Many of these deaths were in two South Side neighbourhoods: Englewood and Auburn Gresham. They experienced the exact same microclimate and extreme heat conditions. Both were roughly 99% African American with comparable proportions of elderly residents living alone. Both faced high poverty rates, high unemployment, and elevated levels of violent crime.

Despite sharing almost identical demographic and vulnerability profiles, the heat deaths were not equally distributed.

Englewood recorded a heat mortality rate of 33 per 100,000, making it one of the deadliest areas in Chicago.

Auburn Gresham, on the other hand, recorded a mortality rate of 3 per 100,000—lower than the city average and safer than several wealthy, largely white North Side neighbourhoods.

At the time, Eric Klinenberg was a 25-year-old doctoral student at whose childhood on the border of Chicago’s Gold Coast and the Cabrini-Green housing project had already alerted him to the inequities of his hometown. When the heatwave struck and hundreds of isolated, elderly residents died behind locked doors, Klinenberg recognised that the tragedy wasn’t merely an extreme weather event, but a manifestation of everyday urban neglect. Compelled to uncover why one neighbourhood survived while an adjacent one collapsed, he ignored what everyone else was fixated on—the weather—and studied the places themselves.

Klinenberg demonstrated that the difference lay in the physical and institutional ecology that supported—or hindered—everyday contact between neighbours. While official narratives focused on temperature spikes, a critical factor was people simply not knowing one another.

Between 1960 and 1990, Englewood suffered severe disinvestment, losing around 50% of its population and the vast majority of its commercial base. This left empty lots, abandoned housing, and broken sidewalks, which amplified fear and led older people to retreat into locked, un-air-conditioned homes. Auburn Gresham, meanwhile, maintained a much denser commercial corridor with active sidewalks, corner groceries, diners, parish networks, and community organisations.

Because Auburn Gresham had spaces that encouraged people to gather, elderly residents regularly stepped outside into air-conditioned public spaces. Crucially, neighbours, church members, and shopkeepers quickly noticed if someone failed to appear for their daily routine, intervening before heat stroke turned fatal.

You’ll sometimes hear people say place doesn’t matter. Usually, that comes from a position of privilege where income or social standing allows someone to simply buy the help or safety they need in a crisis. If they live in a neighbourhood that starts to decline they can simply move.

However, place does matter.

Three-quarters of the people who died in Englewood and Auburn Gresham were over the age of 65, and most were on very low incomes. Those living in a place that made it hard for humans to connect faced an eleven-times higher chance of dying during that hot summer in Chicago.

In the UK we’re just off the back of a stifling hot summer ourselves, and I’ve been thinking about community resilience. Community is often dismissed as a fluffy, “nice-to-have” concept - but connection and resilience will become vital as we brace ourlselves for more unpredictable events in the future.

In his book Palaces for the People, Klinenberg expanded the lessons of the Chicago heat wave into a broader theory, arguing that our shared physical environments—which he terms ‘social infrastructure’—are just as critical to a functioning society as hard infrastructure like roads, bridges, and power grids.

It isn’t fluffy at all.

In a new post, Chris Bolton puts a different spin on this by looking at NATO Article 3, which requires members to maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack:

Referencing the resilience of the Ukrainian people, Chris writes:

“Whole of society preparedness doesn’t happen overnight. That capacity does not appear by magic in a crisis. It is built beforehand in community groups, local businesses, voluntary networks, public servants who know their patch. Trusted communications, practical skills and relationships that cross organisational boundaries. It lives in the neighbour who checks during a storm, the food bank volunteer, the local mechanic, the council officer who knows who to phone, and the community WhatsApp group that is useful rather than terrifying.”

The common thread here is resilience built through ‘people who know each other.’ Relational density is a core structural asset. It is infrastructure.

I often hear people imploring public service institutions to “stick to the basics”—to just do what it says on the tin and leave the rest alone. But that assumes community connection is an optional extra. It isn’t. If we want to have places that can actually withstand the crises of the future, bringing people together isn’t a distraction from the basics.

It is the basics.

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I argued innovation had to be decentralised, and that one siloed hub of creativity tucked away in a corner of the organisation was no longer fit for purpose.

The next step was , as we began transitioning to place-based working, to make every place based team its own innovation lab. When I wrote the post the design had 77 of them. Post merger, it’s now closer to 120.

I still believe that. But reading it back, I can see what I’d missed. Decentralising innovation doesn’t change what innovation is. It gives you more people doing the same thing in more places.

The harder shift, and the one we’re now attempting with BFL Waypoint, is from individual innovation (tests and pilots) to systemic innovation.

What the Lab was actually good at

Bromford Lab was built on a specific and, for its time, correct set of assumptions.

1. That a small team with permission to fail could move faster than a large organisation.

2. That most problems could be scoped well enough for solutions to be tested cheaply.

3. That the main obstacle to change inside an organisation was internal caution, or culture, rather than external complexity.

So we ran small, cheap trials. Some worked. Most didn’t. That was rather the point.

The biggest thing the Lab ever produced was the neighbourhood coach role — there are over 200 coaches working across Bromford today. But even that, our proudest output, was a redesign of something we already controlled: our own job descriptions, our own operating model, inside our own walls.

In truth, almost everything the Lab did well was something we could do alone.

Three arguments that break the model

Waypoint launched last week with three pieces that, taken together, explain why going it alone isn’t enough any more. They don’t entirely agree with each other, which may be the most useful thing about them.

Jas Bains, writing with Matt Leach, argues that the current operating environment isn’t a harder version of the old one — it is structurally different. Six forces converging at once: energy and resource competition, rearmament compressing the fiscal space, political instability, demographic decline, climate as an accelerating meta-threat, and AI sitting on top of all of it. Compound problems, not cyclical. His description of sitting in a board meeting spells out the challenge:

In his piece, Mark Willis argues something adjacent but not identical. The sector is trapped inside short cycles — political terms, funding rounds, three-to-five-year strategies, annual budgets — and those cycles produce rational short-term behaviour that leaves structural problems untouched.

My own piece argues many of our challenges are best tackled locally, within the place or community itself. The people living with the problems every single day are the ones with the best ideas and motivations for fixing them.

Here’s the tension:

Jas is telling us to look up and out at global forces.

Mark is telling us to stretch our horizon to decades.

I’m arguing the best ideas are on the street, held by the people living with the problem every day.

Those three all pull in different directions.

An innovation lab can only really serve one of them — the local, the immediate, the testable. It is structurally incapable of the other two. You cannot run a twelve-week experiment on whether your operating model survives a decade of compressed public spending.

The problem with pilots

Pilotitis is where promising innovations are endlessly tested in small-scale trials but consistently fail to transition into large-scale sustainable, widespread practice.

Pilots happen under entirely artificial, optimised conditions, relying on dedicated project teams, time-limited funding, and highly motivated champions. Once this temporary scaffolding is removed, the innovation is exposed to the harsh realities of routine operations, such as complex IT integration and the need to redesign pathways across deeply uncoordinated teams and departments.

The Troubled Families Programme failed because it tried to tackle a massive, complex issue using a pilot mindset (rigid targets, strict timelines, conditional funding). The Wigan Deal succeeded because it abandoned the pilot approach entirely and focused on changing the underlying culture and trust within the community.

However, pilots have a lot of value. They can prove a hypothesis.

The fundamental issue though is that you cannot pilot your way out of a system problem.

From pilots to system change

A pilot tests a new part inside an old machine, while system change rewires the entire machine—and the people operating it.

When Bromford and the Lab co-created, tested and launched the role of the Neighbourhood Coach they were inserting a new part into an old machine. And true to form , over time, the machine re-asserted its dominance.

Bromford Flagship LiveWest is now attempting a full-on rewiring in three waves:

Making a named place — not a function, a region or a contract — the unit around which work is organised. It is pushing decision rights down to those teams and, harder, working out how residents hold some of that power rather than being consulted on decisions taken elsewhere.

It is trying to build a resource model that matches its long term stated horizon, so that a commitment to a place isn’t undercut by budgets set centrally and annually. It is using scale deliberately rather than incidentally aimed at changing the conditions in places, not just operating within them.

And it is taking an outside-in stance, starting from what a place needs and what other actors in it are already doing, rather than from what a housing association happens to be able to supply.

None of these is finished. Some have not even started. Together they are the component parts of system change.

Bromford Lab took us a long way — further than most of the sector managed. What it could never do was ask whether the agenda itself was right, and if it isn’t, begin to rewire the organisation for a complex present.

So if you’re working on any of this from outside housing — health, education, energy, local government, research, or building something you think we should be using — that’s precisely who Waypoint is built for.

Come and disagree with us.

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They’d left because they didn’t feel they could serve patients properly in the allotted 10-15 minute appointment slots.

This interested me as when I last wrote about restrictive appointment times four years ago I was assured by a fairly senior NHS leader that it was no longer standard guidance.

So I thought I’d have another look where this practice came from, and whether it is really changing.

The origin story of the ten minute appointment slot is from 1986, when a London GP practice ran an experiment:

Patients were sent, more or less at random, into surgeries booked at five, seven and a half, or ten minutes per person.

This was to see whether the length of the appointment affected the quality of the outcome.

At five minutes, doctors picked up fewer problems and the patients felt rushed.

At seven and a half minutes patients felt happier, as there was more discussion about their issues. The doctor was asking more, and finding out more.

In the ten minute appointment, doctors spent longer explaining what was wrong, longer explaining the treatment, and longer on prevention advice.

Roughly:

• Five minutes was useless

• At seven and a half minutes the doctor listens more

• At ten minutes the patient finds out what’s going on.

That’s the study.

And from that experiment in one London practice, by five doctors, forty years ago, the ten minute rule was born and then became the basis for the entire structure of English general practice.

Indeed, in 2004 it even went into the GP contract with money attached, and you got paid for reaching ten minutes, but nothing extra for fifteen. The exam to qualify as a GP was thirteen ten-minute cases, so every new doctor learned to work at that speed.

The 10 minute mandate for GPs lasted until 2014 when the requirement was withdrawn as unduly restrictive, especially for complex cases. However, most appointments in England still last between six and ten minutes.

So the colleague who told me it was no longer standard guidance was correct: there has been no rule in place for twelve years.

Yet the practice often remains.

It’s often a lot harder to remove a rule or requirement than it is to create a new one.

This is sometimes called the ‘Ratchet Effect’

A ratchet only spins in one direction and then locks into place, so the Ratchet Effect describes systems and behaviours that easily move forward but heavily resist going back.

The concept started in economics.

During a crisis (think of airports post 9/11, or the COVID-19 pandemic) , governments and institutions may raise taxes/prices or create new rules.

Citizens accept this out of necessity.

But when the crisis ends, things rarely return to the original baseline. The system has ratcheted up. And it will resist going back.

