Open pollination (wk 37/2025)

Hello friends,

I got back to Singapore from Adelaide at the end of August, but last week was totally consumed by a Very Cool non-aligned project about the near future which brought to Singapore many people I’d only previously known as names on the Internet.

I forced everyone to drink low-intervention wine and eat unfancy foods, sometimes without air-conditioning. Some of them grudgingly admitted later to being slightly inebriated the day after but not actually hungover. The whole thing is embargoed for another 60 days, but you can be sure I’ll write about it here when I can.

Meanwhile, two current projects have dovetailed and reinforced each other in the last 3 months. I wrote about one of them a few weeks ago and the other one this week.

The back story: I’m a fellow at both the Summer of Protocols research programme and the AI for Human Reasoning programme of the Future of Life Foundation. The SoP work is to develop a course on public sector strategy; the AI4HR work is to develop an AI tool to help users think critically about meaningmaking while using AI tools.

It turns out that fixing the public sector strategy problem requires rethinking the content itself: The public sector needs to frame strategy and decisionmaking differently from the private sector. But teaching strategy to already over-stretched public servants also requires rethinking how applied theory gets taught, including what materials are used. In this week’s essay, I explain why case-based teaching is good, but the traditional generic teaching case doesn’t work well for public sector strategy teaching — and how highly customised parametric cases do a much better job.

The idea for better cases came out of a casual conversation at Edge Esmeralda with Venkatesh Rao. But the approach that allows me to generate parametric cases came out of the research and prototyping I’m doing for the FLF work and a conversation with Owen Cotton-Barratt during which he suggested eating my own dogfood. That led me to try applying the FLF tooling to a thinking and writing problem I was working on: Cases for teaching public sector strategy.

After the fact, it is entirely unsurprising that a workflow that explicitly separates meaning from routine processing for college students writing argumentative essays can be retooled for course developers writing customised teaching cases. This is another instance of how practically useful it is to clearly separate meaningmaking work from non-meaningmaking work when designing tools.

Learning the affordances of this new tool has taken many months of experimentation and now depends on a remarkably arcane prompt structure on the back. But, after two rounds of beta testing with real, live public servants working in state and national governments and public utilities, I’m feeling good about trialing it beyond just friends and family.

So I’ll present a 90-minute module from this public strategy course on September 17, 0900-1030 Singapore time (GMT +8), as part of Protocol School. This session is not open to the public but we can accommodate a few guests — email me if you’re interested.

A few days later, I’ll teach the same module with a few modifications and a re-customised parametric case as part of a course on foresight and strategy at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore.

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After over a decade teaching strategy in private and public sector settings, I’ve developed a new public sector strategy course that flips the conventional wisdom. Instead of borrowing failing private sector concepts, my approach recognises that public sector organisations — with their complex stakeholder environments, wicked problems, and indefinite time horizons — require fundamentally different ways of thinking about and doing strategy which should inform how private sector strategy is done. The course also teaches using parametric cases that can be fully customised for particular teaching contexts and specific content, making strategy education more relevant and engaging for busy public servants worldwide.

Read about the substantive and the pedagogical innovations of this new public strategy course.

1. Dissolving (vs solving) the problem: “The important thing is there’s something you do to a problem that’s better than solving it, and that’s ‘dissolving’ it. How in world do you ‘dissolve’ a problem? By redesigning a system that has it so that the problem no longer exists.” (I was reminded of Ackoff’s work by David MacIver’s latest newsletter issue.)

2. The breakdown of quantitative knowability: “Quant hedge fund managers are experiencing one of the most prolonged droughts in recent memory. The bigger concern: They don’t know why … ‘Everyone says it's different this time — different because of duration,’ said a hedge fund consultant who works with large quant funds. ‘This has been a long, slow bleed across the complex.’”

3. Beginning with material: “With any fabric, no matter how great the raw material may be, if it’s simply knitted or woven as-is, it won’t become the kind of textile we’re aiming for. For us, good raw materials are just the starting point. We almost never use them without further refinement.”

See you next week,
VT