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.

Current lines of enquiry include the tribes of digital, designing for democracy and more general thinking about technology driven change and the digital mindset.

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

All change is system change

All change is system change – to say otherwise is to ignore a fundamental truth about organisations being living breathing human systems. There is a lot of great thinking going on in the system change space. Rowan is leading some really interesting work at the RSA looking at the intersection of ...

Spoiler alert – there are now 9 tribes of digital

The 7 /8 / 9 tribes of digital is an ongoing observation exercise based around the different definitions of digital – usually represented by different waves of technology – that you can observe in an organisation. As part of my August firebreak I’ve also been dusting off the 8 tribes of ...

How to find a digital mindset in your origin myth

Taking this few days to reflect and synthesise some of the things I have been learning since joining CRUK has been hugely valuable. As part of this I’ve been revisiting a couple of the models which I have developed previously and dusting them off to see if they still fit ...

Creating a personal firebreak

I really enjoyed reading about how the Helpful Technology gang managed to create what they call a firebreak for themselves — a pause in their work that allows them both to work on their own projects but also catch up on some of the housekeeping work that always gets pushed to the ...

Full stack decision making

A few years ago now I did a lot of work with a number of police forces and I was always struck by the fact that the best of them were very comfortable with the fact that while community policing needs to be fluid and networked any kind of crisis ...

Weeknotes 30th July: who needs an agenda anyway?

I have decided to declare the excellent weather as the new normal which means that blogging needs to continue as planned and not be derailed by a desire to be outside – am compromising by writing in the garden. This last week was all about away days as I had ...

Mindful diary: the early years

I’ve not blogged for a while for no other reason than the weather has been so lovely I have not wanted to spend time inside unless I have to. Weather now permitting (and in fact demanding) some inside time here we go. My efforts at mindful diary and coming together ...

Week notes 11th June 2018

This is a quick note mainly to make sure I keep in the habit as I missed last week. I’ve been heads down finishing our technology strategy and have not felt inclined to write much else. That being said I have a few things rumbling about in my mind which ...

Week notes 21st May

I started writing this on a glorious morning on the Isle of Wight – just taken the dogs out – a perfect bank holiday weekend which makes the apocalyptic weather from the rest of the country another piece of evidence that says that the IOW is actually in another timezone….if ...

Week notes 14th May 2018

Picture above is of a blackbird that is nesting in the rosebush outside the garage. We now have to creep around when extracting anything and also can’t BBQ as its nested just above it but we have fingers crossed we will get hatchlings this year! As the observant will have ...