Last night the Oxford Integral Circle met up, and the topic for the night was the UK national election.
- What factors influence your decision on how to vote?
- How does Integral play a part in it?
A fascinating, and lively (!) discussion ensued, and the evening’s facilitator, Alex Goodall is going to write up our results for publication. But I wanted to write about my own personal insight.
Mostly frustrated by campaign rhetoric, I have tried to look deeper and beyond, in order to see if I can find out what they really stand for. But it’s hard. Candidates govern themselves strictly, and I doubt we get the chance to hear what they really think, or to explore how they arrive at their stances and policies.
I notice that I try to look for some clue as to their development level. Are they Tier 1 thinkers, or Tier 2? Of course, all I have to judge by is what they say and how they say it.
During the second debate, an audience member asked the candidates how they were going to tackle crime in the communities. The question reminded me of one of the sentence stems in Harthill’s Leadership Development Framework (LDF – a sentence completion test that is a pointer to your complexity of meaning making, or action logic). One of the LDF stems is: Crime and delinquency could be halted if… I thought that was pretty similar to what was being asked of the candidates.
I remember my surprise when David Cameron said something to the effect of, ‘We’ll make sure they know they’ll be punished, and fast, that they know they’ll go to prison.’ Something like that. That sort of answer is a rather low-rated response on the LDF. Then Nick Clegg said something to the effect that ‘we want families and communitites to work together, to improve the social systems to deal with the causes.’ Something like that. He spoke about how while young people are imprisoned, sometimes for quite minor offenses, they learn more ways to re-offend once they’re out. He thought the system was set up to teach delinquents how to be lifelong criminals. (I’m paraphrasing.) That’s a quite late stage action logic was of looking at what’s a pretty complex problem. I don’t remember what Gordon Brown said.
But here’s MY problem. How can I tell if what they say accurately reflects their level of development? Or, is the level of their message geared toward the level they think their constituents will want to hear or that they can understand? I don’t know how to tell. I’m going to watch the third debate tonight through this lens.
I wonder how it would work if I wrote a letter to my local MP (who answers letters) asking him a question in a way that’s intended to reveal his level of development? Or, convince government that senior members must take the LDF and have their results published. Hah!