This week I was asked to write a guest blog on Tiger de Souza’s great website and was delighted to do so. This is what I wrote – Last week, an unusual thing happened. The internet was buzzing with a story about a parish council. Was this local governance getting some publicity and attention at […]
If I hear one more leader talk about recovery (without mentioning emotions) I shall scream…. We are going through a period of collective trauma. We’re all facing loss and the attendant grief. For many it is the sadness of mourning someone who has died before their time, felled either by Covid or by illness not […]
in March 2020 I was invited to speak at the Stronger Communities Conference organised by the New Local Government Network. We didn’t know then what dramatic change slay ahead – but we did know we were facing seismic change.
I wrote last week about the nine things I’d noticed at the start of this crisis, but I’ve carried on watching. And I’ve since observed That emotions really are the blind spot in public policy and in the way in which we talk about things. In all the words that have been expended so far […]
We’ve known that a global pandemic would come for decades, and it’s been modelled and planned for time after time. But when it comes it’s a massive and terrifying shock, and the implications will be felt for decades to come. Just now we’re wrestling with the health and economic impacts and learning things we didn’t […]
From a keynote address at the Annual Conference of Learning Disability England,13/2/2020 Manchester. The Civil Society Futures Inquiry was a listening exercise. It was a hugely ambitious exercise to find out what people within civil society were worried about, and what their hopes and fears were for the future. In shaping the inquiry we […]
Part 2 How many Ss spell governance? This model is designed to help boards decide which mode they are in. Many of the best boards signal which mode is required for which subject. Good boards are able to readily identify the right mode. And outstanding boards can move with confidence, and clarity between the modes. […]
Part 1 Who’s who on a board It is very easy to download from the internet, or ask your solicitor, for a list of roles and responsibilities. What does the honorary treasurer do? Should you have a senior independent director? What about the chair and chief executive officer? Does a company secretary serve the board […]
The end of a decade is always a time to take stock, but in the UK just now it represents so much more. A General Election outcome, more dramatic than most had predicted, has created some certainty about the way ahead, and for civil society some greater certainty about what we need to do next. […]
Nobody doubts that we are entering a turbulent and damaging decade. The deep social divisions which have grown in the last decade seem likely to fester and wreak even more havoc and the volatility expected of both the economy and the climate are going to bring massive risks to us all. As we argued in […]