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’ve also started a running post with some definitions and background reading that may be helpful.
Current lines of enquiry are captured in this enquiry map but I tend to roam between designing for democracy and more general thinking about technology driven change and the digital mindset. 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
Do you have 5 minutes?
This is a quick capture of the informal research I want to do around the social movements topic. My first approach is going to be to ask people their examples of social movements and then ask them to respond to the word cloud (in the image) but circling the words ...
Socialising some social movement thinking
We are doing some work on future trends and disrupters at CRUK. This is to help inform our organisational strategy thinking going forward and is also a good opportunity to check in with some of the assumptions and ideas that underpin how we think about ourselves. This blogpost is my ...
Health as a social movement
The NHS has an ongoing interest in the concept of health as a social movement and has commissioned and co-delivered work from NESTA and the RSA amongst others to explore this. One of the most sophisticated exploration of this was the NHS Citizen programme a few years ago which ...
Another august firebreak – redux
Events, dear boy, events……as Harold Macmillan may or may not have said….. This is a bit of a check in how the week has gone. I think fair to say considerably less serenity than last year which is down to me not protecting the time enough and also to the ...
Another August firebreak
I'm taking another firebreak week - though circumstances mean that its actually a firebreak 3 days with a day in the office and a day with DemSoc in-between but the essence is there! I have a few things I want to look at and expect these to spill over into ...
6 month notes
I’ve been away this week – walking on the Isle of Wight which has been lovely. This post is a wrap up of what I’ve been working on in my head while I was yomping along by the sea. Nearly 6 months into the year I wanted to check in ...
Where system change meets agile practice; the multidisciplinary primordial soup
While we all want and crave psychological safety is it realistic as an objective when the goal of the team is system change work which means you are working at the boundaries of certainty well beyond your circle of control and perhaps influence?
Politics will not save us unless we save it first
Brace yourselves – I’m talking about Brexit and it isn’t pretty. Nearly 3 years ago I wrote about my despair in the party political system and the urgent need to reform it as a critical blocker in terms of making any kind of democratic or political process. It turns out ...
Week notes 31.03.19
It was unusual week in that I went to three different conferences – a bit like buses after having had none for a while they all came along at once. It was a mix of old and new as two of them where charity sector focused and the third policing ...
I (just about) put my faith in humans
This is the text of a speech I gave at a dinner at a digital policing conference. It is not verbatim as I never read stuff out and my ipad died 5 mins in but its basically what I covered. I wanted to post it as its reflects some of ...
Digital Leadership All posts
Design principles and being kind
If design is the bringing together of form and function, then design principles are the ...
Field Notes All posts
Design principles and being kind
If design is the bringing together of form and function, then design principles are the ...
NHS Citizen All posts
NHS Citizen design – agile but structured
I wanted to capture my first reflection from the final NHS Citizen design workshop last ...