📜 Fairness is not a universally understood concept

The ability to get things done comes if you spend 80% of your time working on the people, and defining the problem. I remember reading advice from someone who worked in the Civil Service for 30 years. Their view on what people working in policy get wrong is that they spend 80% of their time on the solution: the policy.

People want to know that the policies that we implement are fair and effective, but people’s perceptions of what those two things mean are different. You cannot get to the root of what different people within a community would consider to be a good or a fair future without getting them in the room and having them hash that out.

We run the risk of citizen’s juries being used in a similar way to consultations of the past, where you pull together a citizen’s jury on whatever it might be, you gather lots of interesting opinions but you do not action what comes from that conversation. And similar to everything that has gone before you end up with a group of people who were engaged, spent their time in a room thinking really creatively about something that needs to happen, but you didn’t act on it. And you see a further erosion of the trust in government. 

It is a conscious decision to try to use social media more. You can work on a report and disappear down a rabbit hole of literature and policy reviews. Eventually the output from that gets buried in a very long report that no one ever reads.