Since 9/11 we have dutifully surrendered sharp objects and taken off our shoes at airports, because the rule ratcheted into place. But aviation security experts widely agree that the single most effective measure to prevent another hijacking wasn’t confiscating objects—it was simply installing reinforced, locking cockpit doors. We kept the bureaucracy because it was visible, not because it was doing much.

Adding a rule or habit solves an immediate problem. But removing it means disrupting the ‘new normal’, fighting established systems, and spending effort just to go backward. And, if you’re a command and control type, why would you want to remove a rule that people have already accepted?

It’s worth considering where many of the targets and practices that exist in our organisations come from.

How many have been purposely designed based on evidence?

How many incentivise the right behaviour?

How many of them deliver on what end users truly value?

Pre-empting the Ratchet Effect

If an organisation pilots a new rule or target and realises the evidence does not support it, they can quietly scrap it.

But once a target is officially rolled out, the Ratchet Effect takes over:

• Budgets are allocated to track it.

• Managers’ remuneration are tied to it.

• The public (or more likely the leadership) come to expect it.

Removing it later looks like a failure, a surrender, or a lowering of standards, even if the target was entirely flawed from day one.

My physiotherapist escaped the ten-minute ratchet. But millions of patients and doctors are still trapped in it, moving frantically to a rule that doesn’t really exist.

This is the real danger of the Ratchet Effect. Even if the mandate is officially withdrawn, the system remains haunted by it. We build our practice, our schedules, and our cultural expectations around a ghost.

If a target in your organisation lacks proof that it actually improves outcomes, remove it now before the ratchet locks.

Because once it does, you stop measuring success, and you start measuring compliance for the sake of it. You build a system that rewards checking a box, while entirely missing the point.

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Tired of approaches that had cost lots and delivered little, the Vietnamese Foreign Minister gave them just 6 months to make an impact.

With little time to look for systemic causes the Sternins decided to build upon what was already there, rather than parachute in new solutions. So they travelled to various villages and sought out the real experts: the mothers.

The Sternins started from an unusual perspective. Rather than zeroing in on the mothers who were experiencing difficulty they sought out the ones who were thriving despite the system around them.

And in the same system that was failing the many, they found unusual practice amongst those who were thriving.

• They were feeding their children smaller portions of food, but they were feeding them more frequently.

• They were taking ‘low class’ food, like brine shrimp from the paddy fields that was stigmatised by others, and adding these to their daily soups or rice dishes.

• They were ignoring the socially acceptable norm to feed family elders first – and serving their kids from the bottom of the pot, making sure that they got the most nutritious food that had settled during cooking.

Sternin later termed these people ‘positive deviants’ – those who have, without realising it, discovered the path to success for the entire group.

Positive – in that they are doing something that achieves a fundamentally good outcome.

Deviant – in that their methods are not normal or universally understood or accepted. They may even be frowned upon or distrusted by peers or authority figures.

Alleviating the problem didn’t require huge resources or some big programme – it simply required connecting other community members with these ‘positive deviants’ and encouraging them to start emulating their behaviour.

Sternin went on to define Positive Deviance as a strength-based approach with some core principles:

Communities possess the solutions and expertise to best address their own problems

These communities are self-organising with sufficient human resources and assets to derive solutions to communal problems

Communities possess a ‘collective intelligence’, equally distributed through the community, which the approach seeks to foster and draw out

The foundation of the approach rests on the act of enabling a community to discover solutions to their own problems.

In most social purpose organisations our behaviours are the exact opposite of this.

If positive deviance is about discovering who is thriving against all odds, our default mode is deficit fetishism—where we spend our time mapping human failure, and design standardised interventions.

You’ll see it every day, just as I do.

Segmenting by Stigma: Splitting human lives into analytical buckets based entirely on what they lack—creating “High-Risk,” “ Disengaged,” or “Digitally Excluded” segments instead of mapping local strengths, networks, or assets.

Targeting the Symptom, Ignoring the System: Setting up specialised enforcement approaches for persistent rent arrears or missed payments—chasing the money through formal warnings while completely ignoring the structural friction causing the delay.

Problem-Built Organisational Charts: Designing entire internal departments, team titles, and manager roles around a failure state ensuring the team’s professional identity and budget rely on the problem never actually disappearing.

Weaponised KPIs: Measuring team success by the volume of interventions delivered rather than whether people are actually thriving or becoming independent of the system.

Compliance over Capability: Treating a resident who creatively solves their own problem outside official channels as a “compliance risk” to be corrected, while rewarding the resident who passively follows every rigid rule into total institutional dependency.

An organisation’s inability to distinguish between destructive non-compliance and grassroots innovation is rarely a case of intentional malice; rather, it is a structural byproduct of how institutions are designed.

To a formal system, all deviance looks identical from the outside.

A colleague bending the procurement rules to buy a piece of equipment for a guerrilla gardener looks the same as someone fiddling their expenses.

The guerrilla gardener taking over a piece of land to start a community allotment looks the same as the person causing anti-social behaviour.

Standard operating procedures, compliance metrics, and risk-mitigation protocols exist precisely to create predictability and eliminate variance. Positive deviants , on the other hand, are unpredictable and divergent.

As someone working in an organisation that is making a long term strategic shift to place based working, the first step is the realisation that you cannot tackle all this at once.

As we build a strategy that re-orients the organisation away from focusing on demand, we need to seek out positive deviants both in our colleague base and in the community. Our first step was the appointment of Place Leads. This role isn’t just managing a team — it’s standing between the institution and the place, absorbing the noise so colleagues keep their time and residents get a relationship, not a bureaucracy. It’s encouraging deviance rather than mere compliance.

When an organisation has deficit fetishism, failure becomes its primary currency. We build teams around the symptom, fund departments on the pathology, and measure our value by how many ‘vulnerable people’ we can identify—all while walking right past the people who quietly figured out how to fix it.

Our positive deviants, the people who’ve already figured things out, are among us. We just don’t look for them or even recognise the many problems they have already solved.

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Meetings recorded, notes generated, reports drafted in a fraction of the time they used to take. Everyone’s pleased with themselves and I understand why: it’s the obvious use case, the safe one, and it gets stuff done.

But what is that stuff that is getting done? Meeting notes and reports are the raw material of bureaucracy and centralisation. Where information travels up from the frontline to wherever decisions actually get made. We’ve just been handed a tool that could dissolve the reason the journey needs to happen at all, and we’re using it to make the journey faster.

We’ve got a technology capable of reshaping organisations, and we’re getting it to do our admin. Worse still, ‘AI workslop’ is a growing phenomenon.

We’ve been here before. In the mid 2010s I watched the public sector fall in love with digital transformation and mostly waste it — not because the technology failed, but because we copied the wrong thing. We looked at Amazon and Google and took the last layer, the interface, the self-service portal: without understanding the layers underneath. We built cost-per-transaction graphics that treated every interaction with a complex human being as a unit to be minimised, and we called it efficiency. Digital transformation was a big ambition, assembled with borrowed logic that didn’t fit, and then applied to the wrong model.

This time the danger is the opposite. Nobody’s building a grand AI transformation programme. The failure this time is smaller and quieter: aiming too low, at exactly the moment the tool is becoming capable of more.

The traditional organisational model of functional specialisation, centralised processing, and standardised service delivery wasn’t an arbitrary choice. It was the rational answer to a specific constraint. Capacity was scarce and expensive, so you concentrated it centrally and pushed standardised process out to the frontline.

With artificial intelligence, that world is disappearing.

So a question to ask is why do the organisations we work in look the way they do?

And what should they look like tomorrow?

Ronald Coase was an economist who, in 1937, asked a deceptively simple question: if markets are so good at allocating resources, why do firms exist at all? Why doesn’t all work just get bought and sold job by job, rather than organised inside companies with employees and managers?

His answer was that using the market has hidden costs such as finding the right person, negotiating terms, writing contracts, checking that the work was completed properly. Once those costs get high enough, it’s cheaper to just employ someone and tell them what to do than to start from the beginning every time you need something done.

Economists call this a transaction cost, and it’s the logic sitting underneath almost every large organisation: centralise the thing that’s expensive to coordinate any other way.

A narrow focus on efficiency in the public sector forced more centralisation.

Local libraries, local offices, local counters closed one by one, because a face-to-face conversation in a real building is expensive, and a phone queue or a website isn’t. Direct access to a person became indirect access to a call centre, then indirect access to a form. Underneath it all sat a genuine belief, borrowed from the private sector in the 1980s and 90s, that services would be better if they were run more like businesses — standardised, measured, centrally managed for efficiency and consistency.

Nobody set out to say local was bad. Local was always the thing everyone said they valued. It was just expensive, and centralised was cheaper — so cheaper won, again and again, until “efficient” quietly became a synonym for “further away.” We didn’t lose local provision because we stopped believing in it. We lost it because we never found a way to make it affordable at scale. It was an irrational answer to a genuine cost problem.

It’s not just cost that forces centralisation, it’s the desire for consistency. Consistency of reporting, consistency of results, consistency of line management.

Gary Hamel pointed out that “A small organisation may have one manager and 10 employees; one with 100,000 employees and the same 1:10 span of control will have 11,111 managers. That’s because an additional 1,111 managers will be needed to manage the managers.” Bureaucracy doesn’t grow because someone wills it to. It metastasises, because a layer that exists to make sure the layer below it is consistent eventually needs its own layer watching over it.

The Watchers watch. But who watches the Watchmen? More Watchmen. And so on and so forth..

However, AI can do more than take notes. It can watch, manage, coordinate, and look for exceptions. It can allow for consistency when we need it, and can perform tasks faster than 11,000 managers.

So the big question is: if AI can collapse coordination costs, what happens to the boundary and shape of the organisation?

If organisations exist to reduce the cost of coordination, then a dramatic reduction in those costs should change the structure and size of the company itself. As coordination becomes cheaper, the need to internalise it through hierarchy diminishes. Some are already predicting an extreme version of this.

Marc Bara writes that “The organisational structures that currently exist to manage cognitive coordination face obsolescence not because they perform poorly, but because the problem they solve is becoming inexpensive enough to eliminate the need for dedicated infrastructure.”

This is not just theory — some hierarchies are already measurably flattening. Ewens and Giroud document that U.S. public firms flattened their hierarchies following AI adoption, reducing management layers across a sample of more than 3,100 firms shifting toward flatter structures with proportionally fewer mid- and senior-level employees.

AI can be aimed directly at the cost that justified centralising in the first place.

If a place-based team can get expert-level analysis, diagnosis, or judgement without waiting two weeks for a team in a central office, then what is the centre for?

I don’t think this means blowing up the central office. Some things are centralised for reasons that have nothing to do with the cost of coordination — safeguarding escalation, fraud, consistency of risk decisions. What I think it means is a genuinely different question to the one most of the public sector is currently asking. Not “how do we use AI to perform our existing business more efficiently?” but “what did we centralise because coordination used to be expensive — and does that expense still hold?”

The price that made it right to centralise might be disappearing.

