Sound bites, spin, elections & outcomes

Friday, 03 September 2010
In case you hadn’t already noticed, we’ve been having an election here in Australia. Most of the “dialogue” consisted of attack ads, rather than well argued policies and initiatives. Hence the phrase: “race to the bottom”.
So what’s the alternative?
Let’s take some examples from the online side of things. I want to look at some articles that people write, the responses to them and the pattern they make.

Antony Green is a well-respected election analyst. His articles are well grounded in evidence, with a minimum of speculation. He wrote a piece on ‘constitutional realities’ here, and another on the usefulness (or otherwise) of the two-party preferred vote, here.

Image: SXC - Svilen Milev

Being a blog, there are of course lots of comments. Most are complimentary, especially with respect to his “lucid, spin-free explanations” of how the various governance processes work. Some take him to task on various aspects of his articles. Generally these comments are all ‘evidence based’, like the articles. The balance of the comments are people arguing with each other, more or less politely. These comments tend to have less evidence and more heat.

Nick Ross is the is the ABC's new technology and games editor. He wrote an article here on the costs and benefits of the proposed National Broadband Network. He introduces a spread of information (including assumptions made) before stating priorities and drawing conclusions. None of this is remarkable, except that not much of it seemed to be done during the election campaign by the major political parties. Again, the comments vary from short and sweet/bitter to long and positive/negative.

I follow several blogs and I’ve noticed that the degree of moderation (where the blog author exercises control over whether comments will be published) is key to the quality of dialogue. No control always seems to lead to a downward spiral of unsupported statements and ‘arguments’ along the lines of the famous Monty Python sketch. This is the case with all the articles I’ve seen published by the online versions of the various Australian newspapers.

How then, could these discussions move beyond simple, repetitive statements of opinion? It strikes me that one key is the extent of moderation mentioned above. Another would be introducing the same kind of flow used in facilitated sessions: context, info gathering, info organising, determining priorities or key areas, and finally a conclusion with which people can live.

I’ll have to leave the mechanics of this to another time...

So, what tools and approaches for facilitative leadership have you used to provide evidence, harness heat, generate light and produce robust agreements? Please, go online and share your thoughts.

Go well!

David Jago