Thinking and doing: theory and practice

Welcome and thanks for visiting. This blog is where I write about projects I am working on, capture my research in progress and generally organise my thinking in public. It helps me enormously to have a place to do this – I hope you also find it useful. If you are new to this space you may find it helpful to read my ‘why I still blog blog‘ but suffice to say that this a place where I share my thinking in public but that means its subject to change and may look quite different when its actually applied in my role at Dorset Council.

I tend to roam between designing for democracy and more general thinking about technology driven change and the digital mindset. I’m increasing thinking about systems practice as well as my own leadership practice.

If you are looking for my professional bio then you need to head over to LinkedIn .

Dr Catherine Howe

Here are some of the things I am currently working on:

Latest posts

Broken words and why they matter

We are digging ourselves a hole. In a complicated world communication is everything. Much of this complication is caused by our own laziness and carelessness with language – we appropriate and borrow words without ever taking the time to work out what they really mean. In our yearning to make ...

Week notes 3rd April 2017

I’ve fallen out of the habit of regular blogging for lots of reasons but I intend to get back to it. I find it a hugely helpful part of reflective practice and also core to an action research approach to the world which has been pretty embedded in me ever ...

Digital mindset: A whistlestop tour

This post is a companion to the 8 tribes of digital piece I wrote earlier in the year. It describes the qualities which I use to define the digital mindset. I am putting to one side my ambivalence about the word ‘digital’ and will come back to that another day. ...

Emergent ideas: Its a frame-changer

Sociologists use the term framing to describe the way in which your prior experiences – cultural and personal – give context to way in which you approach a problem or issue. Its a central aspect of how the public sphere operates and critical to our decision making process – both ...

You can’t create a good answer without a good question

Good questions get to the essence of the problem you are exploring, provide a way of understanding what is happening now and give us the tools we need to measure whether or not we are making progress in developing an answer. Good questions help people convene around problems and when ...

Designing for democracy

I was talking the other day about potential visions for future public services. I was asked what mine was and I didn’t give one. Instead I talked about culture and method and behaviours because how we go about shaping the future is critical, how we work will determine what is ...

8 tribes of digital and the rise of the robot army.

I developed the 7 tribes of digital model a couple of years ago – it was a response to my frustration about the number of conversations I was having about ‘digital’ which had people talking with different definitions and as a result very different framings of what digital can mean ...

Reading list – part greatest hits and some newer entries

This is a post for the the fabulous Cassie Robinson who asked me for this a few weeks ago. Its also timely – I’m just about to start running some action learning sets on some of these questions and its a good time to refresh the reading list. So here ...

Rowers, pirates and rocket ships: How do you respond to disruption?

We’re all travelling across an uncertain ocean between the industrial and network society – and different strategies are in play. If you look at how commercial organisations respond to disruptive change from new technologies there are a number of identifiable approaches. I call them row harder, go pirate or build ...

Can you have a story of place without a corresponding story of person?

A lot of my thinking about place has been shaped by social geographers like Doreen Massey or more recently by economic thinking about how to drive place based growth. In considering how to build digital civic infrastructure I leaned heavily into the idea of a story of place and the ...