Ashley Green-Thompson Ashley Green-Thompson
A friend sent me a link to an article about the Creative Bureaucracy Festival that happened in Berlin earlier this month. In its 9th year already, the event was apparently full of young people and civil servants who “…want to do administration better”. It claims to be the world's largest festival for public service innovation, and is rooted in the belief that a healthy democracy needs a functioning state. The article focused on digital innovation, I suspect because it is relevant to the European context. It's not every day that you are invited to associate creativity with bureaucracy, or that you hear about civil servants searching for innovation, so an event like this is intriguing. It would be great to explore the idea that creative convening of civil servants might help us innovate in finding answers to the governance challenges we face here.
Unfortunately time does not allow me to do this. There is a pressing human crisis developing in our country that occupies my mind completely right now, and I – like many others - am not giving enough time and attention to things that might unlock insight and help find solutions to our challenges.
This is the problem of misdirection, and the social media algorithms draw our attention away from opportunities for different thinking towards the echo chambers of division and scapegoating. Why would we invest in thinking creatively about our problems when we already know that immigrants are causing them? I’m guilty of succumbing to that. My energy was taken away from researching the origins and philosophies of this Festival by reports of Malawian migrants at Sherwood Park in Durban. I listened to news reports of refugees being forced to leave their homes because of threats of violence against them. And I realised how we are manipulated by the powerful into impotent rage against our neighbours, absolving the monied men from responsibility for the mess. Today I would rather write about other, more positive things, but as Palestinian poet Marwan Makhoul writes: “In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political, I must listen to the birds, and in order to hear the birds, the war planes must be silent.”
