This month has been bumpy. I have struggled with the sense that I need to be ‘making the most’ of this time — and not always been sure what that looks like. I’ve been trapped, perhaps in a mindset about productivity, and a pressure to have something to ‘show’ for…

Since last week’s kick-off post I’ve been thinking about how I divide my learning into Soil / Soul / Society. I’ve also thought about learning or reflective questions against these headings. Soil: How have I tended my soil this week? What needs attention? What have I experienced / learned? Soul…

I’ve written a long post this week, so this week’s notes are mostly just stuff I’ve listened to /seen /read. With some additional learning points at the end. Tim Ferris talks to Jerry Colonna about sabbaticals. I didn’t love this — there is an assumption of imbalance underlying the conversation…

In the middle of April I started a five-month pause from my work at Friends of the Earth — and I will be returning to my role in our Experiments Team in September. The first two weeks felt familiar, like a holiday. I walked a section of the Pembrokeshire coast…

I’ve worked a four-day week since 2013, apart from a one-year hiatus when I took part in the On Purpose programme (a big sacrifice, and a real challenge for me at the time). The arguments in favour of this pattern are not new, but I’m conscious that more debates and…

I’ve been thinking a lot over the last few months about how to tell a really strong story about the work we do in my team. I’m — ironically for an experimenter— more of an inductive rather than a deductive thinker: I like a model. But whilst models like the…

This summer I have had the enormous good fortune to spend two weeks in France. The first of these was spent cycling east to west out of the arid lands of Provence and into the massif central and the Tarn valley. Much of this land is relatively wild and unpopulated…

“Power seems to be important in your work. How do you think about power?” Yesterday I caught up with Søren Vester Haldrup from the UNDP’s Innovation Fund — and this was one of the questions that most intrigued him about our work. The topic had caught his attention through this…

Since November I have been studying for an Open University Masters’ level module in Managing Technological Innovation. This sits alongside a module I completed in 2017 in Making Environmental Decisions. Making Environmental Decisions introduced me to a wealth of systems-thinking tools and approaches to stakeholder analysis and gave me new…