The Dashboard & The Drum: False Alternatives in Modern Politics

The Hollow Promise of Numbers

It begins, as these things so often do now, with a podium and a graph.

A minister in a navy suit announces a “10 percent improvement” in a public service—pick your favourite: hospital wait times, burglary clear-ups, school performance, pothole repairs. The numbers look crisp. A chart slopes in the right direction, the label is an acronym, and the tone is managerial: calm, competent, pleased. A question from the press follows. The minister replies in carefully ironed phrases about “evidence,” “delivery,” “targets met.” Keir Starmer does this. Rishi Sunak did this. Tony Blair was a master of this. Even the shambolic Boris Johnston did his best. If you closed your eyes, you could mistake one for the other.

But outside—beyond the room—Mary Wilson is waiting eight hours for an ambulance for her husband. Ellie Carpenter is teaching to the test because parents monitor the league tables like stock prices. She chose teaching to make a difference in the lives of children. When Mary hears “ten percent improvement,” she doesn’t feel reassured; she feels invisible. “Improvement for who?” is what lodges in her throat.

This is the odd, corrosive paradox of contemporary politics: we live in an age of dashboards, and yet trust keeps falling. Parties of the centre—centre-left or centre-right—talk like optimised spreadsheets. They are fluent in the grammar of metrics, the tense of week-on-week, and the mood of managerial calm. And yet they sound hollow. They talk about what “works,” but voters keep wondering whether anyone still cares about what "matters".

But let me be clear: the instinct to measure is not the problem. If you’re managing a vaccination program, you track doses and dates. The problem is when the instrument becomes the idol—when numbers, designed to be servants, become masters. Politics slides from a conversation about ends (dignity, justice, belonging) into a procession of means (rollouts, pilots, KPIs). The public senses the swap, even if they can't always specify what's gone wrong. They hear leaders who speak as if running a nation were the same as optimising a logistics chain.

Meanwhile, the anti-technocrats—Trump, Farage, Le Pen, Orbán, Salvini—reject the tonal polish. They don’t bring a dashboard; they bring a drum. Their promises are visceral, picturable, and usually false: a wall that keeps the bad out, a boat that’s turned around, a great nation restored. They connect because they sound human and certain, not because they are honest or true. They tell a simple lie with a chest-thumping rhythm, while the centre’s complicated truth arrives as a memo. In the theatre of contemporary democracy, the memo will struggle to win.

So the stage is set. On one side, the cult of technique—the belief that the right technical fix, carefully measured and reported, can manage society toward good outcomes. On the other, the populist counterspell—an appeal to identity and certainty that bypasses evidence altogether. In between stands the citizen, increasingly suspicious of both: weary of dashboards that don’t match experience, and wary of demagogues who trade in engineered emotions.

Here is the thesis of this essay: our political speech is strangled by the machine metaphors of the cult of technique. We talk about society as if it were an engine—tune the inputs, adjust the settings, and the outputs will behave. But the world we live in is more like a living ecosystem than a machine. It’s complex, adaptive, full of feedback loops and unintended consequences. In such a world, metrics that make sense on a screen can mislead in the street; targets can corrupt the thing they meant to improve; and the politician who promises control invites disappointment at scale.

What follows is not an argument against expertise or evidence. It’s an argument for putting them back where they belong: inside a larger conversation about ends and within a truer picture of how the world actually works. We need leaders who speak in the language of human purposes, who acknowledge complexity without surrendering to it, and who use numbers as lanterns rather than banners.

To get there, we have to understand how we got stuck with dashboards in the first place.

How the Machine Ate the Square — A Short History of the Cult

The first prophets of the cult of technique weren’t evil; they were simply committed to improved efficiency. In the postwar decades, the promise of scientific management—Frederick Taylor’s stopwatches, Peter Drucker’s objectives, modern operations research—seemed humane. If we can measure, we can manage. If we can standardise, we can scale the good things. In factories, this often worked. On assembly lines, every bolt had a torque, every movement a rhythm. Quality rose, waste fell, and the language of targets moved from the shop floor to the boardroom.

