I teach Strategy, Civics & Serious Games at Newspeak House, which will give you an insight into how governance works in Britain and how you might get big things done. You might think about it as politics without the political: not party positioning, but the practical mechanics of power, institutions, legitimacy, delivery and decision-making.
My interest is in how people move from “this is broken” to “this is changeable”. British governance is full of formal diagrams, constitutional language and institutional myths, but most real decisions are shaped by timing, incentives, relationships, capacity, risk, legitimacy and the ability to coordinate people under pressure. I’m interested in helping fellows understand that machinery well enough to act on it.
My background is in the UK Civil Service, working across reform, leadership, stakeholder engagement, delivery, crisis recovery and public-sector systems. I’ve worked on large-scale convening across senior government, reform networks, operational recovery, policy development and complex public administration problems where the question is not simply “what is the right answer?” but “what can actually be made to happen?”
I’m particularly interested in serious games because they make hidden systems visible. A good game can show you why institutions behave irrationally, why bad incentives persist, why contracts collapse, why coordination fails, why everyone can be acting sensibly and still produce a terrible outcome. Games give people a safe way to practise judgement before the stakes are real.
I can help fellows think through questions like: How does government actually work? Where does power sit when no one seems to be in charge? How do you build legitimacy for change? How do you design interventions that survive contact with institutions? When should you use persuasion, pressure, coalition-building, process design or escalation? And how do you turn a good idea into something that can survive politics, bureaucracy and implementation?
My current and previous work has included:
- Working in and around central government on reform, crisis management, leadership development and institutional coordination.
- Designing and running programmes that bring together senior leaders across the Civil Service.
- Government Wargamer and facilitator of Megagames
- Working on operational recovery and public-sector delivery problems where political, contractual and institutional incentives collide.
- Designing practical tools, briefings and exercises to help people understand complex systems under pressure.
- Developing serious games and simulations about governance, conflict, strategy, crisis management and institutional failure.
I am at Newspeak for most Ration Clubs. I expect to run at least two sessions per term, with more if there is interest. I am especially useful in 1-1 conversations where a Fellowship Candidate brings a live problem, project, game design, institutional puzzle or strategy question.
I’m happy to help people sharpen a messy idea into a more practical theory of change. You are most likely to get value from speaking to me if you are trying to understand how something really works, where the leverage might be, or how to design a game or intervention that teaches people something serious.
Bring me messy problems - a broken institution, a half-designed game, a civic project, a campaign that has lost its way, a public-sector puzzle, a theory of change that feels too vague, or a governance problem where the formal answer clearly is not the real answer. I am most useful when helping people make the implicit explicit: who matters, what they want, what they fear, what can be changed, what cannot, and where the next useful move might be.
