Posts

Showing posts from June, 2026

Creative Bureaucracy: Innovation Within Structure

Image
*How governments and organisations can reimagine public services through human-centred design* Introduction In the early 2000s, the Danish government faced a familiar problem: young people were dropping out of employment programmes at alarming rates. The response could have been predictable—tighten the rules, increase monitoring, impose penalties. Instead, Denmark chose a different path. Rather than working harder within the existing system, officials asked a radical question: what if we redesigned the entire experience from the ground up? This question sits at the heart of Creative Bureaucracy, a movement that has quietly transformed how forward-thinking governments and organisations deliver public services. Rather than viewing bureaucracy as the enemy of innovation, Creative Bureaucracy asks: how can we infuse creativity, human-centred design, and flexibility into the structures that hold organisations together? What is Creative Bureaucracy? Creative Bureaucracy, a concept championed...

What Do We Actually Mean When We Talk About Resilience?

Image
  I want to be honest with you about something. I've used the word 'resilience' a great deal over my career — in coaching conversations, in staff wellbeing sessions, in frameworks and programmes. And for a long time, I think I was using it in a way that was subtly unhelpful. I was using it to mean toughness. The capacity to absorb pressure and carry on. A kind of emotional stoicism — the professional equivalent of not flinching. Resilience as armour. What I've come to understand — through working with clients across education, public sector, and corporate settings, and through my own experience of navigating change — is that resilience isn't armour at all. Armour is rigid. It restricts movement. And the people I've seen cope most effectively with genuine adversity aren't those who feel nothing. They're those who feel everything and have developed a relationship with their own inner world that allows them to keep moving. So this piece is my attempt to say...