Then came neoliberalism, which married the zeal for measurement to a powerful doctrine: markets allocate better than ministries. Politicians, suspicious of what they cast as bureaucratic muddle, adopted the accountant’s gaze. Thatcher built dashboards to show that state industries were dead weight; Blair built dashboards to prove that public services could “deliver.” If Thatcher’s revolution broke things apart, Blair’s managerialism promised to make the bits work. Michael Barber, Blair's high priest of “deliverology,” treated government like a performance contract: define the goal, set the target, monitor the monthly returns, adjust.

If you’ve ever worked in an organization that “manages what it measures,” you know the next act. Goodhart’s law—when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure—kicks in. Put differently, people inevitably start to game the system. Chase the numbers, and the numbers start to run away with you. Hospitals focus on the time a patient waits in A&E, so trolleys are parked just outside the counting zone. Police forces prioritize “recorded crime,” so offenses get reclassified or de-prioritised. Schools zero in on exam metrics, so the curriculum narrows and the test becomes the teaching. The reported performance improves; lived experience often doesn’t.

You could call this the managerial fallacy: the belief that complex social realities can be captured by a set of controllable proxies, and thus “run.” The fallacy is seductive because, in bounded domains, it’s true. When the environment is stable and the problem is well-understood, a dashboard is an excellent tool. If you’re maintaining a bridge or allocating ambulance shifts, measurements are not optional. But governing isn’t just maintenance. It’s choosing what the bridge is for, how to share the river, what counts as a good life on either bank. Those aren’t engineering questions; those are political and moral questions.

Neoliberalism made an additional move. By translating public goods into market-like constructs—schools as competitors, patients as consumers—it taught politicians to describe citizens as data points in a performance regime. Once you speak this way for long enough, you stop hearing the strangeness of your own sentences. “We delivered a ten percent improvement” becomes a performative utterance, a way of asserting control. The more the world refuses to obey, the more targets you add. And the more you add, the less anyone believes.

That disbelief is often misread as anti-expert sentiment. Usually it isn’t. Most people trust nurses, GPs, teachers, firefighters. They trust the expert who shows up and speaks plainly. What they don’t trust is the expert enlisted in a political performance whose scene partner is a target and whose props are graphs. They can smell spin; they can feel the absence of honest ends-talk. When a minister tells Ellie Carpenter that reading scores rose by 8.4 percent, and Ellie’s classroom looks thinner and sadder than it did five years ago, she doesn’t need a methodology to spot the gap. She has eyes.

If the centre speaks in dashboards, populists speak in drums. And in the clash between dashboard and drum, the drum beats the dashboard every time.

The Populist Counterspell — Why a Simple Lie Outshouts a Complex Truth

Attend a rally—any rally—for a right-wing nationalist leader and you’ll recognize three moves. First, the problem is painted in high-contrast colours and simple shapes: crime, immigration, national decline. Second, the villain is embodied: the elite, the migrant, the bureaucrat. Third, the solution is made concrete: the wall, the ban, the boat turned back, the country “taken back.” Visceral verbs do a lot of the work. So do nouns you can point at.

In this theatre, nuance is treason. Complexity is not a description of reality but an excuse for inaction. Doubt is weakness; uncertainty, suspect. The leader offers catharsis—anger sharpened into action, bewilderment converted into belonging. He speaks as if the nation were a body and he its neglected immune system. The doctors (technocrats) are pronouncing numbers; the strongman promises to stop the bleeding.

Why does this connect? Because it sounds human. It acknowledges fear and shame and pride, speaks to loss and longing, and gives people a role in a story bigger than themselves. The centre often forgets this because the centre, trapped in the cult of technique, thinks the contest is about facts alone. It isn’t. Facts matter, but they travel on the back of stories; data convinces, but only after narrative connects.

“A simple lie will always trump a complex truth,” someone said during the Brexit campaign. The line endures because it names something about cognition and culture. Brains like coherence. Communities like identity. When truth is complicated and the stakes are high, we look for proxies—trusted voices, vivid pictures. The technocratic habit of presenting complicated truths without a human vessel—and without naming the values at stake—makes those truths hard to carry. Meanwhile, the liar offers a sedan chair.

