Pathologies of practice
Recurring dysfunctions in governance, policy, finance and institutional life.
Notebook
Working thoughts, observations, fragments and early patterns.
Notebook paths
User needs patterns
Working definitions, failure modes and governance questions around user needs, civic needs and evidence-to-decision traceability.
Entries
Organisational antibodies
How organisations can turn corrective knowledge into a threat, move scrutiny from the claim to the claimant, and reduce their own capacity to learn.
Discovery fatigue
A working concept for what happens when repeated discovery stops being experienced as a credible route to action or improved outcomes.
Process is not a substitute for leadership
An indictment of organisations that use design activity, bounded scope and visible outputs to avoid owning a failing service.
User needs are vectors, not labels
A small interactive sketch showing how small changes in user-need wording can rotate the implied solution space.
Civic AI and computable needs
A working argument that civic AI systems need a stronger model of human, civic and institutional needs than correlation, sentiment or delivery efficiency alone can provide.
LLM training and user needs
A stub for a working definition about how LLMs often reproduce weak, product-centric models of user needs unless explicitly corrected.
The Blame Trap
A stub for a working definition about people being led to blame themselves for failures that originate in flawed systems.
Unignorable analysis archive
A catalogue of downloadable Unignorable analyses applying the framework to public topics, reports, speeches, policies and institutional narratives.
User needs collapse
A stub for a working definition about user needs being collapsed into tasks, features, content requirements, policy aims or organisational convenience.
User needs drift
A stub for a working definition about the progressive misalignment between validated user needs and the actual outputs of service delivery.
User needs erasure
A stub for a working definition about needs being ignored, minimised, reframed or made illegible inside institutional processes.
Requirements are not strategy
A note about the difference between complying with requirements and designing a coherent direction.
Bureaucracy doesn’t need saving from itself
A response to James Plunkett’s SDinGov 2025 keynote, arguing that bureaucracy needs redesign so needs, harms and burdens become structurally unignorable.
Hollow innovation
A definition of innovation that signals progress without delivering meaningful improvements in human outcomes.
Delivery theatre
A systemic pathology where institutions stage the appearance of progress through metrics, language and rituals as a substitute for genuine outcomes and structural repair.
Structural abandonment
A bridge concept for describing the systemic withdrawal or fragmentation of institutional support that forces people to manage survival without coherent scaffolding.
Longform essays
Longer developed pieces, talks and expanded arguments.
Designing lean provocations
Small, low-effort design moves that make false organisational stories wobble, based on my ExConf 2017 talk and expanded into a deeper essay.