Noticing the difference
Learning, entropy and what keeps institutions evolving: why the energy that holds off decay is people noticing difference. In English and Italian.
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Public services delivery, sustainability and a lesson from thermodynamics
A couple of months ago, I was on a field visit for a review of a large-scale, government-led poverty reduction protection initiative. Watching and learning from the staff of local line agencies navigate about how they navigate a complex, multi-partner service delivery made me think of an unlikely concept from physics: the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the concept of entropy.
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Is growth inevitable?
I read a mini-review of a new book by Daniel Susskind on growth. I am pasting the review from the Guardian below. While reading this review (I have not read the book yet), I was asking myself whether growth is really inevitable? If there is no growth, is it really the disaster he describes? —
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Unlocking systemic change: reflections on facilitating a policy engagement workshop applying the four keys and PDIA
In today’s complex world, driving meaningful social and policy change requires more than incremental improvements—it demands systemic shifts. In this blog, I describe and reflect on my experience of drawing from a tool from Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation and applied the Four Keys for shifting systems to facilitate a strategy discussion with policy researchers from
Enhancing adaptive development through Strategy Testing
In the rapidly changing landscape of international development, traditional, rigid approaches often fall short when dealing with complex and evolving environments. This is where adaptive development and systems shifting come into play, allowing practitioners to remain responsive and flexible in the face of uncertainty. A key method that supports this approach is strategy testing, a
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Systems mapping and actionable insights – Exploring systems mapping with Pete Barbrook-Johnson and Alexandra S. Penn
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to dive into an insightful podcast from the series Systems and Cybernetics on the New Books Network. The episode featured an interview with Pete Barbrook-Johnson and Alexandra (Alex) S. Penn, co-authors of the book Systems Mapping: How to Build and Use Causal Models of Systems
My discovery of systems through the words of Jane Jacobs
In 2005, I had been living for over two years, in Kampong Thom, central Cambodia. I was working on community development and local governance participation in local governance in a GTZ (now GIZ) rural development programme. I also worked on my PhD research on education decentralisation and community participation in school management, which I did
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Dealing with the unexpected
There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)
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