Hello, I’m Jack Strachan. I work in public innovation. At the moment, I’m attempting to NewCo government with CustomerFirst, experimenting with a different model for transforming public services from inside government and finding out what survives contact with reality.
CIVICWORKS is where I bring together my practice and research to explore public institutions and how they might work differently. It moves across civic bureaucracy, institutional reform, dynamic capabilities, policymaking and technology, intentionally bouncing around different disciplines to connect something as tangible as civic design at street level with the complexity, and often harebrained logic, of digital transformation at state or multinational level.
Each essay or half-formed idea is part of the thinking. They develop propositions, pull ideas across disciplines and give me somewhere to test theory against practice, and practice against theory. Occasionally, inconveniently, they also prove me wrong.
Over the last year, that has taken CIVICWORKS through the machinery behind missions, the rise and apparent demise of innovation labs, the slightly misfitting role of service design in government, the strange persistence of bureaucracy, what we actually mean when we call a team multidisciplinary, industrial strategy, and the institutional conditions that allow transformation to happen at all. Some of the writing escapes elsewhere too, including a shiny forthcoming paper for UNIDO, with ScaleX, on mission-oriented city and industry transformations.
CIVICWORKS started just over a year ago as somewhere to explore questions I couldn’t quite shake. A year later, I’ve got even more I’d love to scratch at.
How should learning relate to authority? How do institutions build relationships and boundary-crossing into their operating models rather than leaving particular people to glue everything together? What should be institutionalised, and what needs to remain flexible? What happens when AI means we can build and test something in hours, while the institution around it still moves in months?
These are propositions rather than a CIVICWORKS theory of government. But, who knows, maybe that’s what we are working towards.
For now, though, some ideas will accumulate evidence, some will change, and some will turn out to be wrong. CIVICWORKS is a space to make that thinking visible while it happens. Enjoy.