Cybernetics is not the banana
A story of practice transfer, representation and cybernetics in public-service transformation.
Open →Public work library
Things I’ve put into the world
Talks, tools, papers, models, videos and working material. Organised around the ideas, with separate indexes for context-specific talks and the shorter visual things that otherwise vanish down the social-media drain.
This is a publication catalogue, not a mirror of every file with a sharing link. Public links also exist to client, course, personal and third-party material. Those boundaries matter.
Browse the bodies of work
Current routes are tight. Historical and context-specific versions sit in the archive pages rather than swelling every concept page into a loft.
Viable System Model
The core 2025 lecture. No grab-bag of old VSM files.
Open →Systems leadership, change and convening
The relationship between systemic ways of seeing, leading, changing and working across boundaries.
Open →Four dynamics and robust systems
The current ISSS route for the differentiation/integration work.
Open →Four quadrants of thinking threats
A recurring attempt to notice how thinking, including systems thinking, goes wrong.
Open →Five core leadership practices
A compact repertoire for leadership under pressure, developed through repeated teaching and use.
Open →Metacontextuality and Bongard games
Seeing the frame, changing the frame and noticing the limits of method.
Open →Productive conversations
Conversation as practical infrastructure for shared understanding, commitment and learning.
Open →Outcomes and complexity
Why outcomes emerge from complex adaptive systems rather than being manufactured by individual services.
Open →The Commissioning Compass
The three current Compass routes: orientation, quick AI-supported scan and the place-based beta.
Open →Relational public services
Relationships, outcomes and the organisational conditions relational practice requires.
Open →Facilitation and systems consulting
Helping without taking over: intervention, workshop design and consultancy from inside the system.
Open →Large-group processes
A separate indexed collection of whole-system and participatory methods, with a ChatGPT mentor.
Open →VECIT and change
A practical way to ask whether a change has the conditions to take hold.
Open →The John Seddon Method
A paper on action learning, public-sector transformation, self-enlightenment and coercion.
Open →How outsourcing can fail
The original paper and checklist, with a newer return to the same structural failures.
Open →Public-service transformation
Adaptive councils, learning communities, post-shock reform and the state of transformation.
Open →Systems, complexity and cybernetics reading
The live route and the main published reading lists.
Open →Talks, workshops and conference sessions
A chronological index of the public session materials found across Dropbox and Google Drive.
Open →Visual and social publications
LinkedIn PDFs, short visual arguments, diagrams and article copies that otherwise disappear into the stream.
Open →How this works
The canonical object is the idea, not a particular filename. manifest.json records the public catalogue and known routes. A file being publicly shared is evidence of sharing, not automatic permission to feature it here.