We live in an age addicted to evidence of progress. Every sphere of life — politics, business, even personal development — has learned to perform momentum for audiences that no longer trusts stillness. Dashboards must glow, timelines perpetually hum, and statements are issued hourly to prove that someone, somewhere, is doing something. The performance of purpose has replaced the practice of it — a civilisation of motion without movement, a sprint that loops endlessly back into itself.
Communication sits at the centre of this illusion. It isn’t a by-product of policy; it is the product — designed, packaged, and shipped for consumption. Like any product, it has stakeholders, target users, success metrics, release cycles, and post-mortems that never happen. When communication becomes untethered from purpose, it behaves like malware; code written to replicate rather than resolve, hijacking audience attention while corrupting the system it runs on. The result is noise that looks like work — updates without outcomes, announcements without accountability.
Nowhere is the illusion more visible than in government itself, where politics has been recast as a performance for the algorithm. Polls rise and fall like stock prices, each swing treated as a crisis or a triumph, while the actual work of governing drowns in the background noise. The language of progress has been reduced to a content calendar — a relentless choreography of reaction that rewards visibility over vision. I miss the kind of politics that was dull enough to get things done, when competence didn’t need a comms strategy and leadership wasn’t measured in trending topics.
Scenario: The Brief
Situation
In the government’s digital comms office, another week begins with a new directive: a social-media push targeting Reform.
The brief arrives wrapped in urgency — “counter-narrative,” “rapid response,” “keep the tone sharp.” It’s the fourth one this month.
Impact
He scrolls the document knowing exactly what it will contain: recycled lines, borrowed outrage, a schedule of posts built to provoke.
The country’s crises — hospitals, housing, wages — sit outside his screen, untouched by hashtags. The brief asks for volume, not value.
Tension
His own proposal, drafted weeks ago, sits ignored in a shared folder — a more constructive campaign built around small policy wins and social repair.
Each time he mentions it, the idea is met with polite nods and a change of subject. The party line is to stay on the offensive; reflection doesn’t perform.
Approach
He complies, crafting the next wave of attack graphics. The comments will follow the same pattern — exasperated voters, disillusioned supporters, replies threaded with disbelief.
He’ll read them anyway, hoping to find even one that feels like connection rather than corrosion.
Resolution
By afternoon the post goes live. Engagement spikes; sentiment tanks. In the team chat, someone celebrates the reach numbers. He doesn’t reply.
Another brief will land tomorrow, another urgent task in a system that has forgotten what it’s supposed to be communicating.
What happened in that room isn’t unique; it’s a symptom of a wider design flaw. Politics — like much of modern life — has mistaken communication for contribution. The energy once spent on governing is now spent on broadcasting, and every institution has learned to reward noise over nuance.
- Every meme is an urgent task.
- Every outrage cycle, a sprint.
- Every metric, a false proof of productivity.
The comms machine hums with purpose yet produces only residue — activity that looks like impact until you hold it up to the light. This is what happens when urgency eclipses utility, when communication becomes a treadmill instead of a tool. The system still measures movement, but progress has long since left the building.
Urgent & Important
When the electorate speaks, it is rarely out of apathy. The frustration that spills through comment threads and town-hall meetings is the truest form of civic urgency — a population trying to hand its leaders the brief they refuse to read.
Yet those signals are routinely filtered, softened, or ignored because they disrupt the campaign narrative. Governments talk about listening while muting the channel the moment honesty hurts the brand.
Radical Candour teaches that care and challenge must coexist: you earn trust by telling the truth kindly, not by hiding it efficiently. But modern politics has professionalised avoidance. The comms cycle runs on the illusion of responsiveness — acknowledgements without answers, empathy stripped of action. Each deflected truth widens the gap between citizen and state until participation feels pointless.
Real agency begins with the willingness to absorb discomfort in real time. Progress isn’t the absence of conflict; it’s the ability to metabolise it. Until political systems relearn how to treat public feedback as a key performance indicator rather than a reputational threat, the nation’s most urgent voices will remain unheard — shouting into the algorithm while policy hums in the background, unchanged.
Not Urgent & Important
The work that matters most is almost never marked urgent. It’s the quiet discipline of pausing, reviewing, and realigning — the space where competence grows and error is corrected.
In government, that space has collapsed under the weight of perpetual campaigning. Reflection doesn’t trend; retrospectives don’t pull headlines. And so the mechanisms built to learn are sidelined by the ones built to announce.
