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

Week notes: 24th February 2019

I've been a bit lax with the 500 words partly because I have been on holiday but partly because I have been brooding over the RBKC post which I just published. Having set that free - and also published the piece I wrote about my research interests for the year ...

Small steps of democratic change

This is a personal reflection on the work that I have been supporting at Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) in my role as a trustee of the Democratic Society. I joined Demsoc back in 2010 as a governor (non-exec director) and have worked with them ever since. It’s gone ...

2019 enquiries: Getting started

I wrote at the start of the year that I wanted to open up my personal enquiry for the year and see who else is interested in the things I am interested in. I’ve spoken to a few people about this and have some takers so this post is intended ...

Weeknotes and yet more on multidisciplinary working

I was asked this week what the difference is between our design principles and last week’s post on multidisciplinary working – its a fair shout. Much of what I wrote about trust and respect is very much an echo of what we wrote in our design principles but I still ...

Making the whole greater than the sum of the parts

My team has a rich set of skills. We draw both from the established disciplines like business analysis and project management but also from the newer disciplines of user research, content strategy and service design. We have a design principle that commits us to being agile first (you can read ...

Weeknotes: Strategy; its a tricky business

I’ve been slightly cheating on the 500 words this week as I have been doing a lot of writing for work stuff on the train and have decided to count that….so I wanted to make sure that I did a proper week note this week. I’ve been spending the week ...

2019: setting intent and seeing what happens

I try not to make new year’s resolutions but I do spend the first week of each year getting myself together, setting an intent for the year and generally becoming set up for the year I want to have. Its a companion to the firebreak that I had in the ...

Big programme design and the willing suspension of disbelief involved

I haven’t written a lot about my time at Capita but I wanted to capture some of the thinking that I did in the last year I was there as its work that I am drawing on a lot at the moment and hopefully it will help people understand where ...

Mindful system and finding our hum

I went paperless about 9 years ago when I started my PHD and realised that I might actually end up being buried under mounds of articles if I didn’t take action. However I have never ever managed to crack my addition to stationary and you can tell when I feel ...