But, let me be clear, to say populists connect is not to say they are right. When the solution is a wall, it’s always you who pays for it; when the promise is national greatness restored, it’s always your neighbour who gets blamed for the bills. Populism refuels politics with real emotions and then burns the engine. It uses the language of meaning to license cruelty and the language of belonging to justify exclusion. It takes an accurate diagnosis—people feel unseen—and prescribes poison.

Here, then, is the tragic setup: the centre mistakes management for meaning and loses the crowd; the populist supplies meaning without truth and wins the crowd only to betray it. “Evidence-based policy” sounds brittle and faint under the floodlights; “take back control” marches in jackboots. And the rest of us are left with a false choice between dashboards and drums.

The way out begins with admitting that both are misdescribing the world. The centre says the world is a machine. The populist says the world is a morality play. In reality, it’s something else.

The World Is Not a Machine — It’s a Living System

Imagine you are in a garden after rain. You can pull weeds, improve paths, prune roses. But if you tug on one plant, another bends. If you open a patch to sunlight, you dry out the moss that feeds the soil. Everything is connected—visible roots and invisible mycelia, insects you can see and microbes you can’t. The garden isn’t a machine to be controlled; it’s a living system to be stewarded. You influence it, you don’t command it. You work with seasons, not switches.

Now try to govern housing, health, or climate with a machine metaphor. You select a target (build 300,000 homes a year), incentivize a set of actors (developers, councils, lenders), and wait for the output. The actors adapt. Land values rise; developers bank land; local politics stiffens; supply chains break; construction labor thins. Your intervention changes the system you’re intervening in; the system pushes back; your target starts directing behaviour in ways you didn’t forecast. You raise a levy that slows the very thing you want to accelerate, then exaggerates a regional imbalance you meant to reduce.

Complexity science has a simple, liberating message: in complex adaptive systems, cause and effect cannot be mapped in advance, only traced in retrospect. The agents learn. Interventions have side-effects, then side-effects of side-effects. Trends emerge from local interactions you don’t control, and the map you made last year no longer fits. In such a world, “control” is the wrong promise. The right promise is stewardship under uncertainty.

This is what the cult of technique refuses to say aloud. It keeps borrowing the language of simple or merely complicated systems—where experts can, in time, get the right answer—and applies it to complex, “wicked” problems, where answers change the question. Fixing a jet engine is complicated; fixing homelessness is complex. You can schedule an engine overhaul and guarantee a tolerance; you cannot schedule a community out of despair. The first needs manuals; the second needs relationships.

So how should leaders act when the world behaves like a living system rather than a machine?

First, they should start with ends. A compass, not a dashboard. True north is not a number; it’s a moral orientation expressed in plain language. “Everyone deserves a home within an hour of their work and a neighbourhood they can belong to.” “Every child should have an adult who knows them by name and hopes for their future.” These are not targets; they are ends that guide choices between competing goods.

Second, they should move from grand plans to iterative probes. In complex systems, small, safe-to-fail experiments teach you more than large, must-not-fail schemes. Try five different housing models in five different places; invite the community into the design; publish the learning as you go. If one approach shows promise, amplify. If another makes things worse, stop. This is not dithering. It is disciplined adaptation.

Third, they should use numbers as lanterns, not banners. Measure what you can, knowing that many of the things that matter most (trust, dignity, cohesion) are stubbornly resistant to quantification. When you pick proxies—for example, “community participation” as a stand-in for “belonging”—be candid about what they miss. Place qualitative accounts alongside quantitative measures. Put Ellie Carpenter's classroom voice next to the reading score.

Fourth, they should speak like humans who know other humans. “We don’t fully know how to fix this yet. Here’s what we’re trying. Here’s why. Here’s what we’ll do if it doesn’t work. Here’s where we need your help.” That humility is not weakness; it is what credibility sounds like in a complex world. It acknowledges agency and invites contribution. People will forgive uncertainty if the ends are principled and the process is honest.

Finally, they should design with time horizons in mind. Complex systems punish short-termism. If you want generational change in health, invest in secure housing, green spaces, clean air, early years. If you want safer streets, invest in youth work and local networks alongside policing. No dashboard can compress the timescale of a forest into a quarter; no spreadsheet can conjure the shade of a tree you refused to plant.

