Now-ish

Sunset at Hua Lamphong; 20 April 2025.

The weeks zoom by in Asia. There was a 10-day period during which it felt like the air stayed at nearly 100% relative humidity; a hot, damp blanket all day and all night, relieved only slightly by short but torrential downpours during which Singapore’s rainwater management system was shown to great advantage.

Most of the last few months has been taken up by researching and writing unnecessarily large scopes of work for various part of the UN Development Programme — which is responding at the whole-organisation level to a long-term shift in what development work looks like, how it needs to be done, and where the financing comes from. I also took on a peer reviewer role for the UNDP Crisis Bureau’s upcoming report on development challenges posed by the new global environment of increased uncertainties and risks.

Some time in March, I decided to put all new writing onto my own domain, and use my newsletter to point to it. So I’ve been writing there a lot more than before, including new articles on

1. Strategy misconceptions and how to fix them,
2. Not falling into the public sector efficiency trap,
3. How to unlock transformative public policy work,
4. More effective research using interviews and experiments.
5. Why structured mess creates more interesting and adaptable spaces, and
6. How to ask for an introduction.

Last year, in Marseille, I recorded a short interview segment for a documentary about skills and the future of work. The film premiered in Paris a few weeks ago and is available to watch here (unfortunately, pay-per-view). And in early April this year, I recorded a long interview about uncertainty and risk, nonintuitive but effective ways to organise for innovation, the virtues of being uncomfortable, and how to change education to create students who are more comfortable with being uncomfortable — it’s available to watch here.

Strategy in the West; 10 April 2025.

But at this very moment I’m in Bangkok for a week-long protocol design workshop focusing on where the futures of AI systems and blockchain overlap. We’re showing the outputs — a series of film microfictions about a temporally proximate future Southeast Asia where AI systems and blockchains overlap and are patchily ubiquitous — at the Bangkok Kunsthalle on Friday 25.4.2025 in a 1-night show called Irrigating the Hardened AI Commons.

This workshop is part of the Summer of Protocols programme funded by the Ethereum Foundation. I’ll also be developing a short course — part-funded by a SOP curriculum development grant — on public sector strategy as a coordination protocol for governments. On that, much more soon.

If there’s something interesting you’d like to chat about IRL (or virtually), get in touch.