Whilst artificial intelligence doesn’t eliminate the need for a centre it fundamentally redefines its purpose.

Rather than managing the centre becomes enabling.

Rather than seeking consistency the centre can promote local variation and innovation.

Rather than requiring managers to do work about work, AI can do that work for them, or eliminate the need for that work entirely.

Right now though, AI is merely doing the bidding of bureaucracy and the paperwork of centralisation.

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During the height of the pandemic, individuals reported thinking and discussing issues like climate change less frequently, even while their underlying level of worry about the planet remained stable or even increased.

As news attention to COVID-19 increased, coverage of unrelated threats like income inequality and terrorism drastically decreased.

Some asserted that this demonstrated the Finite Pool of Worry (FPW) hypothesis: which posits that humans have a limited amount of emotional and cognitive bandwidth for concern. According to this framework, when a person’s level of worry regarding one threat increases, their worry about other threats must inevitably decrease or be crowded out.

The hypothesis was formally introduced by psychologist Elke Weber who suggested that if cognitive resources are limited, the emotional energy required to sustain a state of ‘worry’ must also be finite.

We can all identify with this on a personal level. If we experience grief or the serious ill-health of ourselves or a loved one , other concerns such as financial matters or household upkeep seem to get downgraded or re-prioritised. One serious concern can crowd out all the rest.

In the recent Welsh elections , the finite pool of worry hypothesis was cited for the lack of discussion about climate change in the run up to voting. If you can’t cover the bills today it is understandable that you’re not that bothered about what the planet looks like in 100 years time.

The Finite Pool of Worry hypothesis has been significantly challenged and, in some contexts, refuted by recent research. While early observational data from events like the 2008 Recession and the 9/11 attacks seemed to support the idea that one crisis crowds out concern for others, deeper research has provided a much more nuanced understanding of human psychology.

The most critical refinement to the theory is the distinction between a finite pool of attention and the capacity for worry.

• Worry is not absolutely finite: Contrary to the FPW hypothesis, self-reported worry remained highly stable or even increased during parallel crises. Longitudinal surveys across the US, Italy, and China showed that as people became more worried about COVID-19, they did not stop worrying about other things entirely.

• Attention though is finite, and is a zero-sum resource: You cannot simultaneously focus on a news report about hospital capacities and a report on melting ice caps. Societal and individual attention to issues such as climate change did indeed plummet during the height of the pandemic.

Attention truly is zero-sum. If an executive team is entirely focused on averting an immediate data breach, their attention to a five-year strategy drops to zero. If something requires 100% attention there’s nothing spare to devote elsewhere.

My take is that the Finite Pool of Attention hypothesis explored by Matthew R. Sisco and his colleagues, partly explains why long term strategic thinking and innovation gets crowded out in the minds of many employees, even the most senior.

In a recent post I referred to Henry Mintzberg’s study, The Nature of Managerial Work in which he found that managerial work has always been inherently characterised by brevity, variety, discontinuity, and an unrelenting pace.

Rather than contemplating long-term goals, he found managers were “slaves to the moment,” constantly shifting focus between disjointed conversations and having almost every action dogged by another diversion, interruption, or telephone call.

In an organisational context, the finite pool of attention manifests as managerial short-termism. When leaders are constantly pressed by targets and lagging indicators (such as quarterly income, complaints or past safety incidents), their cognitive bandwidth for long-term strategic scanning is depleted. This creates a vision deficit, where abstract future risks are bumped from the collective pool of worry to prioritise the immediate ‘threat’.

This reactive approach prevents horizon scanning and the development of longer term external relationships and partnerships, which forces you world view in on itself. It can lead to the eventual abandonment of the practices necessary for organisations to innovate or spot systemic risks before they hit.

Strategies for Long-Termism

To combat the displacement of long-term strategy, mainstream organisations could look to examples from High Reliability Organisations (HROs). These are organisations that operate in high-risk, complex, and integrated environments such as nuclear power plants or aerospace, where short-term thinking literally costs lives. HROs survive by maintaining a preoccupation with failure . The defining characteristic of an HRO is collective mindfulness—a state in which the entire organisation actively seeks, gathers, and analyses data to vigilantly search for system errors that could lead to disaster.

Rather than relying on lagging indicators, HROs obsessively track leading indicators—the small signals and near-misses that precede a major failure. By treating near-misses as systemic warnings and fostering a culture that questions the status quo HROs prevent immediate operational success from creating a false sense of security. In these environments, attention is not treated as a finite individual resource, but rather as a collective social process.

Most importantly though organisations must recognise that human attention is a finite resource that requires active management. To enable long-term strategic thought, leaders must drastically reduce the sheer amount of low-value, day-to-day activity (’busyness’) that saturates the modern workplace.

Crucially, organisations must institutionalise protected time for reflection. Strategic scanning cannot happen in the five minutes between back-to-back meetings; it requires dedicated, protected cognitive space free from the urgency of immediate deadlines.

The finite pool of attention is not a myth; it is a profound biological and psychological constraint that shapes every facet of our economy and landscape. The relentless pressure of immediate targets forces our brains into a reactive survival mode, crowding out the abstract, complex thinking required to safeguard our future.

By understanding this vulnerability, organisations and institutions can stop treating short-termism as a personal failure and start addressing it for what it is: a systemic design flaw.

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It is impossible to improve any process until is has been standardised – Masaaki Imai

Attempts to standardise responses to complex lives always fail.

Yet still, we standardise.

Standardisation is the prerequisite for the Holy Grail of public service: efficiency.

Faced with tightening budgets and growing complexity, modern institutions constantly seek ways to streamline processes, cut costs, and manage resources. Yet, despite decades of optimisation, the pressure on our public services continues to rise, and the people relying on them often feel more let down than ever.

Why? Because the modern administrative state is still trapped in the paradox of standardisation: a situation where the relentless pursuit of narrow, technical efficiency through the measurement of anything and everything, actually manufactures the very demand it seeks to manage.

Standardised responses prioritise internal institutional logic over the actual, lived needs of citizens.

Large institutions seek efficiency through control, measurement, and cost reduction. However, to make a system efficient, managers first have to make it ‘legible’. You cannot ‘optimise’ what you cannot ‘measure’.

You must standardise: because the conventional belief is that “it is impossible to improve any process until is has been standardised.”

The origin story of standardisation goes back a long way. As political scientist James C. Scott argues in his foundational book Seeing Like a State, governments historically struggled to control order because societies were too complex and illegible to manage from the centre. To solve this, the state forces ‘administrative legibility’ upon its subjects by standardising, homogenising, and simplifying pre-existing social arrangements.

He gives the useful example of the creation of permanent last names to track citizens. He cites the case of a Welsh man who appeared in court and identified himself with a long string of patronyms: “John, ap Thomas ap William” etc. Although this name was very useful at a local level to distinguish his lineage, the court demanded that John take a permanent last name (in this case, the name of his village). This helped the central government keep track of its subjects, at the cost of a more nuanced yet fuzzy and less legible understanding of local conditions.

Other examples are the standardisation of weights and measures to replace highly contextual local systems, or the standardisation of language to ensure that communication and legal discourse were uniform and manageable by the centre.

These may seem common sense continuous improvements that any developing society would make. However, the problem is that when standardisation is taken too far we start to miss important nuance and ride roughshod over local or individual context.

Today , our own institutions still seek to achieve this through classification—sorting complex human realities into neat, exclusive boxes (vulnerable, mentally ill, homeless, at risk etc) to make them administratively actionable. The internal system logic values precision and symmetry over an accurate reflection of the messy real world where people don’t fit so easily into boxes.

Scott identified this as ‘high modernism’—a supreme, overconfidence in the ability to rationally design social order. The tragic flaw of high modernism is its reliance on standardised, top-down knowledge at the expense of what he called metis, a Greek term, applied to mean the practical, local wisdom and informal improvisation required to make any community or system actually work.

Metis represents the deeply contextual, practical knowledge and improvisational skills gained through direct, hands-on experience. Unlike rigid, standardised, or textbook learning, metis is flexible and strictly local, relying on a nuanced understanding of a specific environment that cannot be easily codified into universal rules.

As a couple of examples of metis:

Emergency responders, such as paramedics, disaster teams, and firefighters, constantly rely on metis. Because every fire or accident is unique, they must know when to rely on a rule of thumb, in what order to apply them, and when to throw the rulebook away completely and improvise.

People in poverty frequently utilise metis to navigate systems that are hostile to them. For example, using street lenders instead of formal banks might seem irrational to a wealthier person, but often offers a better, more practical deal for the poor based on hidden complexities in their lives.

When the state or institution ignores metis, it creates systems that might look beautifully logical on a spreadsheet, but can fail disastrously in practice.

This behaviour can be compounded what James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, termed a “logic of appropriateness.” Managers do not act based on what will practically solve a citizen’s unique problem; instead, they act by matching a situation to established institutional rules. They start from, “What is the correct procedure?” rather than “What does this person actually need?”.

This thinking is so deeply entrenched into our organisations that we don’t always see it. Just the other day I was talking with some very enlightened colleagues who said you couldn’t argue with a particular process because of the efficiency it had generated. But if you unpicked this , you’d find the efficiency was based upon a logic of appropriateness that served an internal KPI. Efficient for the system, maybe, but not necessarily for the end user.

True efficiency is not about how fast a system can process a citizen through a standardised flowchart. True efficiency is the ability to enable people to lead flourishing, self-reliant lives without needing constant intervention.

By prioritising human relationships, local metis, and genuine outcomes over internal bureaucratic logic, we could finally design public services that serve the people, rather than asking the people to serve the system.

Photo by Luke Heibert on Unsplash

What Comic Relief saw as a heartwarming act of generosity, was quickly blasted as exploitative, even winning an award for being the most offensive fundraising campaign of the year.

“This is a video is about Ed Sheeran,” the award organisers said in their commentary. “It’s literally poverty tourism. The video should be less about Ed shouldering the burden alone but rather appealing to the wider world to step in. Is Ed Sheeran willing to pay for the boy’s housing forever?”

This infamous moment was manifestation of ‘Organisational Main Character Syndrome’. Instead of acting as a collaborative partner, Comic Relief adopted the persona of a singular hero, using Africa as a mere cinematic backdrop for a privileged celebrity to swoop in and play the saviour.

The concept of Main Character Syndrome first emerged in internet culture, initially on TikTok, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Deprived of social contact people began romanticising their lives online, filming themselves fulfilling mundane tasks as though all eyes should be on them. People would cast themselves as the main character: a hero (or sometimes a victim) in their own personal drama.

Those with Main Character Syndrome see themselves as the ones driving the story or game, whilst the rest us are the non-player characters (NPCs), who exist to populate their world and give them what they crave the most: attention.

The concept and behaviour of main character syndrome quickly spread to other social networks and is now visible almost everywhere (hello, LinkedIn!)

Can Main Character Syndrome Affect Our Organisations and Institutions?

