We are digging ourselves a hole. In a complicated world communication is everything. Much of this complication is caused by our own laziness and carelessness with language – we appropriate and borrow words without ever taking the time to work out what they really mean. In our yearning to make ourselves understood we dilute our …
This post is a companion to the 8 tribes of digital piece I wrote earlier in the year. It describes the qualities which I use to define the digital mindset. I am putting to one side my ambivalence about the word ‘digital’ and will come back to that another day. But first some back story …
Sociologists use the term framing to describe the way in which your prior experiences – cultural and personal – give context to way in which you approach a problem or issue. Its a central aspect of how the public sphere operates and critical to our decision making process – both formal and informal. As a …
I was talking the other day about potential visions for future public services. I was asked what mine was and I didn’t give one. Instead I talked about culture and method and behaviours because how we go about shaping the future is critical, how we work will determine what is within reach. I have passionate …
This is a post for the the fabulous Cassie Robinson who asked me for this a few weeks ago. Its also timely – I’m just about to start running some action learning sets on some of these questions and its a good time to refresh the reading list. So here you go; context collapse, networked …
We’re all travelling across an uncertain ocean between the industrial and network society – and different strategies are in play. If you look at how commercial organisations respond to disruptive change from new technologies there are a number of identifiable approaches. I call them row harder, go pirate or build a rocket. Row harder: this …
A lot of my thinking about place has been shaped by social geographers like Doreen Massey or more recently by economic thinking about how to drive place based growth. In considering how to build digital civic infrastructure I leaned heavily into the idea of a story of place and the need to find or create …
The image is of the democracy stack – you can have a read about this here Nothing I have seen in the last week or so has made me any less of the belief that the slow death of the current political party machinery is bringing our democracy down with it. Have we not yet run …
I voted remain for two reasons; one is that I believe that we are better off as part of a bigger more connected Europe, two I cannot abide and will not stand for the racist and bigoted tone that parts of the leave campaign reached. Clearly not everyone agrees with me. A referendum was always …
This is an action research post and very much me thinking in public. As I write this it occurs to me that I am perhaps less of an innovator and more of an experimenter – at the moment I am experimenting with ways to get things done. I’ve been thinking about collaboration a lot – …