How I work and on what

My work draws on foresight, systemic design, systems thinking and artistic research, and I am interested in how these approaches can offer alternatives for familiar ways of understanding that have become part of the problem. An organisation may find that its programme silos prevent it from responding to evolving needs and opportunities, it may want to explore the potential of agentic AI without reducing the exercise to a drive for efficiency, or it may seek a systemic perspective in order to develop relationships with unfamiliar partners whose interests and ways of working differ from its own.

I have often understood what is at stake in such situations through Stafford Beer's notion of an Identity Function, an institutional capacity to examine what the organisation is becoming, what it stands for and how its conduct relates to its purposes. Much of my professional work has involved helping institutions recognise the importance of this function and develop the language, practices and arrangements through which it can be exercised, so that there are regular occasions on which assumptions can be questioned, disagreements made productive and responsibilities acknowledged.

Behind this lies a normative commitment. I regard institutions as social and political worlds, sustained by people whose knowledge and commitments deserve to matter. Organisations can be designed and governed in ways that take the intelligence and agency of those involved more seriously, while remaining honest about differences of interest and power. It is this conviction that informs what I have come to call (after Isabelle Stengers) a praxis of the middle voice, a way of working in which one takes neither the position of the detached expert who acts upon a situation nor that of the bystander who undergoes it. I, as much as anyone else who is part of the systems, am a participant in a process whose course cannot be fully determined in advance. I bring experience, analysis, questions and sometimes deliberately unsettling perspectives, and I offer them into a situation that can challenge them in return. Thirty years of practice have convinced me that judgment takes shape through such encounters, among the people involved and in contact with the institutional and material realities at stake.

Much of this work has been situated in the built environment, food and health care, fields in which I have accumulated considerable experience and to which I am also attached as a matter of conviction. They form part of the foundational economy, the systems of provision on which everyday life depends, and the questions of how they are organised, whom they serve and what they demand of people and places are ones in which the quality of collective judgment has particularly tangible consequences. I think of them as areas of particular engagement, and gladly work beyond them when a question calls for it.