I think there is a read across from individual attention seeking to how organisations such as Comic Relief and other non-profits can behave.

Organisational Main Character Syndrome (OMCS) is when an institution stops viewing itself as a collaborative partner in a wider ecosystem and instead adopts the persona of a singular hero with a unique purpose.

The organisation can quickly begin to overestimate its own importance, talking about its own vision, its own impact, the awards it has won. It can begin to frame complex systemic issues (e.g homelessness) as simple rescue missions (look how happy we have made this family who we just housed).

Instead of enabling communities or shining the light on individuals, the organisation swoops in to save them with a self-aggrandising narrative.

Here are some of the typical behaviours and traits of ‘Organisational Main Character Syndrome’

1. Centralised Control

The system behaves as the hero of the story, making all the big decisions from a central headquarters. It assumes that wisdom sits at the top and filters down, often ignoring the side characters (residents and local frontline staff) who actually live and breathe the reality.

2. Service Siloing

It organises the world into neat, separate boxes. It doesn’t see a person; it sees a patient, a mental health case, a housing applicant, a jobseeker. Because the system is the protagonist, it expects people to navigate its complex rules, rather than the system adapting to the person’s life.

3. Passive Engagement

In this mindset, the system treats its users as passive clients. It behaves as the provider and expects the public to be grateful recipients or beneficiaries. It rarely asks people to contribute their own assets or ideas, fearing that doing so might relinquish its control over the narrative.

4. Risk Aversion and Compliance

The system is obsessed with hard data points and short-term linear outcomes. Its primary motivation is often avoiding a bad review from regulators. This leads to defensive behaviours, where following the correct procedure becomes more important than actually solving a persons problem.

5. Standardisation Over Localisation

The Main Character System values consistency above all else. It tries to apply the same solution to every neighbourhood, regardless of unique local needs.

Organisations Stepping Out of the Spotlight

If an organisation wants to cure its Main Character Syndrome, it needs to step out of the spotlight and start seeing the world from a different viewpoint. It needs to view people and places as the most effective unit of change , not itself.

Shifting from Deficits to Assets (ABCD) Organisations must move away from their bureaucratic logic of mapping a community’s deficits (poverty, crime, debt) and start mapping what is strong, not what is wrong. An organisation should only intervene where the community absolutely needs outside help, moving from a model of doing to or doing for a community, to doing by or with the community.

Decentralise the Storytelling If you want to tell authentic stories, you must pass control of the narrative to the people actually living those stories. The person who had the experience is the most legitimate interpreter of its meaning and effect.

Embrace Place-Based Working Place-based working acknowledges a radical truth: that place exists independently of your organisation. Rather than viewing residents as passive consumers of your services, treat them as active citizens and producers. Place-based partnerships require organisations to share resources, pool knowledge, and act as collaborative partners in an ecosystem, rather than top-down directors.

The antidote to a toxic main character complex requires stepping out of the spotlight and decentralising the narrative.

Following the intense public backlash to Ed Sheeran gifting hotel stays, Comic Relief radically changed its approach. It dropped its outdated white saviour formula and instead recruited local African filmmakers and photographers to direct their appeals. By stepping back and letting local heroes speak in the first person, the charity finally gave agency, dignity, and a platform back to the people.

Avoiding organisational main character syndrome means dropping the hero act.

To truly enable a community to step forward, an organisation must be willing to become a minor character in the main story.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

On my return, quite a few people asked me how many emails and messages I came back to. There were hundreds obviously. However, the thing that interested me the most was how few needed my attention.

Plenty wanted my attention, but hardly any needed it.

Less than ten, in fact.

The rest were all pretty much’work about work’. Things that I could , and perhaps should, give me attention to. But things that were not at all necessary in order for me to do my job role.

‘Work about work’ refers to the administrative and organisational activities that take up your time but do not directly relate to your job purpose.

Tasks that feel necessary but don’t actually produce anything new.

The term was coined at Asana by Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein. They had noticed, whilst they were at Facebook, that as the company grew, they were spending more time in meetings, reading and composing emails, and updating spreadsheets.

The emerging work, co-ordination and communication, had taken over from the real work, coding and designing.

Being a productivity tool it’s clearly in Asana’s own interests to exaggerate the extent of problem - they report that up to 60% of our work time can be spent on relatively pointless tasks.

However, whilst critics have argued that this may be somewhat inflated (it’s all about the definition of what counts as ‘work’) nobody is denying the fact that this organisational drag is having a huge impact on productivity.

Workers report spending as little as 9% of their professional time on strategy and innovation, the very activities that are essential for the kind of radical change many of our organisations yearn for.

When only 48 minutes of a workday is dedicated to long-term thinking, the capacity for any radical reinvention effectively collapses.

But has it ever been any different?

The conventional view is that the array of digital tools at our disposal (or maybe it’s us humans at the disposal of the tools) has introduced profound distraction. 50% of workers say they experience ‘tool fatigue’.

The idea that constant distraction and fragmented attention are purely modern, digital-era phenomena is directly challenged by Henry Mintzberg’s 1973 study, The Nature of Managerial Work.

Through direct observation of executives long before the advent of email and smartphones, Mintzberg shattered the classical idea that managers were reflective, systematic planners who spent large blocks of time on strategy.

Instead, he found that managerial work has always been inherently characterised by brevity, variety, discontinuity, and an unrelenting pace.

Even in the early 1970s, without any bombardment of digital notifications, the median time an executive spent on any single issue was a mere nine minutes, with half of all activities completed in that timeframe and only 10% exceeding an hour.

Rather than contemplating long-term goals, he found managers were “slaves to the moment,” constantly shifting focus between disjointed conversations and having almost every action dogged by another diversion, interruption, or telephone call.

Distraction it seems, is a feature, not a bug, and has been part of management roles since the earliest research.

Little did Mintzberg know it was about to get worse. In the 1980s a new approach called New Public Management (NPM) changed how government worked by trying to run it more like a corporate business. The goal was to fix ‘slow’ government and public sector systems, but it did so by introducing more rules, constant tracking, and a heavy focus on data and numbers.

Now, instead of using their own professional judgment to solve problems, managers were stuck in a cycle of constant reporting. Arguably this was the real expansion period of ‘work about work’ where proving you did the work becomes more important than the work itself.

The ethos of NPM lives on to this day , despite overwhelming evidence of the shortcomings. In his excellent series on Substack Tim Brooks writes:

They (’social purpose organisations’) have adopted a corporate style of ‘planning architecture’ for governance: long-term missions, interim milestones (KPIs), enabling foundations, and thematic pillars. What their service users need is to know when their bins will be collected, a leaky radiator fixed or help for a child in mental health crisis.

And this ‘planning architecture’ is arguably what has led to ‘work about work’ metastasising. Managers become so busy filling time with this rubbish that they don’t have the brain space or minutes in the day to come up with new ideas, or tackle complex social issues that span sectors.

Strategic thinking has been replaced by a heavy administrative burden that makes it almost impossible to imagine a different future, let alone create one.

So, what to do about it?

Clearly we need a radical organisational redesign that prioritises time spent on strategy and purpose over administration and counting. Many of us are attempting that journey.

These shifts take time though, so how can you at least stem the tide of work about work in the interim?

First, you can ruthlessly prune your calendar. Research shows that reducing meeting frequency by 40% can boost employee productivity by 71%.

You can defend ‘deep work’ and make organisational slack acceptable and intentional. Leaders must encourage time blocking and introduce intentional slack , the unscheduled time that gives people the mental bandwidth to think rather than just react.

And you can institutionalise innovation. As someone who has run an innovation lab I’m well aware of their limitations. But even a small function whose sole purpose is to research, prototype, and implement solutions at least provides you with some cover for strategy and innovation.

Most organisations claim to prioritise innovation, but the fact that only 48 minutes of a given workday is devoted to it tells its own story.

In sectors that are faced with increased demand, fewer resources and more complex issues, every extra minute spent on ‘work about work’ pushes you ever further away from what the users of your service really need.

Overton maintained that think tanks could influence public policy without directly engaging in the political process.

He observed a fundamental truth: politicians are primarily followers, not leaders. They generally only support policies that the mainstream population already accepts as legitimate.

His theory argued that politicians are trapped: A politician cannot support a policy outside the ‘window’ of what the public currently finds acceptable, or they will lose their job.

The theory:

The window must move first: To get a law passed, you don’t lobby the politician; you lobby the public.

Think tanks can move the window: By advocating for ‘radical’ or ‘unthinkable’ ideas (like 0% income tax), think tanks make moderate versions of those ideas (like a 5% tax cut) look sensible by comparison.

After Overton’s death in 2003, his colleague Joseph Lehman formalised the concept, emphasising that shifts in this window are driven by changing societal values, not legislation.

The model categorises public discourse into six distinct stages:

• Unthinkable: Ideas viewed as fringe, absurd, or fundamentally immoral.

• Radical: Supported by a vocal minority, often used by activists to pull the window toward the centre.

• Acceptable: Policies beginning to be debated in mainstream forums.

• Sensible: Ideas viewed as pragmatic solutions to public problems.

• Popular: Broadly supported ideas that resonate with the majority of voters.

• Policy: Ideas enacted into law that form the new baseline status quo.

The theory is that if you want to change the world, lobbying a politician with an unthinkable idea is the wrong move. You must start at the ground level, utilising social institutions to build support and slowly shift the norms until the idea enters the window.

Society shifts. Women being able to vote was once unthinkable, whilst today the opposite is true. Same sex marriage was seen as a radical idea as recently as the early 1990s.

As Violette Mens writes: “The Overton Window helps explain how societies change over time—whether for progression or regression. While it has led to positive changes such as civil rights advancements, it also plays a role in the normalisation of dangerous ideologies. Understanding this concept is crucial in recognising how ideas gain traction and shape the future of public discourse.”

Today, the digital era has poured rocket fuel on the concept - the window can shift very quickly indeed, for good or for ill.

In a corporate setting, the public is the employee base, and the politicians are the executive leadership. The organisational Overton Window defines the range of management decisions, strategies, and cultural shifts that the people are prepared to accept or talk about.

Can we use this framework to introduce ‘unthinkable ideas’ to our organisations?

Ideas can fall on a spectrum ranging from the unthinkable (which risks staff revolt) to the sensible and then finally policy (standard operating procedure). If an innovator or leader tries to force an unthinkable idea—like suddenly mandating a return to 1950s-style office culture—they risk losing talent and their leadership legitimacy.

We’ve seen two major examples of the Overton Window shifting in the workplace in the first half of this decade.

Prior to 2020, fully remote work for large-scale operations was often viewed as radical or risky for established firms. While technologies like Teams, Slack and Zoom existed, the window of acceptability for the mainstream was firmly anchored in a physical office presence as a proxy for productivity and culture.

