Four foundational principles for a flourishing organisation or society: Part One

I explore a way I've come to think about society with my friend Peyton Bowman and represent in a diagram which is the first slide in these slides. (Here is the pptx, and here is the pdf.) (Note only the first two slides were used in this talk). 

The diagram illustrates the principles which should characterise communication within any kind of community — in which I include organisations like a firm or something larger like a national polity.  Isegoria — or equality of speech — is a 'horizontal' value — calling for everyone to be heard no matter their status in society. But, the ‘vertical’ concept of parrhēsia is also absent. “Parrhēsia’ is usually translated as 'freedom of speech', but it’s a richer idea infused with mutual ethical obligation. It is the importance of speaking truth to power, but it also entails the powerful's duty to listen to what they're being told. 

In our society those lower down are mostly expected to flatter those above, and so they 'gild the lily', and tell the kinds of stories the powerful want to be told. The result is lies all the way up the line.  We explore these ideas in the classroom and then in organisations. I use the example of Toyota which shows how empowering those on the line is an astoundingly more productive way to make cars efficiently than having people directed by, and fearful of, those above.   There are two other orders within which we explore these ideas. Throughout the discussion, we refer back to political life, and towards the end we also talk about science, which also enables us to discuss an additional concept in the diagram, the notion of fidelity. That leaves a fourth principle ‘merit’ to be explained in a future discussion!  Part Two of this discussion is here.