The leaders we need

If government and its institutions are to improve, better ways to assess the quality of people who run them must be found. The current means of selection, which depends on how well a person performs on sound bite driven television, is clearly too chancy.

An old king once married a young woman who, after a while, started to pine for the excitement of the marketplace in the nearby town, which was some miles away. She loved to shop. The king eventually said she could go, provided she went with his trusted retainer, Nasrudin. So Nasrudin set off one morning walking beside the beautiful young woman who rode on his donkey.

The journey took four hours. Then she shopped until the market stalls closed and then she chatted with her women friends in the town. The consequence was that the king spent a very anxious night worrying about his wife who he had expected back the same day. He was exasperated when Nasrudin, with the king's wife riding his heavily laden donkey, turned up the next morning. Nasrudin apologised and said by way of explanation that he couldn't get his donkey to travel any faster.

The next time the wife said she wanted to go into town the king ordered a young man who had a fast strong horse to take her. So the queen mounted the horse with the young rider and they rode off in a cloud of dust, leaving the king confident he would see his wife again 'ere nightfall.

But she didn't return that night, nor the next. Nor the next, or the one after that. In fact she returned with the young man a week later. The king turned to Nasrudin and said, "I realise now how your donkey is much more reliable than that horse."

"It's not the means of transport you should be looking at," said Nasrudin, "It's the quality of the person you ask to use it."

This story illustrates vividly the concept of quality, and that it is the quality of politicians and civil servants individually, not their policies, that our attention should be focused on. They should have the spare capacity to work disinterestedly for the whole community and sufficient humility to be able to draw upon the expertise of other people. And, as said earlier, we must not mistake status for real knowledge. In future the quality of the people we elect to represent us as Members of Parliament will have to be emphasised, rather than their hypothetical plans for 'change' being the criteria. We should be highly suspicious of plans that have never been tried and tested and that are not secured in any genuine knowledge base. If individuals are sound, they will harmonise easily with what needs to be done, as happens in any successful enterprise. Our current problem is one of an abundance of unsound, even mad, people in positions of power. When real knowledge exists, political parties do not have to indulge in dreaming up new manifestos, 'spinning', arguing amongst themselves and splitting up into factions.

There is an interesting parallel between the worlds of psychotherapy and politics. Each of the hundreds of different models of therapy have little bits of truth in them which they institutionalise and try to operate in isolation from, or opposition to, other models. The same thing happens in politics. It is clear in psychotherapy that all of the models cannot be right (hence the evolution of the human givens approach). Likewise, the various different political approaches cannot be right. Traditional parties align themselves along a left to right dimension. Those on the left seek to protect the rights of the majority at the expense of the individual, whilst those on the right seek to protect the rights of the individual at the expense of the majority. Each party recognises some human needs, but by failing to recognise others, which also need to be met in balance, they only succeed in destabilising society further when they attain power. When everyone can see what needs to change, and how, we can set about doing it. The human givens needs audit gives us a benchmark against which to measure all plans and policies.

With this project, we will not, as failed reformers in the past have done, merely claim that we have a wonderful idea for how to reform institutions, and demand support for untested theories. Our effort should be demonstrable in the real world. Those already involved with the project have begun researching solutions for some of the major problems we have discussed, starting with those in the mental health professions. We have already developed a new form of therapy that operates from the human givens approach, which is proving more effective than existing models, as we would expect since it derived from bigger organising ideas. (MindFields College is teaching this approach throughout the UK and Ireland and more than 150,000 professionals have already attended seminars and workshops on it.)

People working with these ideas are already showing how mental health can be improved relatively easily by helping people suffering severe mental illness more effectively.

They can show how they are lifting depression, resolving trauma (including post-traumatic stress disorder) and other anxiety conditions, work with people who are self-harming, addicts and angry people. Even psychotic patients are routinely being treated more humanely and, in the majority of cases (if they are reached early enough), can quickly become functioning members of society again, without any need to take mind-damaging medications for the rest of their lives.[96]

As the demand for this approach to primary care mental health services spreads, we envisage that it will have a positive effect on other approaches that will either adapt to it or have to be abandoned.

Research is also underway into how education can be improved through the adoption of human givens principles in schools and universities. So far, many head teachers and other educationalists have responded enthusiastically to these new ideas.

To show how much better children and young people could be educated using the human givens approach, we need to encourage schools that are already working in tune with human nature and the way people learn, and develop more of them. Teaching children at their own pace in a way that stimulates their curiosity (as a small minority of innovative schools are already doing) will demonstrate that pupils can learn in an organic way and achieve higher standards of emotional maturity and clear thinking than current practice expects of them. They will also gain a knowledge base for life that conventional institutions currently don't provide.

This project will also reveal how those teachers who work in tune with the human givens (as many do, even if they don't call it that), enhance their own skills and derive more satisfaction in the process. A school that employs organic thinking, where the people responsible for its effectiveness on a day to day basis are free to run it, will ask whether a particular change will undermine the teachers' sense of volition or increase it. Will it bring down their stress levels by making them feel more in control, or will it raise them by minimising their control input? Will it give them status or take status away? Will it make their work more meaningful, so that they look forward to each day at work, or make them feel like drudges? If a change doesn't meet teachers' needs as well as those of children, it won't benefit either group. Teachers and pupils and the school as a whole end up functioning at seriously sub-optimal levels.[97]

This is just the start. Now the project is also attracting people to it who are thinking about ways to manage our economic, legal and political systems more effectively by attuning them more closely to real human needs. There is, of course, a huge amount of work still to be done and the resources of many gifted people will be needed to help to plan for the reformation of institutions on a national scale. But we believe it is incumbent upon our generation to do whatever we can to ensure the survival of our species.

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