The COVID-19 pandemic served as a kind of exogenous shock that forcibly moved the window. Overnight, what was ‘radical’ became ‘policy.’ As the crisis subsided, the window did not return to its original position. Instead, the baseline shifted to hybrid work, which is now the ‘sensible and popular’ standard. Currently, attempts by some CEOs to mandate a full ‘Return to Office’ (RTO) are being framed by employees as old fashioned, or even deviant, within the context of the new Overton Window.

Equally, a proposal for a four-day work week was long relegated to the unthinkable end of the spectrum, and seen as a threat to economic productivity and social order. However, the concept has moved through the levels of the Overton Window with remarkable speed. Academic studies and large-scale pilots have provided the hard data needed to shift the idea from radical to popular.

For many companies, the four-day week is now a sensible norm with some even pushing for three-day weeks, suggesting the window is still expanding.

But how do you introduce a radical, disruptive idea that isn’t driven by external factors such as a pandemic or changing attitudes to work?

Innovators generally have two choices: play it safe with incremental innovation inside the current window, or intentionally step outside the window to force radical innovation.

There are a number of ways that innovators can shift the window of acceptability: indeed new tools are now there for us to exploit.

There has been an acceleration of the internal Overton Window which can be attributed to the emergence of collaborative technology. Platforms like Teams, Slack and Trello have created a nervous system for organisations, where messages and stories can act as electric impulses that synchronise the workforce. These tools allow for ‘swarming’ —a decentralised, collaborative effort where volunteers can coordinate on common goals with a speed impossible in traditional hierarchies.

Rick Falkvinge’s concept of “Swarmwise” illustrates how a small core of people can build a ‘scaffolding’ that enables a large number of volunteers to work toward a common goal. In an organisational setting, this means that any small group of motivated employees can effectively ‘permit any action’ on behalf of a burgeoning internal movement, provided they align with the broader goals of the swarm. He argued that this allows for an infinite variety and natural selection of ideas, where the most effective and appealing radical ideas thrive and eventually arrive at the executive suite as mainstream demands.

I’ve seen fairly radical changes instigated by a small group of three or four people spread - as long as the conditions are right for their adoption.

Additionally, internal ‘labs’ and and R&D/Strategy teams can serve as protected zones where radical ideas can be de-risked and prototyped in controlled environments. These teams act as knowledge brokers, translating external complexities into the ease of understanding required for wider adoption. By employing techniques like ‘anchoring’ —proposing a radical concept to make a moderate innovation appear sensible—or ‘strategic reframing,’ where controversial changes are rebranded, innovators can systematically expand the boundaries of what the leadership deems acceptable.

In the same way that podcasters and influencers are pushing the Overton Window to promote radical, and sometimes dangerous, ideas so our colleagues and innovators can encourage us to think the unthinkable.

If you want to change where you work, lobbying the executive with an unthinkable idea is the wrong move.

You must start at the ground level, utilising social networks to build support and slowly shift the norms until the idea enters your organisational Overton Window.

As every function focuses on its own objectives and KPIs – the organisation slowly becomes reactive.

We become focused on addressing tactical fixes rather than exploring the underlying symptoms.

Social chasms emerge resulting in people not seeing any problem in context. Indeed – cross organisational problem solving can break down.

Silos exist for many reasons: some of them very positive and even essential. However, I’ve been thinking about silos that shut themselves off from the world. Those that perceive outside interference and connectivity as a threat.

I spent a week in January in the Andaman Islands, in the northeastern Indian Ocean. Whilst geographically close to Myanmar and Thailand, politically they are part of India.

Whilst I was there I heard stories about an island that might be the most effective silo system on earth.

North Sentinel Island is off-limits to everyone. Step foot on the beach and you are very likely to be killed. If you survive, you’ll get 3-5 years in an Indian jail.

There is no electricity, no light to break the night sky, and certainly no digital footprint—the island is a literal dead zone for Wi-Fi and mobile signals. Without agriculture or even metal, their existence is stone-age; they rely on the forest for wild pigs, and the sea for molluscs and fish.

The Sentinelese left Africa roughly 60,000 years ago and for the vast majority of that time, they have existed in a state of total autonomy. They are the ultimate uncontacted tribe, protected by a strict five-mile exclusion zone enforced by the Indian government.

The government maintains an “eyes-on, hands-off” policy for the 50-150 people that live there. Indeed, no-one really knows what the exact population is, as an official census is impossible.

This has created a unique legal situation: The Sentinelese are effectively treated as an autonomous entity. If they kill a trespasser, the Indian government will not prosecute the tribespeople. The law recognises their right to defend their isolation and protects them from the introduction of outside diseases.

But how, and why, have the Sentinelese maintained such an effective silo, that has completely held off the progress of the rest of the world?

History suggests their aggression is a learned survival strategy rather than an inherent trait. In the mid-19th century, records from passing ships occasionally described the islanders as curious or simply indifferent.

The turning point occurred in 1880, when British officer Maurice Vidal Portman kidnapped two adults and four children for study in the nearby island of Port Blair. The adults died almost immediately from lack of immunity to common diseases. Whilst the surviving children were returned with substantial gifts , they carried pathogens that devastated the tribe. This contact was a trauma that fundamentally altered their worldview: outsiders equal death.

Every attempt to introduce the modern world to the Sentinalese has failed and only hardened their resolve. As recently as 2019, John Allen Chau, a 26-year-old American missionary, was killed by bows and arrows after illegally visiting the island to convert the protected tribe to Christianity.

The Anatomy of the Defensive Silo

Now, let’s be clear, I’m not suggesting that the silos that exist within our organisations have been born out of trauma, but their defensive mechanisms can be triggered by ‘unwanted outside interference’.

Boundary hardening is a defensive process where organisational silos become increasingly rigid and impermeable in response to external pressures or perceived threats.

Silos evolve into hardened bunkers when they encounter outside interference, which acts as a primary catalyst for defensive isolation. This hardening typically occurs through two main mechanisms:

Outside-in buffering: Teams harden their borders to protect members from disturbances like top-down commands or external changes that interfere with localised productivity.

Inside-out buffering: Teams defend their borders to prevent the leakage of core knowledge or proprietary information to external teams. Inside-out buffering is the ultimate power play: teams weaponise their expertise by making sure their ‘core knowledge’ never leaks across the border

How to Build a Bridge (Without Getting Shot)

‘Rogue silos’ can be frustrating to deal with and even harder to connect with. The first thing to understand is they didn’t start that way, just as the Sentinelese, their defence mechanisms have been built up over time, for a reason.

Outsiders can often unwittingly barge into these silos with a sort of saviour complex. We walk in with our latest innovation, our new strategy, our agile frameworks, ignoring the fact that the people inside the silo have spent a lot of time developing survival mechanisms that work for them. When we ignore their context, we shouldn’t be surprised when they reach for their bows and arrows.

Acknowledge the Perimeter: Don’t pretend the silo doesn’t exist. Acknowledge that they have built these walls for a reason. Respect their specialised language and KPIs before you try to change it.

The “Gifts” Approach: Early (and much safer) contact with the Sentinelese involved dropping off coconuts and iron tools—things they actually needed. Don’t bring disruption; bring solutions to their specific pain points.

Diplomacy over Conquest: You cannot force a silo to integrate. You have to prove that the outside world is a partner, not a threat.

Building a bridge to these rogue units requires more than a mandate; it requires the diplomacy of someone who respects their history and can show that connecting to the rest of the organisation means a gain in impact, not a loss of identity.

Silos aren’t built by lazy people; they are built by talented people who feel that the rest of the organisation is a pathogen.

In late 2024, Scottish midfielder Scott McTominay moved from Manchester United to Napoli. He was an elite athlete, at the peak of physical performance, who had spent all his life in the UK. Yet, within weeks of arriving in Southern Italy, he went viral for a comment about a tomato.

“I never ate them at home,” he told The Athletic. “They’re just red water. Here, they actually taste like tomatoes... I eat them as a snack now. It’s incredible.”

The tomatoes McTominay experienced in the UK weren’t mediocre by accident; they were bad by design. To make a tomato a global commodity, the industry had to solve for friction:

The Problem: Real tomatoes are fragile, oddly shaped, and have a shelf life of days.

The Optimisation: Tomato growers developed tough varieties that can be picked green, gassed with ethylene to turn them red on command, and survive 2,000 miles in a vibrating truck.

The result is a miracle of logistics. You can buy a perfectly spherical, bright red tomato in Manchester in December for pence. But as McTominay discovered, when you solve for optimisation, you often destroy the content. By removing the friction of fragility and spoilage, we also remove the flavour. We replace a complex, acidic sweetness with “red water.”

This isn’t just true about tomatoes, it’s a template for how we can ruin place based innovations.

The Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) is a cautionary tale of what happens when we try to scale an innovative practice.

HCZ started as a hyper-local, street by street effort in Central Harlem to wrap children in a ‘cradle-to-career’ support system. Its success wasn’t just in the services provided (after-school programmes, health screenings, college preparation) but in the relational infrastructure that Geoffrey Canada and his team spent years building. It was a dense, trust-based ecosystem nurtured by the specific culture and history of a specific neighbourhood.

When the federal government attempted to scale this nationally via the “Promise Neighbourhoods” initiative, they committed the cardinal sin of a lift and drop. “ They took the HCZ checklist—the services, the funding streams —and asked other cities to replicate them.

Other cities implemented the form of the programme, but missed the soul. They tried to manufacture street level results through top-down policy, failing to realise that you cannot mandate the human connection that makes a place-based initiative truly work.

We are at a critical point in developing the next stage of place-based working at BFL. The pilots that we introduced have been validated and we must move to the next stage: preparing to mobilise circa 100 place based teams.

So do you scale them or spread them?

Spreading (or diffusion) is a horizontal, social process driven by interpersonal influence, peer-to-peer networking, and social replication. Spreading embraces local adaptation allowing people the opportunity to test and adapt the change to fit their unique local environment. Spreading is highly effective for practice improvements, behavioural shifts, and initiatives requiring deep cultural alignment.

Scaling (or managed scale-up), on the other hand, is a deliberate, vertical, and coordinated effort to expand the reach of an intervention. Scaling is typically a top-down, mechanical process that requires tackling infrastructural challenges, such as building necessary technological, procedural or changing management layers. Unlike the flexible nature of spreading, scaling generally demands high fidelity and strict adherence to the original model to guarantee consistency. It is best suited for structural innovations, tech systems, or highly regulated practices (say, a new medicine.)

When organisations try to scale a complex, relational practice using purely managed, top-down methods the results are often disastrous. This approach overwhelms organisational capacity, misaligns resources, and creates internal conflict. More importantly, it eliminates the opportunity for localised trial-and-error, exposing minor hiccups to the entire system and instantly eroding the fragile community trust that place-based models rely on.

This is the risk of our expansion. That our place roll-out is co-opted by bureaucracy, diluting a vibrant locally-driven initiative into a standardised, low-fidelity compliance exercise.

