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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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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
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Can Institutions Decline Like Civilisations?
Many of our institutions are in decline. The average lifespan of a civilisation is 336 years, Big companies used to have a lifespan of 61 years, now it’s down to 18. If all civiisations fall. then surely so must all companies and institutions? Read more
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What I Got Wrong About Innovation and Design
A hospital stay during COVID-19 revealed a surprising truth to me: bureaucracy’s thaw unleashed frontline innovation. As staff bypassed rigid rules, care improved, highlighting the power of bottom-up change. This experience challenges traditional innovation models, advocating for organisational redesign and enabling people themselves to drive progress. Read more
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The Small Challenge For Big Companies
Small = Optimised for Innovation Research suggests that smaller teams are more optimised for innovation. Indeed, as Dashun Wang and James A. Evans write for HBR, large teams can be better at development and deployment, but small teams are better at disruption. Their analysis of over 65 million patents uncovered a nearly universal pattern: whereas large teams tended to… Read more
Paul Taylor 