Anthea Roberts is busy reinventing the world of public governance and decision-making for the complex, volatile and uncertain times through which we are lucky enough, in the Chinese proverb sense, to be living. Australian grown, globally nurtured and profound and compelling in every way. Lucky us… I’ll talk about that work in more detail another […]
Try, test and grow: the smell of new paradigms
I wrote a short piece recently based on James Plunkett’s ‘governing human’ observation about the energy for reform and even transformation in how we govern, including the work of the public sector, emanating from an energetic edge. And I noted that aspects of James’ work are being picked up in some strands of work within […]
Governing human: energy at the edge
“The system is dying from the middle, but there’s vitality at the periphery.” With an apt mix of despair and hope, James Plunkett front ends a very handy inventory of some evidence of the energy and renewal typically found at the edges as harbingers of system shift and renewal. It’s where he’s increasingly looking for […]
Dark Enlightenment, the bonfire of the vanities and being countercultural
This is the 10 February 2025 FT Swamp Notes from Rana Foroohar and Richard Waters. [The Notes is a great @financialtimes newsletter to which I strongly recommend you sign up if you haven’t already]. It’s one of the most disturbing things I’ve read in the torrent of analysis and speculation about exactly what the Trump/Musk […]
The power of the connecting middle: where policy, delivery and democracy meet (and often don’t)
I had one of those interesting collisions between a couple of strands of my work last week that helped to make sense of a couple of things. One piece of work is The Possibility Partnership. More about this below but it’s a project full of, well, possibility about making a dent in the vexed question […]
Nothing is new, it seems
I was chasing up some information about KU Leuven, the oldest Catholic university in Europe and the site of a major EU/US meeting on tech and trade. In the process, I came across this description of the Beguines in the Belgian city of Leuven. Communities of beguines formed at the end of the 12th century . […]
