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: thinking about work
Reflecting on Reflecting
Complex Responsive Processes of Relating I spent a day recently at a workshop entitled “Introduction to Complex Responsive Processes of Relating”, run by Chris Mowles, Professor of Complexity and Management at Hertfordshire Uni’s Business School. Run by him, but giving a lot of time in the day for discussion with the 30 or so other…
A Tale of Two Weekends
For each of the last two weekends I have been with folk who were giving up their weekends for a purpose. One was in Birmingham: localgovcamp, an unconference of (generally) younger UK local government folk, enthusiastic for internet-era change. The other was in Lausanne: a gathering of Alumni of the Institute for Management…
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…
Scrutinising Digital
I had a chance at the recent LocalGovCamp to find some like minded souls (including the wonderful Dave McKenna) with whom to explore a question that has been interesting me for a while: how do you reconcile 21st Century approaches such as Agile with the 20th century style governance that exists within local authorities. For…
It’s About the End User, Stupid! … No! Not that one! The TICTeC blog
TICTeC is great. The world is better for having TICTeC in it. It provokes delight, wonder and thoughts. This blog is mostly about the thoughts! TICTeC is The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference and the third one was held last week (25-26 April, in Florence). It is funded thanks to sponsorship from Google and the…
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…
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…
Take-Aways from #LocalGovCamp 2015
Consolidating my thinking and in a spirit of sharing … The Right Conditions for Digital Paul Brewer (@pdbrewer) pitched a session about the Right Conditions for Digital (see his blogpost) based on his experience at Director of Digital and Resources at the very interesting Adur and Worthing. This could have been a longer session. Paul…
Why do we Reinvent the Wheel – The #UKGC15 write-up
I pitched a session at UKGC15 to try to explore the issue of why some innovation happens from scratch rather than being a case of adopting and adapting viable solutions developed elsewhere. I was motivated to do this from my experience as a member of the Service Transformation Challenge Panel where we saw quite a lot…
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