In the world of scaling innovation, we are obsessed with the delivery mechanism. We want our ideas, our cultures, and our programmes to survive the journey from the head office to the front line without deviation. To make that happen, we often design them for durability: we strip away the weird, fragile, human elements—the local trust, the specific expertise, the messy relational work—because those things are hard to pack and even harder to ship.

We end up with a version of the innovation that is perfectly uniform, easy to roll out, and completely, utterly bland. We have optimised for the logistics of the project, but we have starved the experience of it.

That’s our big strategic innovation challenge: avoiding the watery tomato.

I took Christmas and January off to spend in India, and I intended to blog a picture diary every day. After a false start on Substack, I shifted over to WordPress, but only managed to post eight times across six weeks. So I have quite a few observations I need to get out.

Returning to the UK after a month and a half on the subcontinent is a jarring experience. You trade the chaos of Delhi, the sensory overload of Jaipur, and the energy of Goa for the grey predictability of the M6. But beyond the culture shock, I came back with a nagging anxiety.

The worlds most populous country has a vibe about it that contrasts starkly with the UK.

It’s not just vibes, there’s data to back it up. India currently sits near the top of the global optimism charts, with 69% – 81% of citizens stating the country is on the right track. Even with concerns about rural unemployment and inflation, 51% of Indians believe their personal standard of living will improve significantly this year. For the Indian public, the future isn’t something to worry about.

The UK is a different story. The right direction score places between 16% and 21%, with roughly 65% to 70% of the British public believing the country is on the ‘wrong track’, reflecting a nation that feels stuck in a stagnation trap.

The contrast in national optimism is rooted in a demographic divide: India is a nation of starters while the UK is a nation of maintainers. With a median age of roughly 30, India is powered by a massive, young workforce that views the future as a series of firsts—first jobs, first homes, and a first-hand role in a rising global power. Conversely, the UK’s median age of 41 reflects a mature society with creaking infrastructure preoccupied with the pressures of supporting both children and ageing parents. Unlike India’s ‘climbing the ladder’ energy, the UK is stuck in a ‘fixing the foundations’ phase, where the primary goal is simply to stop things from getting worse. It’s beyond a crisis, and more a permanent sense of entrenched helplessness.

Innovation performance though is still high in the UK, with us currently ranked 6th in the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2025, although slipping from our previous consistent 4th place. Meanwhile, India has rocketed from 48th to 38th in just five years.

One of the things that enables countries like India to surge forward is the lack of legacy, which gives you the ability to ‘leapfrog’ trends or technological innovations.

Leapfrogging occurs when a country skips over older, established technologies or practices and moves straight to the most advanced version. Because they don’t have to maintain expensive, outdated systems they can adopt modern solutions faster than so-called developed countries.

The poster child of India’s leapfrogging is its Digital Public Infrastructure, often referred to as the India Stack. While Western nations struggled to transition legacy banking systems into the mobile age, India skipped the credit card era. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) , has become a global case study, processing billions of transactions monthly from high-end showrooms to rural roadside tea stalls, all by QR code on your phone.

This financial leapfrog has brought over 500 million people into the formal banking system in just over a decade, something that took centuries in Europe.

Telecommunications is where the leapfrog is most visible to the average person. India skipped the era of widespread desktop computing and dial-up internet, moving straight to a mobile-first society. With some of the lowest data costs globally, India transitioned from 4G to 5G at record speeds. This connectivity has enabled a secondary leapfrog in both education and telemedicine.

What makes India’s leapfrogging unique is that it is driven by necessity and scale. Unlike the UK, which must manage and retrofit centuries of legacy infrastructure, India is building on a relatively clean slate.

In the UK, we are often stuck in a kind of legacy lock-in. This occurs when past investments in old technology make it difficult and expensive to move to the new.

One of the problems is, we just aren’t thinking long term enough, therefore our ‘innovations’ are more like tactical initiatives.

India plans in 25-year cycles named “Amrit Kaal” (meaning Golden era/Immortal time). Decisions taken today on semiconductors, green hydrogen, and the India Stack are explicitly linked to where the country needs to be in 2047.

In the UK plans are largely dictated by a 5-year electoral cycle. Major long-term projects (like HS2 or social care reform) are frequently scaled back or kicked down the road to meet immediate fiscal targets or changing/abandoned election manifestos.

Long term thinking unlocks strategic innovation

Most of our organisations do the same as Government, with a series of tactical operational plans masquerading as strategy.

A country or organisation that relies on tactical fixes is essentially playing a permanent game of Whack-A-Mole. They spend all their energy, money, and time reacting to immediate crises.

In contrast, a long-term strategy allows you to move from fixing the past to building the future. Whilst I was away the Bromford Flagship LiveWest (BFL) merger was finalised , with us becoming one of the largest housing associations in the UK. Increased scale brings with it another set of challenges, so it’s now more important than ever that the organisation plays the long game.

What makes our ‘2042 and beyond’ strategy unique is that it moves away from the management by numbers style that has dominated the last three decades in the UK, and shifts toward longer term place-based thinking and working. It’s more ‘Amrit Kaal’ than short term tactics.

Long-term thinking turns innovation from a panic response (fixing a crisis) into a deliberate design (building a future). It allows you to leapfrog the inefficient management styles of the past by designing processes that will still be working in 20+ years.

Ultimately, the divide between India and the UK is all about the horizon and timeline. While the UK remains tethered to the legacy lock-in of its own history—patching up Victorian pipes and firefighting —India is playing a civilisational long game.

Our organisations, especially in the public sector, face exactly the same challenge. So what’s it to be?

A long term vision, with big bets?

Or a plan just focused on stopping things getting worse?

What we are doing?

Getting a cycle tour around Old Delhi. I used to think things like this were too touristy, but I've learned that with the right guide you get stories that have been retold thousands of times. Even if they aren't true, they are fascinating. NOTE: Karen has her hood up as it was cold that morning. Although it's winter it's also as a result of the toxic smog enveloping much of north India this past week. I have no idea how or if they will ever convert to clean energy here, but I'm pretty sure that UK efforts are aimed at all the wrong places.

Where it is happening?

Old Delhi is 380 years old but looks a lot older, and I mean that in a good way. It has that mix of awe-inspiring architecture and decline that’s impossible to not find romantic. A view possibly not shared by the 1.5% of the population that are homeless. When the population is 34 million, that’s a big number.

Who is involved?

This fella is making the best fried chicken I’ve ever tasted. Jama Masjid fried chicken is exclusive not just to north India , but to a couple of streets in Delhi. It will take just one enterprising entrepreneur to bring this to Britain and Colonel Sanders will be facing deportation.

Why?

This is a theme I think I’ll return to - but why have we lost the art of making beautiful buildings? Standing in front of the Jama Masjid, the largest mosque in India you wonder where our ambition has gone. It was knocked up almost a side hustle as they built the Taj Mahal. Compare with HS2, a project that just gets more and more expensive and less and less ambitious.

Namaste!

And Merry Christmas!

1. Frequently immersing yourself in new surroundings.

2. Noticing cultural or environmental differences.

3. Recording new discoveries in a journal.

4. Talking to locals regularly.

5. Taking multiple photographs.

When travelling I’m pretty good at most of these (particularly and very annoyingly number five) but terrible at number three - journaling.

With that in mind I’m going to attempt, for my jaunt around India, to follow the path of Chris Bolton with a four a day picture diary.

What we are doing?

Where it is happening?

Who is involved?

Why?

4 pictures and a bit of commentary to tell the story.

What are we doing?

Arriving in Delhi makes me wonder whether some people simply want to design out tourism. Anyone who has ever filled out an Indian tourist visa application knows what I mean. How many times do I need to tell you my dad is not from Pakistan? The Civil Service in India was brought into existence by Lord Cornwallis under the British Raj and alongside milky tea and railways, we gifted them an astonishing legacy of centralised bureaucracy.

Where it is happening?

Delhi is home to half the population of the UK. In a single city. It shows. Like a giant experiment to see what happens if we dropped 35X more people on Birmingham. We’d need more Tuk Tuks.

Who is involved?

First monkeys I’ve seen on this trip. Does anyone not feel better when you see monkeys?

Why?

Why do we (the English) call it Chai Tea? Chai IS tea. So that’s literally tea tea. Same with Pilau rice. That means we are asking for rice rice.

Four more tomorrow. (If you want more - follow me on instagram)

Namaste!

Placed based work will actually serve people’s needs more completely and more cheaply.

The consciousness of place is not hierarchical or expert. It relies on the intrinsic value of each member of the place. Any flattening is frightening to the expert, and those who certify and train them. This is a big political challenge most of all – Reyn Archer

The responses to my last post on why decentralised pilots fail have been insightful.

In the excellent comment thread, Paul Jansen offered a provocation that framed this follow up post:

Paul is right. We cannot just hope for cultural change. We need to administer systemic immunosuppressants.

Firstly, though lets look at how the organisational immune system (OIS) actually works.

The OIS resists decentralised governance and innovation efforts not through a single decisive action, but through a complex, synchronised network of defence mechanisms all designed to maintain stability and homeostasis. Just as a biological immune system identifies and neutralises foreign agents to protect the body, the OIS identifies radical changes—such as self-managing teams or place-based decision-making—as threats to the organisation’s identity, consistency, and control structures.

This resistance manifests through specific antibodies embedded deep within the organisation’s architecture:

One Size Fit All: Why Organisations Prefer Standardisation

Large organisations rely on standardisation to minimise variance and maximise control. The immune system defends this logic by rejecting the local variation required for decentralised working.

• The “Fairness” Trap: Human Resources departments often block local autonomy by citing fairness or equality. For example, if a decentralised team attempts to set its own working hours or recruitment criteria, HR may block this on the grounds that “if we do it for them, we’ll have to do it for everyone”.

• Rigid Job Classification: In the NHS Buurtzorg experiments, the immune stystem resisted the generalist nature of self-managing nurses. The pay framework required rigid hierarchical banding making it administratively impossible to classify a flat structure where responsibilities rotate. This forced the reintroduction of ‘team leaders’ effectively killing the self-management model.

• The IT Straitjacket: Enterprise IT systems are frequently designed for low trust (security and control) rather than the high trust required for autonomy. Centralised systems often restrict access rights preventing team members from performing necessary cross-functional tasks, while legacy systems remain siloed, preventing the interoperability needed for holistic, place-based decision-making.

Control The Resources, Control The System

The flow of resources is the lifeblood of any initiative; so the organisational immune system restricts this flow to maintain central control.

• Procurement Barriers: Centralised procurement rules, designed for economies of scale, often forbid small, discretionary spending by local teams.

• Unfunded Mandates: A common resistance tactic is the devolution of responsibility without the devolution of financial power—often termed an ‘unfunded mandate’. Local teams may be given the duty to solve complex problems but lack the financial authority to redesign services or allocate resources differently, trapping them in a cycle of failure.

