Charles Leadbeater: combing systems with empathy

On Thursday May 23 leading authority on innovation and creativity Charles Leadbeater gave a public lecture on ‘systems, empathy and public service’. Drawing on his own field work and consultancy in innovation within the public sector Leadbeater elaborated on the balance between society’s desire for people’s freedom and the parallel need and care for public outcomes.

06/24/2013

By using the term ‘the march of the oxymorons’, Leadbeater discussed the challenges facing public servants wanting to embrace new and more innovative forms, but still are chained to old models.

This, he argued, is crucial in the world we now inhabit and central to the question of system and empathy in public services. When you care about inequality, public goods and social outcomes without being ready to control everything, then you have to adopt a form of governance where freedom can be utilised to deliver public goods. We can understand this as ruling through freedom. Freedom creates it’s own discipline. By embracing freedom, we must believe that the people can navigate through their own freedom.

Leadbeater describes how people are systems people, operating in systems all the time, but also work as products of systems. Systems, as regimes can only change by unleashing the power and forces from the inside. We also need to treat citizens as they are part of the system in order to make them contribute, and in order to change systems.

According to Leadbeater systems vary in their degree of empathy. What we should strive for, without generalising, is high empathy systems, systems where people actually want to be. He has created the term ‘systempathy’ to describes these kind of systems. The New Nordic School he argued is a good example of this.

You can find the video of the entire lecture here.

 

The page was last edited by: Public-Private Platform // 12/17/2017