None of this means giving up on expertise. It means asking experts to think and speak like gardeners as well as engineers. Save the torque wrench for the engine. Bring a trowel, a calendar, and a neighbor for the garden.

Replacing Dashboards with a Compass — Toward a Politics of What Matters

If the centre’s failing is to sound like management consultants, the remedy is not to yell like demagogues; it is to recover the language of meaning and pair it with practices fit for complexity. We need leaders who can do three things at once: articulate ends clearly, accept uncertainty honestly, and act experimentally.

Start with the words. Politics is not a quarterly review; it is the pursuit of a common life worth living. Say so. A leader’s first job is to speak plainly about what is good. That is not “populism”; it is moral seriousness. Tell stories that carry those goods into rooms where metrics can’t go. “When my mother rang 999, she waited eight hours. No citizen should feel that alone. Our aim is that no emergency call waits longer than an hour. We won’t get there with a decree; we will get there by rebuilding t...

Then reshape the practice. Create spaces where citizens don’t just answer surveys but help design policy—citizens’ assemblies with real mandates; neighborhood budgeting with real money. Fund local experiments and put civil servants in the room with residents, not as presenters but as partners. Replace performative consultations with practical co-production. The best antidote to the populist’s false intimacy is real proximity.

Reform targets so they serve rather than distort. Fewer, humbler, more transparent measures. Pair every number with a narrative and a trade-off. “This metric encourages gaming in X way; here’s what we’re doing to counter it.” Retire measures that do more harm than good. Treat Goodhart’s law as a warning label. When in doubt, measure closer to lived experience: waiting time as experienced, not as recorded; school quality as told by students and parents, not only as inferred from test scores.

Shift time horizons. Give yourself the political courage to plant trees whose shade you will never sit in. Be explicit about it: “We are starting work whose full benefits you may not see for ten years. We do it because it is right. We will also do nearer-term things that make life better this year. We will not pretend that long-term problems have short-term solutions; we will not insult you with slogans.”

And change the metaphors you use when you talk about the nation. Retire the machine. Adopt the living system. Speak of stewardship, cultivation, regeneration. If you must keep a technology metaphor, keep the compass: a tool with a steady purpose that helps you orient in a shifting landscape. A dashboard tells you whether you’re hitting your numbers; a compass tells you the direction you should keep through the fog.

This is also how the centre can beat the drum without becoming the demagogue: by telling stories that are vivid without being false, honest about trade-offs, and faithful to shared ends. A powerful story needn’t be simplistic. It can be simple: one nurse who decides not to leave because the team made her workload humane again; one street where the youth center reopens and the nights get quiet; one housing estate where tenants co-design the plan and move back sooner than anyone predicted.

There is a final, uncomfortable truth to acknowledge. The cult of technique didn’t arise from malice; it arose from a desire to do better. And the voters drawn to the drum aren’t dupes; they are humans starved of recognition. If politics wants to be believed again, it must stop treating citizens as inputs to be optimised or crowds to be managed and start treating them as neighbours who can help shape what good looks like.

Picture, one last time, that minister at the podium. Imagine if, instead of presenting a self-satisfied slope and declaring victory, she began like this:

“We said we’d shorten emergency waits. The truth is, we’ve made some progress and fallen short elsewhere. The numbers you’ll see today will not feel like your everyday. That’s because the numbers don’t capture your whole experience—and because some hospitals have been gaming the target we set. That’s on us. We’re changing the measures, and we’re changing the way we work. We’re asking three hospitals to try three different staffing models co-designed with their own teams and patients. We’ll report publicl..."

No perfect phrase can dissolve the distrust we’ve accumulated. But this voice—plain about ends, frank about complexity, concrete about experiments—could begin to sound like something the public has been missing: leadership that treats them like adults.

A broken dashboard in a storm is a dangerous thing. It seduces you into staring at the flicker while you drift toward rocks. Put it aside. Step out on deck. Find the stars. Take a bearing. Ask your crew what the sea is doing under the hull. Then steer, slowly and together, toward land.