• Siloed Budgeting: Traditional cost-centre silos prevent holistic solutions. If a preventative measure saves money for one team but costs money from another’s budget, the immune system typically blocks the expenditure, prioritising departmental budget compliance over system-wide efficiency.

The Shadow Hierarchy and Middle Management Resistance

When formal hierarchies are flattened to create decentralised teams, the immune system often reconstructs them informally to preserve the status quo.

• Shadow Management: Middle managers are often the demographic most threatened by decentralisation, as their traditional value proposition (directing resources, monitoring and approval) is eliminated. Without retraining or new incentives, they often engage in ‘shadow management’—attending meetings they shouldn’t, demanding detailed reports, and subtly directing the team’s decisions.

• The Boss Shadow Effect: Even when titles are removed, the ghosts of old power structures remain. Employees conditioned by hierarchy may struggle to take initiative, waiting for permission from former leaders. If the organisation does not explicitly dismantle old approval mechanisms the shadow hierarchy reasserts control at the first sign of stress.

Bureaucratic Inertia and Risk Aversion

Finally, the organisational immune system uses the sheer power of inertia to wait out change initiatives.

• Risk Intolerance: Public sector organisations often equate risk with doing something outside the norm. This leads to an overemphasis on evaluation to mitigate all potential risks before a project can begin, effectively paralysing innovation efforts in a limbo of analysis.

• Preference for the Status Quo: There is a deep-seated institutional preference for predictable, familiar processes over innovative ones, even if the current processes are inefficient. This manifests as ‘passive inaction’ where projects stall and deadlines are missed not due to active sabotage, but due to a lack of momentum and resource hoarding.

To fully protect new and emerging ways of working we must diagnose these specific antibodies that will attack local autonomy. Only then can we administer the correct immunosuppressant to prevent the host system from neutralising the new DNA.

As Reyn Archer said – the consciousness of place is not hierarchical or expert. And any flattening of the organisation or system in order to give power to individuals is frightening. Indeed, it is antithetical to the very of idea of top down leadership that is propagated by the likes of LinkedIn.

A necessary rule of place-based or decentralised approaches lies in recognising that, left unchecked, the system will seek to overpower any efforts to change or disrupt the natural order.

The power is in the targeting and strength of those immunosuppressants.

This post is the second in a series of three looking at decentralised and place based approaches. The first one is here.

This is the juncture that most innovations fail – can they spread without compromising what made them unique in the first place?

The work we have seen emerging from our current pilots is testament to the power of smallness. These pilots have succeeded precisely because they are tiny, unique, and autonomous from the host. They have been organic rather than managed. They have their own personality types, their own strengths, their own flaws.

As we move toward the proposed rollout of 78 place-based approaches each supported by a team, we face a crucial strategic inflection point: how do we scale our impact without succumbing to the fundamental structural flaws that kill innovation?

The Promise of Decentralisation

In most organisations a tension exists between the legacy of industrial-era management (standardisation, hierarchy, and economies of scale) and the emerging imperative for agility, localisation, and human-centric work.

This tension is nowhere more visible than in the attempts to implement place-based working in the public sector and decentralised or self-managing teams in the private sector. These models promise to resolve the inefficiencies of bureaucracy by pushing decision-making power to the edge of the organisation, where interaction with the customer or citizen actually occurs.

Successful implementaions of these models are few and far between. Most people know of the names Buurtzorg and Haier for a reason: they are total outliers rather than the norm.

Approaches that seek to replicate their principles of autonomy and self management are marked by:

An initial cycle of enthusiasm

The pilot implementation

Rubbing up against systemic friction

The eventual compromise or reversion to the status quo

In the digital and corporate sectors this can result in ‘decentralisation theatre’ which describes the performative adoption of decentralised structures—such as squads and tribes in software engineering, or DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) in Web3 that sound good on paper but often mask a highly centralised reality. It’s really easy for organisations to adopt the vocabulary of decentralisation (e.g empowerment, bottom-up, place-based) without altering the infrastructure of control.

In the UK public sector, this is often visible in the localism agenda, where central government devolves duties to local councils but retains tight control over funding formulas and policy constraints, effectively turning local government into a delivery arm of the central state rather than an autonomous sphere of governance.

In unsuccessful attempts to replicate the success of a Buurtzorg or Haeier a sort of pseudo-autonomy is adopted, as employees or local teams are nominally granted the freedom to make decisions. However, the parameters of those decisions are so tightly constrained by central metrics, budget limitations, and reporting requirements that the autonomy is completely illusory.

Centralisation’s Immune Response to Decentralised Work

Attempts to transplant the Dutch Buurtzorg model of district nursing into the National Health Service (NHS) serve as excellent case studies for how organisational practices compromise decentralised working. Buurtzorg, founded by Jos de Blok in 2006, revolutionised home care in the Netherlands by replacing managers with self-governing teams of nurses who handle the entire process of care, from intake to discharge, supported by a lean back office and sophisticated tech.

When this model was introduced to the NHS, a system characterised by extreme hierarchy, specialisation, and regulatory oversight, it encountered a series of systemic rejection mechanisms.

When Buurtzorg teams in NHS pilots attempted to recruit their own colleagues (a core tenet of the model to ensure team fit), they collided with centralised NHS recruitment policies.

Technology is the nervous system of decentralisation. Buurtzorg developed its own bespoke IT platform, Buurtzorgweb, which is iPad-based, intuitive, and integrates clinical records with time-keeping and team communication. It was designed by nurses for nurses. NHS Community Trusts typically rely on large, legacy enterprise systems. They often schedule nurses based on ‘tasks’ (e.g. 15 mins for an insulin injection), whereas Buurtzorg works on ‘holistic visits’. They rarely talk to Social Care systems forcing nurses to double-enter data or rely on paper notes.

Additionally Buurtzorg teams are empowered to spend small amounts of money (e.g., buying a specific dressing from a pharmacy or a fan for a patient) to solve problems immediately. NHS procurement rules, designed to leverage economies of scale, often forbid off-contract spend. Nurses found themselves unable to buy a £10 item without a manager’s signature or were forced to order from a central catalogue that took weeks to deliver. This disempowerment signals to the team that they are not trusted, undermining the very principle of self-management.

In essence, the Buurtzorg implementation became an example of pseudo-autonomy—the vocabulary of self-management was adopted, but the centralised infrastructure of control remained, rendering the new way of working inoperable.

Navigating the Immune Response

To make approaches successful organisations must move beyond ‘implementing a model’ to ‘redesigning the system’.

These are not exhaustive but are central ways in which the auto-immune can be countered:

• Create Separate Entities: As Haier demonstrated, it is often more effective to create a new operational entity with its own HR/Tech/Finance rules than to try and carve out a space within the legacy mothership.

• Radical Back Office Reform: The back office must be stripped of its control functions and repurposed as a service provider to the (place-based) teams.

• Outcome-Based Accountability: Hierarchy must shift from measuring process (compliance) to measuring outcomes (citizen health/happiness), creating the space for local variance in how those outcomes are achieved.

Genuine place based and decentralised approaches are not merely structural changes; they are assaults on the fundamental logic of the traditional organisation. The traditional organisational model is designed to minimise variance and maximise control, whilst place-based and decentralised approaches seek the very opposite.

When a decentralised unit is introduced into a centralised host, the host’s systems react as an immune system would to a foreign body, isolating and neutralising the threat.

The only way to counter this is not to concentrate on scaling your innovation, but rather to change the very system itself.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next - Helen Keller

In today’s corporate environment, the instinct of the system is to demand order, predictability, and consensus. Yet, the reality facing us is that nearly half of CEOs don’t think their organisations will survive 10 years unless they radically change path.

The solution to this lies not in reinforcing prevailing orthodoxy , but in institutionalising ‘heretical thinking’. Giving a mandate for constructive dissent must be moved immediately from a discouraged anomaly to a mainstream strategic imperative.

How We Kill Heresy

Heretical thinking, which I’m defining as a challenge to organisational sacred cows—those fundamental assumptions, practices, or long-established revenue streams—is suppressed in traditional organisations. This suppression is not accidental; it is built into the system’s design.

Understanding how the system protects itself from challenge is vital if you want to create change. The system protects the current business model not though active suppression, but through the creation of inertia.

Cultural Inertia: The widespread fear of speaking up or challenging power structures.

Cognitive Inertia: The presence of unchallenged assumptions and deep-seated groupthink.

And possibly the most powerful and commonplace,

Action Inertia: The sunk cost fallacy that prevents the organisation from shifting resources quickly or stopping legacy processes or rituals. These aren’t inherently bad , but as Amro Alkado writes “when they drift out of context, they stop serving people and start serving the system itself.”

They become → 𝐑𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞.
Performances of safety that soothe anxiety rather than solve problems.

This is a crucial point, as what is often referred to as ‘culture’ , the ‘way we do things around here’, is often the system flexing its muscle and subtly enforcing the status quo to prevent or limit any change.

The Strategic Mandate: Mainstreaming Dissent

We must make a deliberate choice to institutionalise constructive dissent, recognising it as a form of commitment aimed at organisational learning. As Peter Drucker observed, the first rule of decision-making is that one does not make a decision unless there is disagreement. The value of productive tension—the clashing of ideas that results in a stronger resolution—must be embraced.

It almost goes without saying that the introduction of heretical thinking requires a bedrock of psychological safety. Without it, employees perceive that disagreement will result in negative consequences, guaranteeing silence.

Five Ways To Introduce Heretical Ideas and New Rituals:

1 - Fear of reprisal kills good ideas. You are not collecting feedback; you are inviting treason against the status quo.

• The Mandate: Implement a third-party, no-metadata submission tool. No IP logs, no email traces, no names. It must be impossible to confirm who the heretic is.

• The Ritual: The submitted heresy must explicitly challenge a core organisational belief (e.g. “The Budget Allocation Model,” “The Team Away Day” “The Culture of Mandatory Meetings”). Only foundational critiques qualify.

2 - Never force the person who spotted the flaw to be the one who fights the war. The idea needs a handler.

• The Mandate: Once the heretical idea is chosen, assign a politically secure senior leader—someone with tenure and clout—to serve as the Devil’s Advocate Champion. Their job is to manage the backlash and vet the concept.

• The Ritual: Host a mandatory “Status Quo Trial“ where the champion presents the heresy and forces any challenger to articulate the benefits of adopting the change, rather than just defending the existing process.

3 - A reward system tied to implementation will only generate safe ideas. You need to reward the courage to challenge power.

• The Mandate: Reward challenging power as a recognition of critical thinking. Award a prize for the ‘idea that could get you fired’ but has generated the most valuable strategic debate, regardless of implementation.

• The Ritual: The top heretic receives a week of paid time off or a dedicated budget for an unrelated passion project. The message: We value your independent thought, now apply it elsewhere.

4 - Ideas that disappear into a black hole breed cynicism. You must show the heretics you’re listening, even when the answer is “No.”

