A Sneak Peak into Technocracy

The Engineers Have Taken Over

Right.

With only six days left until #BearNecessitiesOfPoliticsAndPower launches on 31 October, here’s one last excerpt to whet your appetite.

This one’s from Technocracy, a chapter that dives into my favourite (and perhaps overly applied) approach to leadership (my own included).

So, if you’ve ever found yourself tempted to run life on an Excel spreadsheet, this preview might just be for you.

Enjoy!

🐻

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Let’s make up an image of our minds of the Technocrat.

They’re the straight-A student who not only reminded the teacher about the homework, but also provided an annotated bibliography - just for fun*.

They’ve never missed a deadline, never failed a test, and probably organised their class notes using colour-coded tabs. Fast forward a few decades, and now they’re running your country. Not because the public found them charming or inspiring (please, that’s so inefficient**), but because they were "the most qualified." In a world of bumbling politicians getting stuck on ziplines and getting lost in a room with one entrance, the Technocrat is out there with their trusty Excel spreadsheet, running the numbers, optimising society like a particularly complex financial model.

They don’t do emotional speeches. They don’t do handshakes or public rallies. They do PowerPoint presentations with bullet points and bar graphs. The Technocrat is the ultimate pragmatist, the one who treats society like a machine to be tinkered with, improved, and, if necessary, rebooted. They’re the political equivalent of your company’s IT guy - constantly muttering that "if people would just stop touching things, this system would run perfectly."

I have to admit, if I were ever to go into politics (don’t worry, I won’t), this is exactly the ideology I’d follow. I am, after all, Spreadsheet-Guy. I live my life on Excel. My idea of a productive afternoon is running statistical analyses and making sure every data point is colour-coded for maximum efficiency. There’s something comforting about it - about the neat, orderly world of data, where every problem has a solution, as long as you just run the numbers one more time.

But, as my husband is always so fond of pointing out, there’s a little thing called thinking like a human being that doesn’t always align with the joys of spreadsheet life. He likes to remind me, often with a raised eyebrow, that there’s more to the world than graphs, data sets, and mathematical precision. There are feelings, emotions, and irrationalities. People - annoyingly - don’t fit neatly into rows and columns.

Now, this is where Technocracy hits its first real snag.

The appeal is obvious, right? Who wouldn’t want the experts in charge? Surely things would go more smoothly if we put the nerds - the logical, data-driven problem solvers - in control of everything. No more political grandstanding. No more emotional speeches about "the will of the people." Just good, clean, efficient governance, led by people who actually know what they’re doing.

But here’s the thing. As much as I love a good graph, humans aren’t graphs. They’re not even pie charts, and trust me, I’ve tried to make that analogy work. The more you try to cram people into data sets, the more they resist. People have this annoying habit of not behaving like variables in an equation. They have emotions, they make irrational decisions, and they don’t always choose the most efficient option. In fact, they rarely do. Just try creating a spreadsheet that predicts human behaviour and see how long it takes for the whole thing to devolve into chaos.

Now, imagine the Technocrat stepping into power. They’ve got all the data. They’ve run the numbers, consulted the experts, and have a plan. They’re going to streamline the economy, reduce inefficiencies, and optimise public services. Everything’s going to run like a finely tuned machine. And for a while, maybe it does. Decisions are made based on cold, hard facts. Budgets are balanced. Infrastructure projects are rolled out with military precision. Society hums along like a well-oiled machine.

But then, something happens that wasn’t on the spreadsheet. People - those damned, unpredictable creatures - start to complain. Maybe it’s because the new data-driven healthcare system has reduced their wait times, but also cut out those "inefficient" human doctors who actually listen to their patients. Maybe it’s because the algorithm deciding who gets public housing doesn’t quite account for the messy reality of human lives, like trauma, family connections, or - dare I say it - empathy.

You see, while Technocracy is brilliant in theory (and honestly, who wouldn’t prefer a well-organised, data-driven government to the usual mess of populist politics?), it’s not foolproof. At some point, you have to take off the Excel goggles and realise that humans don’t fit neatly into models. They defy categorisation. They reject optimisation. And they sure as hell don’t like being reduced to numbers.

Now, I’m not saying we should ditch technocratic thinking entirely. Far from it. I’m still firmly in the camp that believes the experts should be making the big decisions - climate policy, public health, economic planning. Let’s leave that to the professionals, not the politicians whose idea of expertise is shouting the loudest on Twitter. But technocracy, like my love for a well-formatted spreadsheet, has its limits. You can’t always govern from the data alone.

It’s a tough pill for a data nerd like me to swallow. I want to believe that everything can be solved with the right model, the right algorithm, the right formula. I want to believe that if you just analyse enough numbers, you’ll find the answer. But then my husband, ever the realist, reminds me that not everything is a numbers game. Sometimes, you have to think like a human. You have to consider the emotional, the irrational, and the downright illogical.

This is where Technocracy needs a reality check. As much as I want to hand the world over to the experts and let them fix everything with data and reason, I also know that people don’t live their lives in a bubble of rationality. They’re messy, emotional, contradictory beings who don’t always do what’s best for them. And that’s okay. Sometimes, the most efficient solution isn’t the best one. Sometimes, what we need is a bit of chaos, a bit of unpredictability. We need to feel like we’re part of something bigger than just a well-run machine.

So yes, while I love a good graph and can happily spend hours tweaking a spreadsheet until it’s perfect, I also know that governance requires more than just data. It requires humanity. It requires leaders who can step away from the numbers and see the people behind them. Because, in the end, no matter how much we want to optimise society, people aren’t just variables.

They’re the reason we need to get it right.

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Footnotes:

*Considering the number of footnotes and the fact that there is a bibliography and a glossary attached to this book, I’m not in any position whatsoever to judge.

**Also, very unlikely.

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