The Art of Translation: a manifesto for place-based leadership ... I detect that there is a deficit in future place-based leadership and among a number of useful ideas I have considered recently, the concept that I saw as the most powerful is was to create momentum for a cadre of System Translators more ...

Beyond collaborative leadership ... Future leaders of place will need to be collaborative systems leaders.  The series of characteristics described in The 21st Century Public Servant work are a very good starting point.  They will need system translators working at all levels in the ecosystem that they lead.  The generational traits that these future leaders are likely to exhibit dovetail very neatly with the public sector direction of travel: caring, value-driven networkers, builders of consensus, disrespectors of hierarchy.  Conveners, indeed more ...

A tribute to Returning Officers and a gentle challenge to the voting system. more ...

The most important investment is the one you make in yourself …
I always thought that this oft-heard statement is so obvious as to be trite.  Yet over the last ten days I have reflected on this quite hard as I attended my fifth consecutive Investors Summit at Sea.  The Summit has become my most important personal development event​. more ...

A safe space and focused facilitation to think transformation thoughts at the Local Government Chronicle’s annual Transformation Summit:  reflection on why this event is particularly effective.  more ...

Re-imagining political governance in Wales: can a politics of place defined by a mix of democratic republicanism and social libertarianism allow public services in Wales to survive and then thrive? more ...

The role of the corporate centre in avoiding diminishing returns: what local councils can learn from the collapse of great civilisations  more ...

Is it time to re-consider the lexicon of local government before ‘devolution’ becomes a word as tainted as ‘transformation’?  more ...

Disintermediation was around in the pre-digital age  more ...

Contact:              e: carl-brooks@btconnect.com               m: (+44) 7717 438862               twitter: @carlbrooks191