There’s a feature about the most successful multi-sectoral partnerships I have done. They are all a bit of a shambles. Not catastrophically broken, mind you. Just perpetually messy in ways that make people uncomfortable. Meetings that raise more questions than answers. Workstreams that split, merge, and reconfigure like some kind of organisational amoeba. If you…
I watched Con Air a long time ago. Whether it’s a terrible or great film depends on your tolerance for Nicolas Cage’s hair and John Malkovich’s exaggerated acting. When they hijacked the plane in mid air, there is a moment where Cyrus “The Virus”, the villain, says “It’s not difficult to surmise Nathan’s feelings towards…
David Benjamin once grew a building out of mushrooms. Not a metaphor. An actual 40-foot tower in New York, made from 10,000 bricks he grew in five days using mycelium, the bit of fungus that lives underground and does all the interesting work while the mushroom takes the credit. When the exhibition ended, they composted…
Part 2: From Archetypes to Instruments (and Why Blended Finance Keeps Coming Up) What I have been trying to build is a process that moves archetype thinking from concept to operation. The surprising part has been realising that blended finance, a domain I used to work in, offers structural logic that transfers directly to neighbourhood…
The Categorical Invisibility Problem I have facilitated a couple of in-house workshops on neighbourhood health working and have had the opportunity of synthesising ideas from a wide range of brilliant colleagues. This has partially helped my thinking and turned what started as a practical question about how national organisations work at community scale into something…