Now-ish

Early morning with Louise Nevelson at the Chapel of the Good Shepherd; New York City (13 May, 2025)

All my time now seems to be soaked up in procurement process. Procurement doesn’t comprehend the work of the amorphous consultant. The part that seems to especially mystify procurement is the idea of hiring someone to figure out what work needs to be done instead of to work to a predefined and stable scope — even though growing and increasingly unavoidable uncertainty (which is not the same as risk) means the discovery function of amorphous consulting is increasingly essential.

After coming back from a protocol and blockchain workshop held in Bangkok, I got sucked into a sudden flurry of down-to-the-wire preparation to run a pair of back-to-back strategy workshops lasting 6 days in total, for two different teams. Naturally, it was so last-minute because of procurement and other bureaucratic molasses. Some of the preparation involved thinking about the strategic differences between products and services.

These workshops proved to be more amorphous and emergent than even I had planned for. One of them had to be reworked basically every morning to adjust to the outcomes of the previous day — and sometimes reworked literally in the moment to accommodate key participants being pulled away for unexpected but urgent business, or not coming back as scheduled. And then I ran a day-long, closed-door forum on AI assurance for Resaro and Temasek that was also designed to be emergent and filled with productive discomfort.

Late morning with plant-fanciers at Green Spring Gardens; Alexandria, VA (17 May, 2025)

By the end of all of it, I needed some serious nap-time: This kind of extremely emergent work is hard to scope, price, plan, and execute. (I’ve previously written about the pains and pleasures of running an emergent convening.)

Meanwhile, I’ve been building up a scaffold for a public sector strategy course. The basic idea is: Public sector organisations have indefinite time horizons, must deal with wicked problems, and are obligated to serve multiple stakeholders (including those not yet born) — yet they rely on strategy frameworks and approaches from the private sector where time horizons are short, shareholders are prized above other stakeholders, and wicked problems can (and should) be avoided.

Clearly public sector strategy must be approached in a different way to avoid these and other pitfalls and misconceptions of strategy.

The structure of an intensive public strategy course.

Interleaved with work, I spent some time on the East Coast (New York and D.C.) and the West Coast (Healdsburg and Palo Alto). I was in Healdsburg for Edge Esmeralda — a migratory temporary gathering — to continue some long-standing research interests in cities and their dynamics (I’ve written a bit about Burning Man and Black Rock City and the Kumbh Mela). At Edge Esmeralda, I got thinking about how public sector strategy problems are more tractable when decomposed. Then I went down to Palo Alto to see good friends from graduate school, visit the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, and meet Woody Powell IRL (!)

Midday in the Dish Park; Stanford, CA (2 June, 2025)

For much of June (and August), I’ll be in Adelaide for a visiting research fellowship at MOD. and the University of South Australia to work on a book proposal about not-knowing, that public sector strategy course, and (maybe) a prototype for an experiential exhibit about different kinds of not-knowing. You can be sure I’ll avail myself of the opportunity to investigate the low-intervention wines of the Adelaide Hills. For science.

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

Dusk; Healdsburg, CA (27 May, 2025)

Updated 5 June, 2025