Public Strategist

Bureaucracies temporarily reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one. Clay Shirky

Data is the plankton of the new economy. It seems plentiful, tiny, and insignificant but whole ecosystems of companies, large and small, are emerging to feed off of it. David Eaves (h/t @martinsw)

Try as we might, we just couldn’t make a mortgage application fun, so we made it simple instead. ING tube advert

A digital citizenry isn’t interested in talking to an analogue government David Eaves  (h/t Martin Stewart Weeks)

Listening looks easy, but it’s not simple. Every head is a world Lauren Currie

I totally respect the need for caution and propriety, after all I was a civil servant, but you can’t on the one hand champion social media in government and on the other seek to manage and control the agenda. It just cannot work, and it won’t. Jeremy Gould commenting on a post by Dominic Campbell

Organisations cannot learn not to be surprised by the future.  They can learn not to be surprised that they are surprised by the future. Paraphrased from comments by Ian Livingston.

Innovation requires failure. @rufflemuffin

Sixteen-hundred Pennsylvania Avenue might get the bulk of the press, but it’s in the extremities of government where much of what shapes the lives of citizens takes place. Nancy Scola

There are very serious reasons behind many of the projects I’m working on at the moment, but this gravity doesn’t preclude the use of a little panache or showmanship to add to the effectiveness of the end product. Indeed, in many cases it’s the lack of style that’s been the problem in the first place. [...]