Praxis. What we think.
Essays on receiving systems, agentic government, and the gap AI made obvious. Written from the work, not the sidelines.
Recent thinking.
New Look, Who 'Dis?
Real change is harder than most change programmes acknowledge, and the gap between what organizations say about change and what they actually do is where most transformation efforts quietly die.
Campfires, Trails and Warm Data: Documenting Sensemaking
When the most valuable work resists documentation, the document still wins. Two metaphors — campfires and trails — for producing artifacts warm enough to enable real action.
Structuring Collaboration for Systems Innovation
Launching collaboration, practicing it, and sustaining it are three different organizational capabilities. A nine-component blueprint for the full arc — and the places attrition quietly takes hold.
Two experimental surfaces sit alongside this archive.
The archive, newest first.
25 essaysHow It Got Fixed: Report Out from a GovMaker Workshop
934 ideas. 39 strategies. And then everyone got on their flights home. Why the harvest is the easy part — and ownership has to be designed in, not hoped for.
Another Walk in the Snow
Culture does not change through announcements. It changes through repeatedly walking new paths until they become the obvious route — and recognizing who benefits from the old ones persisting.
The ShiftFlow Transformation Deck
You've had the meeting. Now try the game — a structured play session designed for that moment before the breakthrough.
Scaling Is a Systems Problem Not a Logistics One
Most organizations confuse deployment with scaling. Lasting change requires working systemic spread, social adoption, and individual change in parallel — not pushing harder on the rollout.
Lab Legacy: From Temporary Space to Lasting Change
Innovation labs excel at making a different logic livable for a moment. The harder question is whether they are designed to leave something behind once the temporary space is gone.
Adjusting in Degrees
Applying James Clear's *Atomic Habits* to organizational transformation. Teams are systems, and shifting their habits is how change embeds over the long term.
Why Budget Cuts Without Resource Reallocation Rarely Transforms Systems
Austerity that reduces total resources while preserving flow logic is contraction, not transformation. If you don't re-plumb the pipes, turning down the water pressure just produces a weaker flow to the taps.
There Is No Transformation Without Integration
Lessons from the Hero's Journey for innovation labs and organizational change. Transformation does not end at the return — it requires the inward work of integrating what was learned.
Teaching Innovation in Government
A condensed design sprint we ran at the Government of New Brunswick — from pre-work and journey mapping to prototyping and closing circles — and the conditions that made it work.
Surfacing Innovation in Bureaucracy
Innovation can seem impossible in a bureaucracy, but transformative change is necessary for survival and effectiveness — particularly in government, where reputation and trust depend on it.
The Government That Unlearns Fastest Wins: Bootstrapping Public Innovation and the Strategic Value of Labs
Between 2017 and 2020, a small team in New Brunswick catalyzed open government through executive backing, prototype-driven approaches, grassroots momentum, and emergent strategy — and learned that the government that unlearns fastest wins.
Creating Public Value Through Networked Governance
Five lessons from the New Brunswick Social Policy Research Network on how networked governance and knowledge mobilization support a shift to an open government paradigm.
Accountability Without Effectiveness
Thoughts on transforming what governments measure. Metrics serve as essential tracking instruments, but unintended traps can obstruct efforts to generate value, foster innovation, or challenge the status quo.
Teaching Prototyping with Back to the Future and Self-Lacing Shoes
Using the case of the self-lacing shoe to teach prototype design and the concepts of Desirability, Feasibility, Viability, and Impact (DFV-I).
Butterfly Goo and Digital Transformation
Embarking on an accelerator program will feel like uncharted territory for most public servants. The metamorphosis of a caterpillar to a butterfly — and the goo in between — is a useful guide.
Facilitating Collaborative Problem Framing
Tools aren't everything. What's more difficult and more important than tools are mindset, condition-setting, team dynamics, and problem framing — especially when done collaboratively.
Beyond the crisis
The rationale for a Parallel Learning Structure in government — capturing insights from how government changed during Covid-19 so that agility outlasts the crisis that produced it.
Lean Organizational Change
Accelerate change in government with innovation adoption theory. Theory helps us make sense of our world and take action effectively — and the diffusion of innovation curve is a powerful lens for organizational change at every scale.
All the product roles and agile scrummy scrums in the world
Agile, product, and DevOps frameworks only deliver when the underlying mindset shifts from inside-out to outside-in. Without that, organizations just rebrand the old practices with new vocabulary.
Tips for Innovative Workshop and Program Design
Eight lessons from building organizations, labs, and programs centered around professionally-facilitated workshops — covering theoretical framing, spaciousness, predictability, feedback loops, recursion, takeaways, scope, and impermanence.
The loose doorknob effect
Every public service touchpoint is a handshake that subconsciously defines our relationship with government. Governments are good at counting transactions, but the wiggly doorknobs — the small frictions — are usually where the real damage hides.
Paths in the Snow: A Meditation on Individual & Organizational Change
Personal and organizational change follow the same pattern. Imagine your mind as fresh snow — the more you walk a path, the deeper it becomes. To change culture, we need to walk new paths long enough for them to become familiar, even when no one has cleared them.
Public Innovation Labs - The New Brunswick Experience
How visionary leadership and the New Brunswick Social Policy Research Network seeded a generation of public innovation labs — and what NouLAB's fiddlehead-shaped lessons can teach any public sector trying to build innovation capacity.
No Lab? No worries.
You don't need an innovation lab, a program budget, or even a strategy to begin shifting the culture of a public organization. You need network, executive sponsorship, scrappy projects, skill development, and stories — and the patience to plant trees you may never sit under.
Introducing ShiftFlow: Innovation for a better future
From bureaucratic indifference to life-affirming solutions. ShiftFlow is launching as a cross-sectoral, multi-disciplinary innovation and design agency tackling the wicked problems that traditional ways of working can't solve.