Brave New Dawn 2.0?....or ‘1984’, ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘House of Cards’ rolled into one?

What does this political maelstrom tell us about Leadership, Democracy and Human Behaviour?

There must be more than one author and film-maker out there, sculpting the material that reality is currently throwing at us, into some blockbuster that would have been hitherto unbelievable had we not just witnessed these events for ourselves. Indeed, we are all bit-part players in this political drama unfolding before us, although the Big Question must be whether we profit from our role in this, or whether we are to become unfortunate out-of-pocket victims…

There are plenty of doom-sayers out there, intent on convincing us that we are facing the apocalypse, and ‘it’s all someone else’s fault’: the Right, The Left, the Young, The rest of Europe… The cacophony of blame is deafening. 'We’ve all been conned, been lied to, or at best, misled. The politicians… they'll all incompetent, or arrogant, or mad…'

But what can we do about it? Are we really victims? Do we stand idly by, waiting for sanity to return, or is it the end as we know it?…..or is it not all so bad after all?

We all know we have a choice here – a choice on how we react to events – so let’s try and reframe what we see…

We are being taught some lessons, that’s for sure. As voters, what are we learning? Or as workers, as employers, as members of our community, as parents….what can we learn, and then what can we do differently as a result?

What are we being taught?...here’s my view, for what it’s worth:

• Be careful what you wish for (as if we didn’t already know this)
• Don’t assume all Party Leaders are good Leaders. They get appointed for all the wrong reasons sometimes...
• Don’t underestimate the power of salesmanship over statesmanship. Stupid statesmen/women can be wrong-footed by passion and purpose, however badly-delivered it seems at first.
• Don’t expect the young to do what we want, when we want it – they’ll wake up eventually and surprise us all, when we least expect. But ultimately, they're not stupid - they won't let us down.
• If you want to run a referendum, only ask questions the public are qualified to answer and that drive the right outcomes. ‘Ask a stupid question’…and don't be surprised at what happens!
• A two-party system - for as long as it prevails - doesn’t always encourage the right behaviour from an intelligent, non-partisan digital-savvy electorate – on either side of the Atlantic! No point in encouraging more people to vote, if the choices we give them are no longer appropriate for the world we live in now, or if it's only because they hate the alternative.

Blaming the world will get us nowhere, for sure. Everything that’s occurring is not just us ‘being unlucky’, or others ‘being stupid’. There’s an ironic symmetry to many of the events we are seeing. Almost as if the Universe is applying some ‘self-correcting’ forces as a way of compensating for some of the stupid actions that we – consciously or otherwise – have been party to. Whether it’s the economy, the environment or society, as a democracy – however badly in need of updating that democratic system might be - in my view we generally get what we deserve.

So, we should just deal with it. Get on with it. Adapt!

We need to accept the world for what it is, look for the positives, and put positive energy back into the system. We might even be surprised that some of the things we didn’t vote for, turn out to be what we needed all along.

Because let’s face it, the stuff we did vote for doesn’t seem to have delivered for us anyway, does it?...