Your Council: Unskilled or unaware?

From our friends at Wikipedia:  The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is. Dunning and Kruger attributed this bias to an inability of the unskilled to recognize their own ineptitude and evaluate their own ability accurately.…

We’re pleased to announce that the name of your local Council candidate is……….largely irrelevant

There are various groups across the country who lobby and campaign for significant electoral reform. Much of this campaigning is, understandably, aimed at the national level and changing the way governments are elected.I have to agree that the national system needs a serious review; whether any party elected through the current archaic system will ever…

Council Lifers

At some of the councils I have had the pleasure of working at we’ve often been kind enough to recognize those who have served the authority for long periods of time. Ten, twenty and thirty years long service awards are not that unusual – even today. These awards are often heartfelt and involve the obligatory…

Here’s to the Council Crazies!

Today’s post is more light-hearted and certainly less critical than most. My usual style is to make general criticisms of the dearth of quality leaders within local government, to have a general pop at the systems which restrict better public services and to highlight some of the more non-sensical council approaches to work. When I…

Deskilling the Council

Regular readers of my posts will have noticed that in many ways I am a bit “old school”. I wear this badge with no small amount of pride; although I don’t necessarily see myself as a dinosaur I do concede that I do look at “change” within the public sector and have something of a…

Council Zombies

At my last council me and a few of the more “waggish” officers instituted a new game to get us through the many, many meetings that we attended. Essentially it was a case of doing anything we could do to entertain ourselves during otherwise seemingly endless periods of boredom. The game itself was called “rent-a-zombie”.…

Council Ostriches

I recently had recourse to contact a number of councillors at one particular local authority. I signposted them to my blog for them to take a look at my bitter and resentful ramblings so at least they had an opportunity to (I hoped) listen to an alternative view. This being in contrast to the perhaps…

Democracy: The last taboo (pt 3 of 3)

After the first two parts of my rant on democracy based on “Beyond Democracy” by Frank Karsten and Karel Beckman you will be pleased to hear that it is almost over. Here is part three examining more myths about our precious democracy that I hope will encourage more people to think about the Western world’s…

Democracy: The last taboo? (pt 2 of 3)

Following on from part one of my post based on “Beyond Democracy” by Frank Karsten and Karel Beckman. Here is part two of my diatribe on some of the myths associated with democracy. Many of these are ones that I have heard from the mouths of councillors. Invariably the winning ones of course, who have…