ as quickly as possible might be a false hope. Perhaps these events presage a very different future, in which such extreme weather events are far more common? I made free reference to other developments on the collapse theme, like the Institute for Collapsonomics and the Dark Mountain project.
I was criticised for being too gloomy. So I wrote a second piece illuminating the original theme. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Add new tag, crisis, resilience, world game
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December 4th, 2009
IFF hosted a small private seminar at Ramsay Garden this week with Sir Kenneth Calman, chairman of the Calman Commission whose report Serving Scotland Better: Scotland and the United Kingdom in the 21st Century was published in June.
Our meeting was timely, coming as it did shortly after the release of subsequent white papers from the UK government and the Scottish Government setting out in the first case a response to Calman and in the second a commitment to a referendum in which ‘implementing Calman’ could be one of the options on offer.
We learned a good deal about the internal discussions that led to the consensus recorded in the report. It is evidently a careful consensus, taking into account what the Commission judged the political market could bear. One participant saw it as a catalyst in the constitutional debate: speeding up the chemical reaction while remaining unchanged itself. Our discussion lifted the veil just a little on how much further the report might have gone in different circumstances.
It is clear that we are now firmly in ‘devolution is a process not an event’ territory. So how might things play out in the years ahead?
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Tags: Calman, constitution, devolution, future, independence, Ramsay Garden, Scotland
Posted in governance | No Comments »
November 10th, 2009
The Equal Opportunities Committee of the Scottish Parliament published a report today on issues facing women in the criminal justice system. It brings to mind my earlier post about a memorable event we hosted earlier this year with artist Eva Merz, Baroness Viven Stern, former First Minster Henry McLeish and Ian Gunn, former Governor of Scotland’s only women’s prison Cornton Vale. The theme was female imprisonment - which Vivien Stern memorably described as ‘a sin against the future’.
This was one of a series of seminars inspired by our IFF Kitbag programme. As part of that programme we have been working with a group of women in HM Prison Cornton Vale to enhance their capacity to look after themselves and to help others - an ever more necessary requirement as the resources available for care and support in the prison are stretched closer to breaking point.
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Tags: culture, Kitbag, McLeish, Merz, prison, women
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November 9th, 2009
IFF hosted a small private seminar at Ramsay Garden recently with Dr David Milne, chairman and former CEO of Wolfson Microelectronics (left). We discussed the challenges of creating a sustainable high-tech company. David has kindly given permission for me to report the main themes of our discussion here.
David has some claim to be one of the most successful Scottish entrepreneurs of recent years. The company that he founded as a spin out from Edinburgh University in 1985 made a significant number of employees millionaires when it floated in 2003 and was turning over more than $200m a year when David finally stepped down as CEO in 2007.
The emphasis of our discussion was very much on longevity: Scotland’s tech business start up rate is up there with the Bay Area and Massachusetts, but - as one participant put it - once our companies get out into the big wide ocean they die.
This was an event packed with insight, much of which I am sure applies equally to companies in all sectors, and indeed - at least by analogy - to organisations beyond the business world.
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Tags: economic regeneration, governance, Ramsay Garden, resilience, sustainability
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