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

Democratic dreams

Another post with some dreams – very much from a personal perspective and as someone who has been thinking and researching in this space for a fair while now… While devolution is a huge and wide scale shift in how our democracy and state will operate its very very light ...

Devolution by design

Speaking very personally, I’m living with the tension between being passionately up for both local government reorganisation and devolution and my equally strongly held belief that how you do something really has an impact on the outcome you are creating. This was always going to be a messy process and ...

Digital dreams

In my other start of the year post I talked about some of my democratic and design dreams for the year – in this one I want to share my digital dreams. Stepping back from devolution question and into the reorganisation one, the opportunity for modernisation which comes with the ...

Setting up 2025

I’m having a slightly unusual start to the year as my husband and I (along with half of the rest of the country it seems!) have been absolutely wiped out by some kind of bug and we are just about staggering back into the real world. It makes me extra ...

Week (ish) notes

I’ve been on holiday* and have used some of the time to catch up on things I wanted to capture here and perhaps come back to: I have am still getting responses to my piece on buying better stuff (thank you!) and I am going to invite people who are ...

Shape the market and buy better stuff

Last week we stopped the implementation of a major upgrade of a piece of legacy software as it really didn’t meet the hype it was sold with and clearly wasn’t going to support our modernisation work. Stopping something like this is hard in any circumstances and stopping a project with ...

AI musing – time to get engaged

Having said goodbye to social media (sort of) and having largely bypassed the data hype cycle as being a technocratic rather than social one (with a large exception for a fascination with the quantified self and big data meets IOT which I might come back to) I am fully on ...

Setting up for 2024

Given I only managed to post my 2023 intentions in August it feels a bit soon to be posting again – but here we are with some intentions for 2024 – all written alongside the annual sorting week. Part of my sorting this year is to get a proper AI ...

So long twitter…it was fun while it lasted

I have been fascinated by the power of online community to provide real support and connection for people for nearly 20 years (eek) and when the internet got social, I was an early and enthusiastic adopter. Right now I find myself withdrawing from most social media and I will pop ...