Step one: have a bad idea. Step two: make it better.
Prototyping in practice & 'What Next for the Liberal Democrats?'
Hello everybody! Fellow politics nerd Mark Pack and I published a proposed electoral strategy for the Liberal Democrats yesterday. (Mark is President of the Lib Dems, and a much nicer and wiser fellow than me. You can read his newsletter here and his Blueskings - do we have a word for these yet? - over here.)
The paper is of course thrilling, page-turning stuff, and should have you rapt for every single one of its 11,012 words plus footnotes. ;-)
I’m not going to recap the arguments here, because you get can the gist of it from the introduction, you lazy so-and-sos. Instead, I’d like to show you a little bit about how the sausage got made as a way of further introducing the prototyping spirit of this here newsletter/blog/thingy.
How’s that? Because the paper started off from one of many, many bad ideas that I have made an impassioned and impractical case for at one of the deeply nerdy ‘strategic brunches’ that Mark and I have enjoyed over the years.
This time round, it was the weekend after the General Election, and I had spent most of the last couple of days either excitedly running data models to understand what had happened, or repeatedly failing to sleep. One fact kept jumping out at me: we were now so close to overtaking the Conservatives as the second largest party in Parliament. (I’d even heard that the tactical voting campaign Stop The Tories had made it their unofficial stretch goal in the last few weeks of the election.)
So over brunch that weekend, I showed Mark the data. Here’s how many seats would need to switch, here’s how big the swings would need to be, etc etc. The Conservatives had already lost 244 seats, and it would only require another 10% of that number for them to drop to 96 and us to overtake at 97, and so on. Imagine much waving of arms and accidental spilling of coffee.
So far, not so terrible. (As we argue in the paper, overtaking the Conservatives is a good target to bear in mind, depending on what happens over the next few years.) But I went further and argued that we should make it our official target for the next election. “It would be inspirational!” I said.
That was a bad idea. We certainly should aim to overtake the Conservatives, but pinning it to one election cycle is, to put it mildly, a bit silly. Not only does it depends on what the Conservatives do, but it also depends on what every other party does too. Will Reform continue to split the Conservative vote? Will the Greens draw votes away from Labour in Lab-Con marginals? Will the SNP recover? Every one of these factors will affect the number of seats the Conservatives win (as will whether they continue to wander the anti-woke wastelands, of course, happily muttering to themselves).
(This is why Keir Starmer’s target of making Britain the fastest growing economy in the G7 is, similarly, a bit silly. It depends on all six of the other countries, and on how far each of their economies is interlinked with the other biggest economies in the world, like China. Presumably someone round the table said “It would be inspirational!”)
So, a bad idea - but one that got us thinking. What would it take for it be realistic? What would our priorities be about the scenarios that we set out in the paper. How achievable would it be in a dream scenario? What about in a nightmare scenario? We honed in on a ‘likely worst case’ and ‘likely best case’, and then thought through what the party would need to do: what should our priorities be if we’re on the defensive? What about if we get a golden opportunity? The stuff about overtaking the Conservatives is still in there, but it isn’t the focus. Instead, the core of the paper is the importance of accepting uncertainty and determining a course of action that works come rain or shine.
So, four rules of prototyping for you.
All ideas start off bad. Not all ideas are worth un-bad-dening (de-bad-ifying?).
The only way to tell the difference is to get other people involved.
Where you end up will look very different from where you start. (If it doesn’t, you’re not doing it right.)
But it never actually ends.
I quite like leaving that last one starkly unfurnished like that, but to expand on it: no idea is ever finished, you just decide you’ve done enough on it to show it to a wider audience. There will be things we’ve suggested in the paper that others will find fault in or identify ways to improve. Quite right too.
Over here in Prototype Politics, I’m going to be polishing up a number of currently-bad ideas that I think have potential. Mark and I chose not to write about party messaging, brand, identity, or positioning regarding the other parties. I have ideas on all of these, and will be steadily polishing them up here, and asking for your feedback on how they can improve.
I’ll be back in the New Year with these and all others sorts of bad ideas for your praise and condemnation alike, and I very much hope to see some of yours too.
All the best, and happy presents time to you all,
Jim
PS I’ve decided to get on BlueSky too. It’s like Twitter, but with fewer lunatics. You can find my Bluesks here.