I like this time of year, as 2016 draws to a close. For the usual reasons, obviously. But also for a time to slow down, to reflect, to look back at the year we’ve had and to look forward at the year to come. As a child growing up near St Andrews in Scotland, I remember family and friends meeting up at this time to talk about our lives, our experiences, our stories our hopes and fears going into the new year. My three children are spending this Christmas in three different continents, but at heart, we remain story-tellers and of course we have Facetime.
This time last year, I wrote down my eight hopes and eight fears for charities in 2016. In my next post, I’ll re-visit what I wrote, what I got right, what I got wrong and what I missed altogether.
I don’t think I’ll score well for 2016. I didn’t see the Brexit result coming, nor the Trump Presidential election win. I was expecting another coalition Government when the Tory party won the election in May 2015. I was expecting political change in UK and US to be incremental and, in the event, change was much more radical and fundamental. The UK was more divided than I realised and not across simple left/right perspectives. Scotland voted to stay in the European Union, as did London, the most multi-cultural part of the UK. Parts of the country which have benefitted from EU funding nonetheless voted to leave; the North East, parts of Wales and Cornwall.
I’ve also learned a new word from the Oxford English Dictionary, post-truth which the Dictionary defines as an adjective:
‘Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less important in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’.
The Dictionary gives this example:
‘in this era of post-truth politics, it’s easy to cherry-pick data and come to any conclusion you desire’.
The Oxford Dictionary teams in UK and US both chose post-truth as their word of the year for 2016. Past words of the year were more innocent. In 2006, the UK went for ’bovvered’ and the US ‘carbon-neutral’. In 2009, the UK chose ‘simples’ and the US ‘unfriend’.
In my next posts, I’ll go back to my 2016 predictions and, in a spirit of boldness, set out my predictions for 2017. I’ll also reflect on what a post-truth world might mean for charities?