Finding our voice

In conversation yesterday with a senior figure from business about why large IT projects so often go wrong we got talking about complicity, checks and balances, and ultimately the prospect of collective responsibility. Our conversation touched on many of the challenges we face in the modern world but we kept coming back to how passive people have become and how little dissent there is these days.

We rely too much on forces outside ourselves to dictate what we think, feel and say. Whether in the form of politicians, the media, or even the power of consensus around us, we defer to voices other than our own. We need to reclaim this right to think for ourselves and exercise this skill at every opportunity. We need to think more, think better, share what we think more, and work things out together.

This process of waking up, finding our voice, and improving our collective understanding is the still untapped potential of the web and of blogging. This is what my work is about.

As polling day starts here and many of us struggle to know who to vote for other than the self dubbed “natural party of government”, I am struck yet again how broken our current approach to democracy is and how far from our new found potential…