Energy Analysis is a different way of viewing how organizations work. Instead of seeing people in particular “jobs” — which are random portfolios of roles inherited from earlier empire building, task dumping and power grabs — we examine the energy flows through the whole unit. We also look at the type of energy involved.

This method always points up people placement, expertise and role confusion as the main sources of rigidities in any large organized group.

Energy analysis is a simple enough procedure, but breaks away from our normal worldview in which people are the natural drivers and shakers of all corporate activity rather than the specific expertise operating at critical decision level. At first sight, it can leave you a bit disoriented.

Then, out of the blue, a perfect example of an energy-driven corporate entity landed with a thud in my lap : the European Commission.

Basic background
The EU Commission is a board of quasi civil servants, drawn from the political classes of EU member states, and based in Brussels. Unlike normal secretariats it exercises considerable executive powers by proposing new Europe-wide legislation which eventually becomes legal throughout the community.

It has steadily amassed a lot of influence and control, backed by a tame supreme court which almost always supports the central orthodoxy. Its methodology has been “salami-slicing”, taking power in small increments that they think will not be noticed by busy people, but will accumulate over time into a vast control console for the whole of Europe.

Despite its power, the Commission is widely regarded as a political graveyard for national politicians who see it as western Europe’s equivalent to the Siberian salt mines of the old Soviet Union, where out-of-favour opponents were conveniently deposited. Britain’s commissioner, Peter Mandleson, a friend of Tony Blair, was twice forced out of the British Cabinet for alleged dishonesty. He now controls trade negotiations for all 27 countries in the EU.

The same scenario applies to most of the other commissioners.
/Basic Background

Now just imagine what all that negative energy will do if concentrated in one supranational body given the power to use it.

Naturally, that resentment and the loss of status back home will translate into a process of stripping power from national governments and lodging it in Brussels. This will be seen — possibly unconsciously — as compensating commissioners psychologically for the assumed shabby treatment they had received from national politicians.

In short, the Commission will inevitably become a kind of politburo, hoovering power to the centre and spewing out hundreds of thousands of prescriptive “directives” for the folks back home. It will be job justification and revenge politics writ large by a powerful bunch of losers.

And that’s just what has happened over the past 35 years, ever since the UK joined an inoffensive “Common Market” with “no political or sovereignty implications”. The energy map of the institution predicts perfectly how it has evolved over the decades.

Now, with a new constitution, the transition from common market to legal jurisdiction is almost complete, with not a referendum of the people in sight. And it’s all been driven by the energies funnelled into the Commission by short-sighted, short-termist national politicians.

Clearly, we should take a hard look at the energy makeup of the Brussels Commission and the Court of Justice.

Energy Analysis is a useful tool in any organization, especially when aimed at finding the points of maximum competence for taking critical decisions.

For Superdemocracy to work in a large corporation or governmental situation, it needs the right format of management or legislation to operate in. Prescriptive regulations in a top-down system strangle the process at birth.

Jeremy Bentham’s embalmed body

In this short piece, I’d like to consider and obvious example of how bad, nitpicking management can destroy even the most benign situations. It examines the governance of the UK under Tony Blair’s Premiership and how the Utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham could make all the difference.

Abraham Lincoln’s famous adage, “You can please all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can never please all of the people all of the time”, is so obviously true you wouldn’t expect anyone to fall foul of its remorseless logic. Yet that is precisely what Britain and some other Western countries have done over the past decade.

It began with Bill Clinton and his obsessive pursuit of minority interests to bolster his poll results and show how caring he is to the wider electorate. In Britain, Tony Blair followed suit under the banner of The Third Way, a neo-Marxist equality agenda of endless social tinkering and mindless bossiness. It was how they would make the entire population love them to bits — they thought.

The Third Way signalled the death of Bentham’s Utilitarianism in British politics and the beginnings of an eerie hero worship of carefully selected in-groups and minorities.

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), philosopher and social reformer, paved the way for modern fully-franchised democracy with his great maxim, “The object of all legislation should be the greatest happiness for the greatest number”. It has been the basis of modern society ever since and has clearly worked well. He even provided a mathematical formula for calculating the best possible outcome in every situation.

Then came the Clinton/Blair obsession with “dog whistling” — the pursuit of prescriptive minority rights which are often rolled out at the expense of other minorities and almost always the majority itself.

Let’s look at an analogy of Bentham’s dictum in action. Somewhere in Holland a hole appears in a dyke. A small boy senses the danger and stops the flow by putting his finger in the hole.

