This is the fifth of a set of posts about my life and how PeopleCount came to be. In the previous post, it was about mid-2011 that I concluded that it would be worthwhile to look for a way to transform politics.

So I began to look.

As I looked, it seemed like there was blame for everyone.

Voters were a “silent majority”. Many didn’t care, were poorly informed or were too lazy to vote.

Politicians were corrupt. They spent half their time fundraising. They stuffed pork into bills for their districts. Some took bribes.

The wealthy seemed to hugely influence politics, much more than one person should.

Corporations seemed even more influential, even though they weren’t even people. All the people in a corporation already were represented- why would a business entity have any right to influence politics?

And parties were a mess. They struggled for power instead of compromising. They divided people instead of uniting them. Plus they divided up most issues so that most people favored one party on some issues and the other party for some others, but had to vote for only one. The purpose of parties seemed to be to represent ideologies, not people. And worse, since candidates didn’t really know what people wanted, they mostly played it safe and adopted party positions. Plus they needed to stay loyal to the party to get party support. Parties were good, they served a purpose. But they were also an obstacle when it came to our representatives actually representing people.

What about the media? I had read that there was an issue before Congress a while back of whether the television signal spectrum should be sold at an auction to raise a lot more money. None of the TV stations had aired the issue in their news reports and there was almost no coverage in the print media as well. Even the media was corrupted.

Polls were of little help. It was very difficult to know about what Americans wanted on lots of issues. Polls were very selective and shallow. I had been polled a few times and I wanted to read up on an issue before answering, but that didn’t work for the polling organization. As I looked for information on issues, it took a lot of searching and often there was none. Polls were not very useful.

Stepping back

As a professional problem solver, I knew that blame was a sign that I was thinking inside the context of the problem. All of these views were from within the system. So I took a new look at each group. Everyone was doing what they could, what they were allowed to do. I realized that the system was working as well as it could, with its current design.

How would it look if Congress would instead do what the people wanted? To do that, they’d have to know what the people wanted. To tell Congress, the people would have to want to tell them, which would only happen if Congress were listening. How could Congress listen to 200 million people? And why would Congress listen? I sat with this for a few weeks, and played with it, looking at the relationships.

I thought back to what I wanted, to tell my representatives what I wanted. What if I could? What if I could just vote on issues? The solution started to fall into place. What if people could vote on issues and say which issues were important to them?

Discovered: A basic solution began to form

I remembered something I had heard in courses. Being accountable meant you must give an account for what you did and what you will do. What if Congress were accountable to the people? They’re not currently, even though we vote for them. But that makes sense because voting is just about firing them. Accountability isn’t fire-ability. That’s a bit of it, on the tail end. But in my job, accountability happened every day or week when I’d report to my manager. So what if Congress would report to us on issues?

They won’t like that- sending a report to everyone on an issue. They’ll want to talk to different people differently. But if people were voting, the system would know where someone stood on an issue. So the representative could write several reports for the different audiences and the system could deliver them based on the way the people had voted!

How would this help with elections, with fire-ability? Challengers could use the system as well. They could report to citizens just like incumbents. And they could keep incumbents honest, pointing out any lies. We could really get to know our politicians.

These reports would be rich communication from politicians to citizens on issues important to people. They would let candidates run effective campaigns for little money. Politicians would no longer have to be accountable to the wealthy. And knowing what people wanted and being able to run effective campaigns, politicians would no longer have to be accountable to parties!

Landmark courses have another bit of jargon, a “structure of fulfillment”. We say we want politicians to be accountable to the people, but they can’t. There’s no communication structure that lets them account to the people, no way for it to happen. Basically, the solution is to create a structure of fulfillment for political accountability to the people.

Now that I had a solution, what next?

There was more to it- more analysis and more details, but that was basically how it happened. In retrospect, the things I had desired and missed when I tried getting involved in politics were basic to accountability, so the my experience had led me straight there.

My Landmark courses had provided the context, and the key definition of accountability. And luckily I was a problem solver so I knew the way to solve a problem was to seek to understand it from the outside, rather than to just see it from the point of view of a citizen. In hindsight, it seems reasonable that it was someone who was a problem solver and a Landmark grad that put this together. In a sense, God put someone with the right tools in the right place at the right time. I just did what I did naturally. It didn’t really take strength of character.

But the next part would, actually trying to build a company for it. I would need to evangelize the solution, assemble a team and build it. That was much farther outside my comfort zone.

There’s more to the story. I’ll get to it…

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