Metrics drive this inversion. Engagement graphs and polling snapshots have become the dashboards of leadership, rewarding surface sentiment over structural progress. When the feedback loop is calibrated to visibility, failure becomes a scheduling issue rather than a strategic one. Each week ends with a report on reach, not on repair. The system optimises for applause because applause is quantifiable.
Retrospective Facilitation — the act of reviewing process without blame — is treated as a luxury in politics, when it should be an operating principle. True leadership depends on structured reflection: understanding not only what went wrong, but why the same mistakes keep recurring.
A government that can’t slow down to learn will forever mistake motion for momentum, managing perception instead of outcomes. Progress needs patience — and patience, in this climate, has become an act of rebellion.
Urgent & Not Important
The most corrosive work is often disguised as the most productive. Each rapid-response graphic, each reactive post, feels vital in the moment — an urgent defence of values under threat. Yet the urgency is synthetic, engineered by the feedback architecture of political life. Every notification pings like a moral summons, pulling attention toward conflict and away from competence.
Inside this environment, identity becomes currency. Belonging is maintained through allegiance, not alignment. The Fearless Feedback Model teaches that trust thrives on candour, but political tribes thrive on conformity. To question tone or strategy is to risk exile from the group chat. Even well-intentioned voices learn to self-censor, to avoid being mistaken for the opposition. The result is a team that runs on adrenaline but produces only artefacts of anxiety.
The contagion spreads outward. Political discourse behaves like malware — code optimised for replication, not resolution. Its payload is outrage, its vector is belonging. Every share extends the infection; every repost tightens the loop of antagonism that keeps citizens engaged but paralysed.
The cure is not silence but immunity: rebuilding cultures where feedback is interpreted as care, not attack. Until then, communication will remain both the symptom and the sickness — a perpetual emergency doing little more than sustaining itself.
Not Important & Not Urgent
What remains when the noise subsides is not clarity but fatigue. The system has trained itself to survive on reaction alone, mistaking exhaustion for endurance. The risk is not failure in the dramatic sense — scandal, collapse, defeat — but something subtler and more corrosive: a long, slow erosion of purpose.
This is the danger of the final quadrant in the Eisenhower Matrix, the one reserved for what is neither urgent nor important. It is the quadrant of drift, where institutions continue to move simply because stopping would reveal how lost they are.
Resilience begins with the courage to redraw that matrix. To pause long enough to decide what genuinely matters and to accept that some problems will not be solved by visibility or volume. Governments once had mechanisms for that kind of thought: cabinets that deliberated, parties that reflected, civil servants who could tell the truth without fear of trend graphs. Those habits have withered under the weight of constant performance.
When everything is urgent, nothing is important. When everything is important, nothing is done.
The cure is not more noise but moral calibration — the reintroduction of deliberate thought into public life. Until we reclaim that discipline, resilience will remain cosmetic, and progress will continue to die in the polite silence of a system too busy to hear itself think.
Conclusion
The illusion of productivity is seductive because it feels like control. When the dashboards are full and the feeds are active, it’s easy to believe that the system is working. But politics isn’t a product sprint, and nations don’t need engagement strategies; they need outcomes that improve the texture of everyday life. The metrics may glow green, but the human indicators — trust, wellbeing, stability — continue to flash red.
Progress depends on the discipline to slow down, to distinguish between communication that informs and communication that performs. Reflection, honesty, and deliberate focus are not signs of weakness; they are the infrastructure of competence. The same logic that governs a well-run product team should govern a country: know the problem you’re solving, measure the right things, and review the work with humility.
The goal isn’t to make politics louder or slicker but to make it boring again — boring in the same way that reliability is boring, that quiet progress is boring, that results without theatrics are boring. Boring should be the new radical. Because when politics finally stops performing productivity and starts practising it, we might rediscover what government is for — not to trend, but to serve.
Tactical Takeaways
Reclaiming the Work of Progress
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Noise isn't evidence of work.
Question whether “updates” represent action or just activity. -
Measure progress in outcomes, not optics.
What counts is what changes, not what trends. -
Make time to review, not just react.
Silence used for thought is not neglect — it’s maintenance. -
Reward the truth-tellers.
Honest feedback isn’t disruption; it’s calibration. -
Rebuild trust through competence.
Demand governance that ships results, not rhetoric.
