the three phases of planning emergency management: moving towards complexity

in episode 018 of the humancurrent, preparing for complexity in emergency management, stacy interviews thomas appleyard who is an expert in emergency management. one thing that stuck out to me from his episode was the three phases he believes emergency management has gone through. the phases, or at least lessons from the phases, i think relate to other fields as well. i’m definitely thinking about my own field of urban planning, but other things like social change and communications.

designing for imperfection in movement work

“there has never been a social justice movement that didn’t include people who were disappointing.” — alicia garza, episode 1 of how to survive the end of the world

dave snowden: managing in the present by designing parallel safe-to-fail experiments

dave snowden’s interview on the humancurrent was one of the few podcast episodes this year i felt like need a repeat listen. i could probably listen several more times and still be getting new things from it (the other was the last episode of season 1 of how to survive the end of the world).

a happy ending on a corporate sellout story: paws for trello

​as an early adopter, i’ve just gotten used to things that i love being dismantled. useful new fringe tools either get bought and slowly shelved (see sunrise), rolled into much less useful packages of tools (see bloatware that experiences feature creep), or watered-down so as not to really compete with the parent company’s top-of-the-line service/product offerings (see simple).

oleg konovalov: organizational culture as catalyst or inhibitor

another really interesting element of oleg konovalov’s organisational anatomy framework is the idea of culture as a catalyst (source: episode 37 of the humancurrent podcast).