City of Fremantle Happiness Department – Lefty Bullshit or Good Governance?
by Tim Grey-Smith
Happy
It was November 2009. Six bright eyed, slightly nervous new councillors and six slightly less excitable returning ones entered the hallowed halls of the Esplanade Hotel Conference Room, flanked by senior City staff and entered a two day facilitated lockdown. It was an odd process. We were asked to define five strategic priorities that would guide the City moving forward. However as a new councillor, my deep understanding of the inner workings of the City and what it really needed were still a mystery.
As a result, I just re-hashed what I knew at the time, which was all the feedback I’d had from the community through the election period, combined with some slightly informed opinions of my own. None of these items were of any real strategic importance, although they did all make it into the document in some form. The senior staff were very vocal through this process, they were professionals and they knew what they needed to see in the plan for them to move forward in their own departments. It would be naive to think they weren’t steering the entire process, and it would have been wrong to stop them. The end result, after much wordsmithing and consternation, was the City of Fremantle Strategic Plan 2010 – 2015. If I had a time machine, I would go back to that workshop, skip the overcooked beef at the buffet and demanded that we create a sixth directive, and make the Happiness of our ratepayers a strategic priority.
It’s not a new idea. The tiny nation of Bhutan has been measuring Gross National Happiness since the term was first coined in 1972 by the Fourth Dragon King (what a title!) Jinge Singye Wangchuck (what a name!), as a method of applying Buddhist spiritual values to measure the nations general well-being. The four pillars of GNH are sustainable development, preservation and promotion of cultural values, conservation of the natural environment and establishment of good governance. Over time, this work has been further defined into eight general contributors to happiness: physical, mental and spiritual health; time-balance; social and community vitality; cultural vitality; education; living standards; good governance; and ecological vitality. Whilst the measure isn’t as quantifiable as GDP, and isn’t perfect by any measure, the role of “liveability” indexes are becoming more common as many people start looking for more holistic approaches to societal growth.
So how would this idea of a “Happiness Department” apply to the City of Fremantle? Obviously the scope of such work at a local level is much more limited than as defined above, but I believe a deliberate attempt to drill down into the emotional health of our citizens and do what we can do increase their happiness, or at the very least remove some of the frustrations, would be a worthy exercise and money well spent.
For example, one of the biggest frustrations I had while serving on the Planning Services Committee was the amount of neighbour disputes that clogged up the process. One infamous warring set of neighbours kept the entire committee enthralled for an hour while they disputed .38m2 of encroachment. Apart from the real and obvious angst that was felt by the parties concerned, the opportunity cost of this dispute was that by the end of it, everyone was so tired we rushed through quite a large strategic planning issue without the debate it really deserved.
A Happiness Officer (sign me up!) would have the remit to look at issues like this, and look at the idea of happiness of ratepayers in general, and see how they could build better communities, and basically stop people “sweating the small stuff”. They could encourage street parties, get neighbours to know each other better and with better relationships, perhaps avoiding some of these conflicts. If we could remove five neighbour disputes that ended up at the State Administrative Tribunal (SAT), the position of Happiness Officer would become cost positive in short order.
The Happiness Department could also look at council processes themselves, finding common frustrations with overly bureaucratic process and introducing some common sense. I believe that even the community knowledge that there is someone working internally to remove frustrating processes would remove some frustration in its own right.
Whilst on the surface this concept might seem a bit twee, I believe there are real and effective outcomes that could be achieved by such a department. What do you think? If we had a Happiness Officer at the City of Fremantle, what would you get them to do?
You are really talking about ‘recreating community’ here, Tim, where we all learn to share better and be less selfish. We have become to self centred on our backyards and homes, and our self importance is really out of balance when we consider our relevance within the bigger picture of the entire community, and even the planet.
Happiness is extremely important for communities. Happy people work better, fight less, are more willing to share, and more willing to consider the needs of other people.
Can I be your assistant happiness manager at the City of Fremantle.
Roel Loopers
Relationships, the hardest thing.
What a wonderful idea! A happiness officer would serve as such a positive for Fremantle, well for any suburb. I am looking forward to the happiness project exhibition this week that starts in Fremantle too – more of this stuff would be wonderful. I was only just watching an amazing documentary that I would highly recommend called ‘Happy’ by Roko Belic. It kind of ties in with what you have been saying.
It takes a journey from the swamps of Louisiana to the slums of Kolkata in search of what really makes people happy. A professor called Ed Diener has been trying to measure human happiness called ‘Positive Psychology’ just like one can try and measure depression or anxiety. He determined that it can be measured by what’s called our ‘genetic set point’. Our genes have 50% to do with it, only 10% of our happiness is contributed by our circumstances such as job/money ad 40% is from whats called ‘Intentional Activity’, stuff we can do daily, simple positive behaviour that creates what he called ‘Flow’ – an dopamine rush.
It has been long known that ‘poorer’ people in this world are actually a lot happier in their lives. They have a set value system with intrinsic goals – Personal growth, desire to help one another, relationships that mean so much and also they have a very secure community connection which was found to be key to their overall happiness. They recognised that there is always something far more greater to care about than the ‘self’.
A well connected community that is open to change, to personal growth and realise we are all different and respect that will make our relationships stronger, our workplaces better and our societies stronger too.
Bring on a happiness officer 🙂
I’m very supportive of the concept of increasing your 4 pillars and 8 generators of GNH, but not sure if having a Happiness Dept is the best way to go for our small Council.
There are clearly many examples of hostility and conflict between ratepayers, developers, be they just a neighbour or a blow in developer intent on greed, and with our council who seem to seldom represent the ratepayers, rather to support the blow in developer. I think investigating conflict resolution between these groups and designing very different ways of operating would be very helpful.
Much conflict is based on lack of understanding of the other perspective, drivers and values, lack of acknowledgement and worthiness of the input and opinions of others. Conversation is often the best mechanism, ie, genuine face to face listening. Active listening has feedback loops such as paraphrasing, which subtly inform each other of that acknowledgement and understanding process, that enables a dialogue to progress.
Forms of that are possible even with proposals with public comment. Currently after the comment period, the result is a revised edition of the proposal, but there is no feedback that demonstrates acknowledge and understanding of the submissions made, certainly no conversation, and hence why a point of view is not accepted. Councillors and the Mayor merely restate their own personal perspective, and expect respect from ratepayers who are effectively ignored.
The British Columbian (Canada) approach is along the lines of minimising conflict and expectations, by involving the community at the conceptual outset for all development, whereupon only acceptable ideas go on to Councillors and Departmental staff.
The Mabo and subsequent decisions gave locals, ie, the custodians of each locale’s amenity, significant status. The aboriginal communities fought for retention and protection of amenity not ownership. In that regard they now have better protection than most metro based locals. Rather, these locals are ‘labelled’ as trouble makers, by Council and developers, for trying to retain amenity.