Browsing » July 2012

Board Women

By Greg Fisher Two weeks ago I attended an All Party Parliamentary Group in Westminster which focused on rebalancing boards of directors to ensure they included more women.  A compelling argument for doing this was presented by Nadhim Zahawi MP, who noted that returns on investments in companies with gender-diverse boards stood at around 11%, […]

Chaos Versus Complexity

By Greg Fisher Recently I got in to a very interesting discussion, which led me to articulate to my interlocutor (and myself!) the difference between Chaos Theory and Complexity Theory.  I thought I’d write this down in the form of a blog article.  I should stress that you should only read further if such technical […]

The complex effects of technological dislocation

By Chris Davies The widespread coming-to-prominence of the New Institutional Economics (NIE) school, which was given a little push recently by the sad news of Elinor Ostrom’s death, has brought to the fore the importance of economic structures.  This is surely a good thing: by acknowledging the importance of institutions, formal and informal, the NIE […]

Test, Learn, Adapt… and repeat: Learning and adaptation in public policy

By Mark McKergow The Cabinet Office Behavioural Insights team has just issued ‘Test, Learn and Adapt: Developing Public Policy with Randomised Controlled Trials’ (download from their website here). This document is notable for several reasons.  One of the authors is Ben Goldacre, author of Bad Science and a thorn in the side of pseudoscientists and charlatans […]

A New Style of Community Leadership for Complex Networks

By Lorraine Ford Picking up on Greg Fisher’s blog post regarding the distinction between power & formal authority, I did some related work recently at Henley Business School with Mike Green on local strategic partnerships – a concrete example of networks operating in the public sector.  We looked at how local political leaders use their […]

« Previous Entries