You can’t manage complexity with a simple system
When we speak to organisations about how they intersect with the worlds of politics, democracy, government and the state, we hear repeatedly that good people with the best intentions on all sides are being weighed down by a mix of overwhelm and overload.
Alongside this is a kind of category error.
People in business and organisations just don't really get politics. And politicians don't really get them.
Of course, market and democratic accountability are two different things - but as ever we're going to have to square the circle.
While we do, the demands on everyone only seem to grow. And our political, democratic and cultural structures seem less able to deal with the pressures and the fragmentation of the party-political system.
From a system designed to encourage and enable a two-party politics, we have stepped through the looking glass to a multiparty reality. It's unlikely we'll be going back. Even when governments secure big majorities in the UK, like 2019 to get Brexit done or 2024 to kick the Tories out, the underlying fragmentation and lack of a bigger purpose show very quickly.
The national and local elections coming up in the UK next week will simply confirm both the fragmentation, and the polarisation, of our party political system.
Back in the day, there were only two buttons on people's TV sets. Today we have dozens of platforms, each with hundreds of choices. Kodak politics was never going to survive in an Instagram world.
So, what to do? Howling at the moon is one option - but is unlikely to work. You can fight many things but you can't fight the zeitgeist. Instead, for all of us in the worlds of business and politics, the answer is to embrace the complexity and the fragmentation and make it work for us.
In cybernetics, there is something called the law of requisite variety, which states that any object can only be governed by a system as equally complex as itself. We all need to apply that law.
Whether you're running a company, an organisation, a council or a government - we're all going to have to embrace complexity and pluralism, in a future (as we always say at Jericho) that is negotiated not imposed.
Our special purpose vehicle to help deal with the tensions, paradoxes and possibilities of how decision-makers and the rest of us can work more effectively together is our Commission on Business and Democracy.
Right now, we're talking to business and organisational leaders about these pressures and possibilities and will set out some thoughts soon about the opportunities and spaces to move the conversation and the practice into much more constructive terrain.
If you have any thoughts or insights do get in touch. It's going to take all of us to solve this.
It might get worse before it gets better, but we've always managed to solve deep and intractable problems. As ever, we are the people we've been waiting for.
The Jericho Team
May 2026