Engineering a better parliament

Our politics always seems to solve a problem in the way - because our politicians tend to think in a particular way. We need politicians with a more varied approach to problem-solving if we want to fix our problems.

A thing I've been thinking about a lot of late is Scotland's inability to do things well. We seem repeatedly to be bad at putting together deliverable action plans which work. Things keep failing when it seems, from the outside at least, to be easy enough to get them right.

I've also been putting this in a global context – it's not just Scotland, the Western World is increasingly filled with failed projects, under-performance and snarl-ups. And then a review of a book in the weekend's FT helped to crystallise a particular viewpoint which I think is crucial.

Really simply put, the most common professional background of a politician in China is 'engineer'. In the US the most common professional background for a politicians is massively, overwhelmingly 'lawyer'.

In fact the book (written by an astute expert who has lived half his life in either country) contains the quote that the US has a system of government “of lawyers, by lawyers, for lawyers”. Engineering is a profession which is largely about making things work; law is a profession which is about slowing things down or trying to prevent them altogether.

This simple point left me with a cascade of questions and thoughts. Do we have any engineers at all in the Scottish Parliament? What are we – a parliament of former public sector bureaucrats? Is this linked to the lack of a 'let's get this right' mindset in the Scottish Parliament?

Are we trapped in a cycle where people who worked in a system where the primary purpose of everything is to fill in paperwork are then becoming parliamentarians who still think filling in paperwork is the main purpose of government? (That's how you get statistics, and that's how governments run – statistic-management.)

We posit an awful lot of reasons for failure which are not about this question of fundamental mindset. We don't ask if politicians might be approaching questions from the wrong direction altogether.

The reason why I think this idea of the kinds of expectations politicians bring to their parliaments is so important is that it makes consistent sense right across the Western world. German politics is a politics of lawyers, political scientists and public administration. France is overwhelmingly a parliament of white collar workers, largely from legal and administrative backgrounds.

Why has this happened at the international level? Well, one obvious answer is that it certainly suits global power elites. They like democracies which are caught up in process, which move slowly, which are populated by people who are used to working for clients, any clients. Law is a brilliant way to not get things done.

It's probably also just self-reinforcing – this bureaucratic model of politics and government has taken hold and so you'd expect it to regenerate itself. If bureaucrats made politics bureaucratic, it sort of make sense to recruit bureaucratic candidates for politics.

It's just that this whole model is not very good. Weird as it may sound, I'm actually a fan of bureaucracy – with conditions attached. Effective project delivery requires clarity and the ability to judge where things are and why they are there. Good, effective record-keeping is crucial for that. After all, creating a plan is itself bureaucracy.

But that's the condition – bureaucracy must serve a task, a goal. Bureaucracy can never be the goal itself. And in the sphere of law and public sector management, too often bureaucracy is the goal in itself – for the literary among you, think Jarndyce v Jarndyce.

So how do we break this cycle of people with a bureaucratic approach to things making politics more and more bureaucratic at the expense of effective outcomes? It is quite easy to say what it would look like if we had got this right, but it's harder to suggests ways to get there.

Why? Because this is all culture change stuff, and culture change is notoriously hard. At university, politics is often quarantined in the faculties of humanities and social science. I've heard lots of people studying sociology or politics or history who say they are interested in going into politics but I can't think of a lot of times I've heard an engineering student or a medical student or a product design student say that.

And you don't hear the commentators say any of this either. People who talk about politics will indeed often argue that we have too narrow a field of skillsets in parliament – but for reasons ideological and stupid, they think that that only means 'more business leaders'.

Actually, despite what they say, the proportion of business leaders in parliament probably isn't that far off the proportion in society, and it is an awful, awful long way away from obvious that the business leader has some unique skillset which is wildly useful for legislatures. Accountants handle money better, marketing people do bullshit better, HR professionals do people management better.

“I think we may need to change the mindset of politics from outside politics”

So we don't attract enough practically-minded people and we don't have a discussion about why it would be good if we could attract more practically-minded people. How, therefore, do we change mindsets on the way we think about this, about innovation and project management and delivery and vision?

First of all, I think it unlikely that we can simply say 'engineers' (I use that as a catch-all concept) 'come and join our shit game'. When people ask me how to get young people involved in existing politics I always say that you don't, you give them the space and power to create their own politics. Why would they adapt themselves to something we ourselves groan about constantly? Another meeting anyone?

So I amn't convinced that people who know how to do things, make things work, change things, are going to come flooding into parliament because we tell them that it's time they sat in more meetings too. I think we may need to change the mindset of politics from outside politics.

To be clear, I've been thinking about this for no more than a couple of days now so I have no illusions that I've worked this out or I know what to do. But let me float one idea that I think could be interesting, could work, could actually be really exciting.

Why don't we build and fund a public innovation campus? It wouldn't be bargain basement, but it needn’t totally bankrupt us. And it could really alter how people see the interaction between the realms of the practical and the political.

This is how I'd work it. I'd create some kind of place with accommodation and multi-use buildings that can house computing or design or workshops or prototyping. I'd get a bunch of practically-minded big thinkers and give them a job overseeing the place.

Each year I'd then offer one or two year placement opportunities to anyone graduating from relevant subject areas – engineering, electronics, energy systems, architecture, product design, graphic design and visual art, coders and software engineers, possibly medics and pure science graduates and anything else with a practical creative bent.

There would perhaps be, I don't know, 500 of them and they would then stay on campus (food, accommodation and pocket money – co-location is probably key) and the overseers would set a bunch of challenges based on public policy conundrums. Participants could then choose a challenge to go and join, or they could flit between a number of different ones.

How do we retrofit housing for sustainability? What is the future of transport? Can you regulate a positive and constructive online environment where people can trust what they see and not be scammed all the time? How should we communicate public policy to the public? What does a 21st century city look like? How do we distribute energy without enraging communities? What do we do with AI?

It kind of doesn't matter what the challenges are, the purpose is to create generations of people in practical fields who think about public policy as a real option, who bring new perspectives, who solve problems in ways different from politics graduates. It would generate thinking and ideas, but it would also change expectations and how we see the challenges we face.

Now I don't want to get starry eyed here – engineers are no more virtuous and no less capable of idiocy, incompetence, venality and brittle egos as anyone else. It's just they bring all of that with different perspectives. And it really does make a difference to have different perspectives.

So to finish and to show you why, let’s think about a yellow ball sitting on a table with the instruction to find its volume. We know that in Scotland a politician would put together a tender for a consultant to come in and answer the question.

Except a mathematician would measures the diameter with calipers and evaluates the integral. A physicist would drop it in a bowl of water and measure the displacement. And an engineer would check the serial number and look up the volume in the specification sheet online.

These all work, but three are fast and cost nothing. These are the kinds of options you get if you have varied thinking with plenty of practical-mindedness. This is exactly the kind of thinking which seems outside the grasp of domestic politics. We suffer as a result.