• The Mandate: Every selected heresy must receive a formal, public response. This response must be substantive: it must clearly detail the specific constraints (legal, fiscal, technical) preventing the change. No vague dismissals.

• The Ritual: Maintain a public, internal “Book of Heresies.” This open log contains every submission and the subsequent, detailed response. This builds organisational memory and shows that critique is taken seriously.

5 - Heresy must be constructive. It is a critique of the system, not a vehicle for settling personal scores.

• The Mandate: Submissions must explicitly target processes, policies, or systemic assumptions. Any critique targeting an individual’s performance or competence is immediately discarded.

• The Ritual: Run an annual “Process Obituary Contest.” Employees submit a dead-weight process and write its mock obituary, detailing its failure and celebrating its demise.

So , I’m being a little bit playful with these suggestions, as an organisation that solicits heresy without committing to action is merely performing (another) ritual that breeds deeper cynicism. To truly leverage unorthodox challenges, the organisation must adopt a framework based on safety, consequence, and investment.

The main point of this post being:

Discord and friction are necessary.

Effective organisations need just enough friction and regular, intense debates, because discord has to be allowed to take its proper place to solve the problems that matter. The system dislikes discord.

We must challenge the common corporate value of seeking consensus and harmony at all costs.

We often fail to recognise that whilst organisational memory is short, community has a long memory Regaining trust often needs a long term strategy, sometimes lasting decades.

Satisfaction (whether employee or customer) is always a lagging indicator. It reflects the cumulative effect of experiences over time, and it is not swiftly reversed.

Humans don’t forget easily. Unlike managers who are under pressure to show immediate success following an investment of time, money, and effort into a change initiative.

How long is the long memory within communities? And how quickly can trust be regained? Let’s see what research says

The success of any community recovery strategy, whether focused on urban regeneration, tackling Anti-Social Behaviour (ASB), or implementing localised service delivery, ultimately rests upon one fragile foundation: trust.

In communities marked by years of under-investment and repeated institutional failure—those often termed ‘left behind places’—trust is not merely low; it has been actively eradicated. Understanding how long the memory of that failure persists, and how quickly trust can be regained, is critical for those of us seeking to prove their long-term commitment to place based working.

The Chronology of Cynicism: Why Institutional Trust Can Take Decades to Restore

A sustained lack of confidence at place level can spread beyond individuals until it translates into a deep community cynicism—the pervasive belief that nothing will ever improve.

Crucially, this cynicism is not an irrational sentiment but a perfectly rational response to repeated systemic failure. If promises are consistently broken, adopting a sceptical stance becomes the safest psychological path to protect against the risk of future disappointment. This justifiable cynicism creates an inertia that prevents citizens from engaging, leading to withdrawal and apathy.

While the deep scars of neglect last for decades, trust repair occurs in measurable phases, distinguishing between quick demonstrations of competence and the long haul of genuine commitment

Trustworthiness is built upon four core pillars:

• Reliability (following through on promises)

• Competence (staff knowledge and capacity)

• Transparency (consistent communication about decisions)

• Good Intentions (acting in the community’s best interest)

The initial phase of recovery is the quickest: establishing competence and reliability. Institutions can move from a position where trust is based on generalised negative assumptions (e.g ‘xxx is a useless organisation’) to where trust is based on specific, demonstrated performance (e.g ‘But some of the people at xxx are pretty good’) relatively quickly.

For instance, a neighbourhood team that quickly resolves visible maintenance problems provides tangible evidence that the company is capable of effective action. At Bromford Flagship , we’ve seen this shift happen in the first 12 months in our foundational place based working pilot in South Gloucestershire. Simply having a team of committed people on the ground visibly resolving things will restore a bit of faith.

However, achieving genuine institutional trust requires moving beyond transactional success to relational commitment. This reconstruction of deep institutional trust is a multi-year, highly resource-intensive process.

Strategic frameworks consistently recommend that institutions must publicly commit to a long-term timeline, emphasising that meaningful trust restoration often takes 7 to 10 years, or more, to solidify. This commitment must be sustained enough to survive inevitable changes in funding, policy, and personnel. For example, successful international housing models like Community Land Trusts (CLTs), which prioritise accountability to local people, often have operational histories exceeding 20 or 30 years to prove genuine, sustained local control.

Why Complaints Signal Success

One of the most counter-intuitive phenomena in trust repair is where initial success in building trust leads to a short-term surge in reported ‘negative metrics’. Organisations will almost always unlock latent demand.

In low-trust communities, despair suppresses reporting. Resolve UK’s data shows that a massive 58.2% of people who were victims or witnesses of Anti-Social Behaviour (ASB) did not report it. The main reason cited by nearly half of non-reporters (49.6%) was profound scepticism: that “nothing would be done if a report was made”. This belief acts as a practical manifestation of institutional distrust.

When institutions successfully remove this barrier by demonstrating responsiveness and competence, citizens are suddenly incentivised to report issues, believing the effort is worthwhile. This resulting spike in reported complaints or low-level ASB is not a sign of rising disorder, but the successful conversion of latent, unreported incidents into official, actionable data. Again, in our move to place-based working we are seeing this in our Cotswolds based pilot - as residents see that we will take action on ASB, more people report it. As complaints are addressed, more people complain.

Leaders must correctly interpret this numerical increase as a positive behavioural shift. Indeed, to manage this we should shift from a focus on raw volume of complaints to qualitative metrics of validation, tracking how well they demonstrate empathy and responsiveness.

Accelerating Trust

Although there is no shortcut to rebuilding trust after systemic failure, there is evidence that small actions can speed up the process. Research demonstrates that the use of simple, brief transparency statements—such as a local employee beginning an interaction by saying, “I’m working to get to know the community”—can reliably decrease the community member’s sense of threat and increase reported trust.

This needs to be genuine though, and backed by action and repeated dialogue. The public are much better at detecting short term bullshit than institutions are.

To evade the community’s keen bullshit detection—a sensitivity sharpened by direct experience and low trust—a fundamental shift is needed.

The only viable path to genuine public trust is through long-term relational commitment - where we stop treating communities as passive recipients who are there to generate our satisfaction statistics.

The paradox of improving metrics at community level is not to focus on metrics. Trust is rebuilt through a long term relational focus of listening and acting. Establishing lead measures that encourage that focus is crucial.

Concentrate on relationships and the metrics will improve.

Concentrate on the metrics and your relationships will fail.

Photo by Declan Sun on Unsplash

But if you’re customer or a colleague who gets stuck there, it’s a nightmare to get out.

Failures in service delivery are often attributed to individual incompetence or malicious intent, but as economist Dan Davies argues in his book, The Unaccountability Machine, the true culprit is often systemic design failure.

These flaws create a ‘structural pathology’ where negative outcomes are generated automatically, consuming vast resources and eroding trust.

To understand this pathology and how they interact, we must define three concepts: silos, accountability sinks, and failure demand.

Defining the Pathological Triangle

The term “functional silo syndrome,” was coined in 1988 by consultant Phil S. Ensor. Ensor was inspired by the appearance of grain silos on his visits home to rural Illinois. He used the structure, which keeps different grains rigidly separated, as a metaphor for modern organisations.

He described the “syndrome” as a damaging outcome of traditional functional structures, where specialised departments become isolated, fail to share information, and focus on their own narrow goals rather than the overall success of the company.

While modern institutions deal with highly interdependent problems, their organisational designs are often maladapted for cross-system collaboration. Siloed operations facilitate the pathology by obstructing coordination and filtering out negative feedback signals before they can reach decision-makers who possess the agency to respond effectively.

This fragmentation ensures that the negative consequences are often ignored across organisational boundaries. Who is accountable? No-one.

This siloed environment is the critical precondition for the formation of the accountability sink. Conceptualised by Davies, an accountability sink is a systemic phenomenon—an organisational structure where responsibility, while appearing to be assigned, is absorbed, obscured, or deflected when negative outcomes occur. The sink operates by delegating critical decision-making authority away from humans and into immutable rulebooks, policies, bureaucratic protocols, or automated algorithms. Accountability is diffused across multiple teams, displaced when blame is attributed to the rulebook, or absorbed into institutional processes, creating an illusion of control that masks genuine failure.

Crucially, the sink effectively severs the feedback loop, making it impossible to identify the source of mistakes and preventing essential organisational learning. The primary function of this mechanism, in a complex, risk-averse public sector, is not performance enhancement, but blame avoidance. When complaints increase it is common for an organisation to blame the public (‘everyone is complaining more’) or attribute it to ‘poor communication’ rather than seek out the root cause – the system itself.

The operational cost of the accountability sink is measured in failure demand. Coined by John Seddon, failure demand (or avoidable contact) is defined as demand on a service organisation that is caused by the organisation’s failure to do something, or to do something right, for a customer. This type of demand is distinct from value demand, which is the healthy request for the core service the organisation exists to provide. Failure demand includes rework contacts (fixing errors), missing information requests, clarification contacts, and progress-chasing (e.g. “Where’s my stuff”.)

The Causal Link: From Sink to Decline

The accountability sink functions as the structural generator of failure demand. When responsibility is diffused across multiple silos, the system lacks the integrated mechanisms needed to correct chronic flaws in service design. This systemic failure manifests as friction points for the user.

The volume of this preventable work is potentially staggering; studies show that failure demand consumes between 20 to 80 percent of organisational capacity, sometimes reaching 80 to 90 percent of contacts in local authorities.

A recent Home Office asylum service controversy—in which a £600 taxi journey was booked to take a person to a GP —exemplifies this pathology. The failure was organisational: the automated system only booked taxis due to rules requiring guaranteed transport (delegation to rulebook), and the ultimate accountable body admitted lacking aggregate data on taxi spend (absorption into a data void). The high-cost journey was the inevitable output of a system designed without effective cost feedback or cross-system coordination.

The Antidote: Focusing on Purpose

To make the shift, a structural redesign is necessary. The guiding principle could be Stafford Beer’s foundational maxim: “The purpose of a system is what it does” (POSIWID). POSIWID mandates that organisations should evaluate their success based on the actual impact and outcomes (like failure demand levels), rather than solely on the stated intention of the humans involved.

A similar maxim comes from Don Berwick who maintained that “Every system is perfectly designed to achieve the results it gets”.

To bring this to life the following examples show the difference between intended and actual purpose.

Adopting POSIWID requires leaders to prioritise learning over blame.

Performance measurement must be holistic, promoting cross-system collaboration to mitigate the upstream problems that create failure demand.

Counteracting the ‘delegation to rulebooks’ requires enabling frontline staff to understand customer needs and adjust processes to solve complex issues, which is very much where we are going with place-based working.

The structural antidote to the silo-sink dynamic involves implementing robust cross-system coordination functions. This includes introducing systems convening roles or boundary spanners with authority to bridge organisational boundaries.

Instead of silos and accountability sinks we must build a “shared consciousness,” through the creation of a network of teams.

View the world as a system rather than a series of vertical silos, and keep an eye out for the people trapped in the spaces between them.