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. I try and maintain a running post with some definitions and background reading that may be helpful.

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. You may find it helpful to read this ‘why I 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 Adur and Worthing.

If you are looking for my professional bio then you need to head over to LinkedIn . If you are trying to find me online for a more research orientated discussion then you can find me on twitter as @curiousc. If you want to contact to me about speaking at an event then you can contact me via either of these routes.

Dr Catherine Howe

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

Latest posts

Connecting the big ideas is the big idea

This is a post about multidisciplinary working – something which we rely on but don’t often think about. Multidisciplinary (or cross disciplinary if you are using the language of research or practice) or matrix (of you are using the language of organisational design) are essentially a bunch of experts trying ...

Enquiry map: January 2021

This is a continuation of the previous iteration of the map which you can see here. The enquiry map is an action research process to help me work through the early stages of working out what the actual questions are that need experimenting with. I’m also going to use it ...

Setting an intent: 2021

This is my check in with myself for the year. It links to other stuff that I do/write in this annual week of reflection / intention setting and cupboard sorting. You can see last years post here and if you interested here is the one from 2019. How did 2020 ...

The why I blog blog

This is just a short intro to this blog to explain what its about. Its also a bit of a user guide for people I work with so you can understand what I am doing here. It started as effectively the field notes for my doctoral research. As I was ...

The one about Community Mapping

Understanding how we at Adur and Worthing show up in place and work with our communities is a central question for our Thrive work and key to how we want to organise ourselves in the future. Showing up in place for me is about the ability to be in ...

Some definitions

I use a lot of what you can either call buzzwords or you could call specialist language. I try to plain English stuff as much as possible and am happy to be called on it if I fail to do that but this is a list of some of the ...

What does it mean to Thrive?

What do you need in order to thrive? Its a question that I always ask myself at the start of the year, connected to the thinking I do around setting my intent for the year which I wrote about here but its meant at a deeper level to ask what ...

The everlasting hunt for the hum

I’ve been thinking about meetings a lot this week…..while in a lot of meetings. It’s been odd joining an organisation during what we can officially refer to as Strange Times. The thing I have found most difficult is in finding the rhythm of the place. Every team and organisation has ...

Thrive?

Back again for more week notes…. Really pleased to see our Climate Assembly getting up and running with Demsoc as our delivery partner. We had a big milestone this week with our participants being finalised which is brilliant and makes it all very real. Or rather virtual as we are ...

Creating capacity for change

Conversations with both Cassie Robinson and Noel Hatch have made me resolve to try and get back to my weekly blogging habit and do some proper week notes. These are going to be a bit of a shopping list I think to start with as I’m still all over the ...