First published at FutureGov. “The old is dying and the new is not yet born, in the interregnum many mordant symptoms are found” – Antonio Gramsci Since I first heard this quote (more on which later) I have been struck by the explanatory power of recognising that we are in an interregnum; in fact we…
Category: public policy
What might Coordinated System-Wide Climate Emergency Activity look like?
Context As we know, the response to the climate change emergency is such a ferociously complicated system problem that no-one can solve it on their own; all must play a part. But the disparate nature of different organisations and the very many different things that need to happen can mean that we end up (potentially)…
Interesting Questions
This blog is an attempt to articulate the wider questions within which the elements of my portfolio of activities sit, and for which I am (very slowly!) trying to explore relevant academic literature. The one sentence which tries to encapsulate things is: Public service governance in the era of digital approaches, sophisticated analytics and variegated…
Introducing the Improvement and Development Board
This article appears in the November 2017 edition of The Clerk – the newsletter of the Society of Local Council Clerks. Terminology: within the sector Town and Parish Councils are referred to as “Local Councils” with their larger brethren which people may more instantly think of as local authorities known as “principal authorities”. My…
The Growing Chaos and Complexity of Local Government
(This is based on a talk which I gave at the recent mySociety Company retreat) Summary This is a future-based look at the chaos and complexity of local government. We are a very centralised nation but we are becoming more localised in ways which change the nature of the complexity that people have to deal…
Is “Localism” to Blame for Brexit?
An edited version of this blog first appeared in LGC shortly after the Brexit vote. Some of the trends that we celebrate as localist – taking decisions closer to the people they affect, uniting people within the bubble of their place, creating effective but smaller groups of people – these trends of fragmentation seem similar…
On Being Ignored
This is a slightly adapted version of my blog which was published by LGiU here. It is the run-up to the EU referendum. Two voices are speaking, but not to each other: Voice Number 1 – “I’m really frustrated and don’t know what to do about it. The vast majority of people I know and trust,…
Free is a Curious Price
This is where I may get torn to shreds by some people I really like – Open Data folk. For the last three decades, since my early qualifications in Operational Research, through my consulting and public and private leadership roles I have been fascinated by the role of data and analytics in helping make the…
“Dark Value” in Public Services?
We are used to the idea of “dark matter” as the name of the precisely quantified but undetectable proportion of the universe that has to be there for current physics theories to make sense. By analogy* Geoff McCracken writes in a book of the same name about “Dark Value” – the hidden value – that…
Why Ideology Eats Evidence for Breakfast
A Bioengineer called Guru Madhavan gave a talk at the RSA this week pointing out that it makes sense to apply the tools of rational disciplines, like engineering, to the field of public policy. He gave some examples of (what others would call) user-centred design, systematic and multi-criteria decision-making. I got this stuff with my…
Four Futures for Health and Social Care Integration
A few months ago I wrote a structured future scenarios piece looking at four (deliberately extreme) possible futures for health and social care integration. (There’s also a little teaser video about it). At the heart of the paper is consideration of how the future will evolve in terms of uncertainty on two key dimensions…
Immediate Reflections on the 2015 Solace Summit
I shared my immediate reflections on this year’s Solace summit in the following tweets which, to be clear, contain my personal views and are framed partly as provocations, the provocative nature often enhanced by the character limit! Reflection 1: Devo will give birth to people-place-changing awesome 21st C Municipalism (except where it miserably doesn’t) Reflection 2: *Evidence* is…
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