I’ve been involved in two discussions recently which have collided, for me at least, in a mix of hope and expectation. Discussion#1 goes something like this. Is the care economy a thing? And if it is a thing, is it a thing whose defining characteristic, fairly or not, is its stubborn resistance to many of […]
The Third Stack: Epistemic Discretion and the Power to Decide
“By contributing to an open-source, transnational effort that aligns with its own industrial priorities, Vietnam inserts itself not as a peripheral adopter but as a co-author of global AI infrastructure. This is asymmetry as strategy: composing relevance not by competing at the centre, but by accruing influence at the edge.” I’ve now read this essay […]
This is why you need to study ancient history: we’ve been here before
I’m obsessed with the idea of just how much our current global moment of transition resonates with the transition in ancient China from the Spring and Autumn period (770 to 476 BCE) to the Warring States period (475 to 221BCE). More accurately, my obsession is with this recent essay from Noema by Shanghai-based Chinese scholar […]
Inverting Socrates: we’re all inquiry designers now
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 […]
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 […]
In extremis: what Ukraine 2.0 tells us about reforming government and the public sector
I don’t know much about judo or any of the similar martial arts, but I gather one of the central features is the ability to use the power and momentum of the attacker to your advantage.When you are attacked, the trick is to turn the aggressor’s energy back on itself. Defence becomes attack. Aggression is […]
