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PUBLIC SECTOR SCORECARD

The Public Sector Scorecard is an integrated service improvement and performance management framework which extends and adapts the balanced scorecard to the public and voluntary sectors

VSM Mapper using LLM from Recursive Systems

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The interesting parts of the Deming story aren’t really Deming

[Though I would say I believe there may be another story about Deming’s behaviour – as a typical mid-20th Century male guru figure – which may or may not come out. But that could …

Patrick McGee (@PatrickMcGee_) on X

The first time I heard the name "Homer Sarasohn," it was an ex-@Apple engineer telling me there should bronze statues of the guy in Apple Park, Cupertino. "These ideas didn't come out of nowhere," the source said, when I asked about Apple's supply chain strategy. "It all goes

The systems framing: Beyond the 2×2 and why Operating Model Design needs Cybernetic First Principles – Aziz (2026)

Abdul AzizStrategy & Performance through Empathy, Architecture and AnalyticsMarch 28, 2026 The systems framing: Beyond the 2×2 and why Operating Model Design needs Cybernetic First Principles |…

Systems are deterministic, people are probabilistic – AI is both, and that's a headache for cyber teams

AI combines both the risks associated with IT systems and the people using them, creating headaches for practitioners

Cordon Sanitaires and Purity Spirals

What the rise in antisemitism teaches us about radicalisation

OK, you got me. That post earlier was an April Fool’s. But there was a true element: I have received some funding, and I’m entering a new phase of work. I’m grateful to have been awarded a grant by… | Benjamin P. Taylor

OK, you got me. That post earlier was an April Fool’s. But there was a true element: I have received some funding, and I’m entering a new phase of work. I’m grateful to have been awarded a grant by the Late Phase Research Foundation, which specialises in identifying individuals who begin exhibiting late-career characteristics, and supporting them to formalise these tendencies before they become socially disruptive. I believe they’ve been around for some time. In my case, the panel noted: • a deepening preoccupation with 1970s cyberneticians, philosophers, and therapists whose work improves with obscurity • a drift from ‘projects’ to ‘questions’, and from questions to ‘what is going on, really?’ • a growing tolerance for diagrams that attempt to explain everything • consistent beard maturation (despite active countermeasures) • interests that have become simultaneously narrower, stranger, and more ambitious The Foundation’s purpose is straightforward: to support the transition from delivery to synthesis - reconciling governance, state and system, cybernetics and metaphysics, public service and the noumenal. My own directions of travel, for now: • connecting public service transformation with second-order cybernetics and political economy • taking systems seriously enough to ask what kind of reality they imply • and testing whether anything useful sits between institutional practice and whatever passes for wisdom There are, as ever, conditions. These include: • a spiritual ‘journey’ (I’m told ‘journey’ will become quite a theme!), requiring a plausible spiritual source (shortlisted options currently include second-order cybernetics, obscure strands of Eastern Orthodox thought, deracinated Shamanism, and something half-remembered from Marhsall Berman – anyway – some kind of relationship with a beard-forward wisdom tradition) • producing a Theory of Everything of sufficient coherence to be taken seriously by at least three people and seven podcasts • maintaining light but credible contact with the counterculture as represented by Stewart Brand, Terence McKenna, and, where appropriate, the ghost of Buckminster Fuller - I will be guided in this endeavour by regular sessions with an on-faculty character they call ‘the Central Scrutiniser’, who apparently ‘was there at Esalen’) • and undertaking a modest programme of psychedelic inquiry (psilocybin, LSD, or prolonged exposure to late-period systems literature) I’m a little nervous about the requirement I host ‘live-ins’ in my home (haven’t told my wife yet :-o) but I’m sure it’ll be fine. They send a druid first to balance the ley-lines…. Funding is said to originate from a loose alliance of ageing longhairs, systems mystics, and at least one person who was ‘there at Esalen’. I have not asked further questions. The expectation is clear: less novelty, more synthesis, and a growing willingness to say simple things that turn out not to be simple at all. More… when the energy is right.