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Net Zero and The Law of Horse Manure
Catastrophic predictions that spell dark days for humanity are nothing new. The Times predicted in 1894 that in 50 years time, every street in London would be buried under nine feet of horse manure. It was the crisis of all crises. There was, to be fair, some evidence for this. As urban populations rapidly increased… Read more
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The Gravitational Pull Of Business As Usual
The interior secrets of black holes are guarded by a one-way light-trapping boundary called the event horizon. This horizon is the point, according to NASA, that the gravitational influence of the black hole becomes so intense that not even light is fast enough to escape it. A very different horizon exists in many organisations, except Read more
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Digital Transformation and Our Failure To Learn From Past Mistakes
The cyclical nature of public sector failure is a testament not to a lack of intelligence or goodwill, but to a deeply ingrained resistance to genuine learning. It’s a system designed for stability, not innovation. The very structures that make it reliable—bureaucracy, risk aversion, and short-termism—are the same ones that guarantee we will, time and… Read more
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The Way Out of The ‘Performance Myth’
The Performance Myth reduces individuals to commodities or “performers,” whose value is contingent on meeting predefined metrics. This leads to a workplace culture where employees are constantly evaluated not for their creativity, integrity, or contributions to collective well-being, but for their ability to meet targets that may or may not be aligned with deeper organisational… Read more
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The Problem with a Narrow Focus on Efficiency
Being efficient is not half as effective as conventional management would like to think. Read more
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Sectors Reimagined as Products, and the Move to Agile Place
What if agile places could save the public sector? What if we stopped thinking of individual sectors and started thinking about of them as ‘products’ that require interoperability? An ‘agile place’ view demands a radical shift. It pushes us to view public services – be it healthcare, education, or social support – as evolving products. Read more
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Transforming Public Services with Agile Principles
Applied outside of tech agile can usher in a fundamental shift from rigid, top-down planning to a dynamic, iterative, and, crucially, person-focused approach. Think about our place-based working experiments. What we understood, fundamentally, is that the answers to local problems lie locally. We didn’t parachute in an army of consultants with a 200-page report, or… Read more
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The Missing Ingredient For Community-Led Innovation Is Permission
The bigger the unit the more pessimistic we get about it. When faced with vast issues like global warming or national debt, we feel a deep lack of control and efficacy. Conversely, smaller units of change, like a local community, breed optimism. Here, problems are concrete, solutions feel tangible, and our actions have visible impact.… Read more
Paul Taylor 