His cries alert farm workers nearby who rush to his aid only to find other holes appearing. They stop the trickle with their own fingers. Soon, at the urging of the Mayor, others are rushing onto the scene until the whole village is there with their fingers in hundreds of holes.

“What do we do now?” somebody shouts.

A distant voice cries, “There’s another hole.”

So now the dyke will give way taking the entire population of the village with it. The Benthamite view would be to send a small repair party to the dyke to assess the likelihood of saving it, while evacuating the rest of the village to safety. In other words, it may mean sacrificing the few in order to save the majority.

We know that children are happiest and more stable if brought up in married two-parent families. All the statistics prove this self-evident fact. Why then would a couple with children be financially better off in Blair’s Britain if they were not married? And why are the same “rights” given to same-sex couples in loose relationships as to married families?

Bentham’s relentless logic means that public policy should never be confused with private kindness, which is exactly what we’ve got in Brokeback Britain.

The greater public good has been destroyed in favour of a patchwork quilt of minor prescriptive measures, all jangling against each, causing huge resentment in the so-far silent majority, and destroying all social cohesion in the cities and in the country.

Children run wild at night, tormenting adults who can’t take action because of the Children’s Rights Act. This situation is an example of extensive child neglect in a society that increasingly looks to the state for everything. And that’s not to mention the destructive Human Rights Act which grants British civil rights universally to the whole world in an act of unparalleled betrayal of a nation’s right to protect itself from harm.

If New Labour had foresworn the advice of its militant Marxists, oddball, second-rate academics, and heeded the wise words of Jeremy Bentham, little of this might have happened.

That politics today is broken is clear. Only the resurrection of Bentham’s Utility agenda, allowing Superdemocracy to flourish, can save it. It’s not as if he’s that far away. His perfectly embalmed body, still in his familiar clothes and sitting in his favourite chair, can be seen in a glass cabinet in a London University college.

It would mean the end of prescriptive legislation, social engineering of the many by the few, the massive centralization of power, and the loss of the balm of Superdemocracy.

If you’re coming to this site from Moneyizor network magazine, you may wonder what it’s doing on a finance and business portal.

Superdemocracy is a new system — or art — of corporate governance, aimed largely at big corporations or government service enterprises.

To get an overview of the subject, read : The Superdemocracy Manifesto, which provides a short introduction to the topic.

The material accumulating on this site will eventually form the basis of a book by John M Evans to be published by Dial Publishing.

The hidden forces of superdemocracy (SD) are what make it different from other systems of corporate governance, which depend on analysis of aggregated responsibilities at nodal points unrelated to competence.

By its nature, Superdemocracy uses dynamic flows of energy to create its systems, rather than by assessing the people in aggregated-responsibility positions, i.e., jobs.

If that seems more akin to magic than conventional analysis, it is.

Most jobs have large legacy pots comprising fixed areas of responsibility, usually maintained by protectionist clutter like trade union demarcations, “Spanish practices”, and just sheer inertia. Sometimes a job title is so all-embracing that it is difficult to see the absurdities embedded in it. The UK “Home Secretary” is a case in point.

Looking instead at the dynamic patterns of operation within any organization — the decisions that alter and influence the flow — and determining the Points of Maximum Competence for the execution of those decisions, results in a very different picture of how a system of management works.

Mystics have always known that there are forces at work in the world that are unseen by a vast majority of us. Many view them as “causes and effects” too complicated to be fully understood. Some recognize the essential energies of life at work and know that they are influenced and driven by thought.

Since the mechanism is invisible to most people, the outcomes are largely hit and miss. We build great edifices of operational superstructure to prevent certain outcomes arising by chance : laws, constitutions, training regimes, constant supervision, regulations, red tape. All this saps the energy of every organization and makes it largely unworkable without considerable effort and cost.

By mapping the energy flows against the outcomes that exist, it is possible to refine the plan of the enterprise. This may or may not be a necessary first stage for success.

But simply isolating the decisions that need to be made and ensuring they are taken at the Points of Maximum Competence, regardless of job title or seniority, will turn round a business or government more quickly than any inbuilt rigidities, such as plans, maps, layouts or constitutions. My thesis is that these Points are nearly always far below where the decisions are currently taken, especially in governmental systems.

That is why I say that SD is more like magic — the influencing of hidden forces to secure an identified outcome — than any other presently known methodology.

The next point is to identify the hierarchy of decisionmaking : purely local decisions, middle-point decisions, and over-arching, strategic decisions. Of course, under Superdemocracy, a lot of strategic shibboleths are revealed to be worthless, merely underpinning a false position of authority. Pseudo-authority is a major part of the SD analaysis.