I have always been curious about what makes places function. It’s why I was drawn to geography, why I wonder as I pass through a town or community what it’s like to live there, how the unique interaction of people and environments and climate and resources shapes the way a place evolves.

It’s probably why I  instinctively brought a neighbourhood focus to my work in local government, linked service prioritisation and investment with need, developed systems- and place-based approaches to change at the RSA, developed alternatives to the benefits system with a basic income experiment, brought entrepreneurialism to the fore in local public services, and have championed alternative forms of commissioning and procurement. Among other things…

It’s why I rail against standard risk and HR practices, work with teams trying to make life better for people in their communities, supported Start Network’s efforts to invert the power dynamics of the prevailing systems, worry about the divisions being sown in our culture, voice my concerns over the economist-led approach to local government reorganisation, test alternatives to the linear tools of evaluation and impact, explore self-organising principles of team performance as a counterpoint to patriarchal organisational hierarchies.

On the face of it this is as disparate a set of issues and ideas that anyone might get involved in, though perhaps not unexpected given the diverse work I’ve done over the years. But ultimately it is about being an advocate for local places and communities and the systems and processes that constrain or enable growth, prosperity, life chances and happiness.

Reinventing and recreating the systems of governance we need in the UK to enable all places to thrive. Towns as well as cities, isolated rural and coastal communities, those that are connected and those are geographically peripheral, ones with thriving high streets and others seemingly abandoned, cities with boundaries constraining effective governance and regions made up to fit a national agenda. Structure matters.

When you get out of London and the south east everything changes. If the UK excluding London was a US state, it would rank last on measures of productivity, behind the 50^th state, Mississippi. Something needs to change.  Whoever you are, wherever you live, do you not deserve to feel as though your place matters and that opportunities exist for you to live the kind of life that works for you? We know life chances are, in part, contextual, but there are place-based elements of context that we don’t have to leave to chance.

What I’m really talking about here is the need to change the systems of governance in the UK that results in, or compounds, these problems. The over-centralisation of public policy and power in Westminster. The evident lack of trust on the part of central government to create a space for local government (or, in the humanitarian and development sectors, local NGOs) to deliver in response to the needs of their communities. The desire for standardisation of policy (the rallying cry of avoiding a postcode lottery is blindly adopted even when it can never be avoided).

The fact that five families can live in five different parts of the UK under fundamentally different systems of governance and political accountability is, frankly, a nonsense. Some things need standardisation, the national principles that enable local variation in response to local context. How places are governed is one of the most important.

With enabling governance and accountability mechanisms we can address the critical challenges we face as society at the appropriate geography. Some things need to be addressed in our local community, perhaps through a public meeting of the parish council. Some things are best addressed at the national level because they are impact the whole country. This is the issue with the current round of local government reorganisation. It’s an economist-driven solution to a geographical problem best solved through the principle of subsidiarity.

In addition, some problems are too important to be left to market forces. Making a profit out of the most vulnerable in society, such as private-equity run care homes or looked after children, or in the neglect of essential resources, such as water, or infrastructure, such as railways. Others will never be solved by the private sector. Near-derelict high streets aren’t going to be revived through the same market forces that led to their decline; they are a leading indicator illustrating how global capitalism is impacting the town. Running rail franchises is never going to have the real purpose of rail travel – to move a mass of people from a to b at the lowest cost and as quickly as possible – at the top of the priority list. Private equity needs its return on investment, period.

We are in a time where we need radical solutions.

I believe there are some core principles that should underpin these solutions. They must be nuanced to the places in which they must work. Fair investment proportionate to need, which requires a national redistribution of taxes to areas of greatest social and economic need. It means making sure that local government is adequately resourced to coordinate the local public sector as a whole to address the needs of its citizens, not stripped bare and left to the vultures.

The areas with the ability to raise the most taxes are the richest ones; if community funding is left to each local area the rich will grow richer and the poorer areas will continue their race to the bottom. Cutting the public sector, as austerity did, compounds the situation as the poorer areas, those with limited economic growth, are not only more reliant on the public sector for higher skilled jobs but it also forms a larger proportion of the workforce.

There is no silver bullet, no magic solution or approach that if diligently implemented will achieve the desired end when those ends are about improving the fabric of society and the places where we go about our day to day lives. Thriving places that meet the needs of their citizens emerge only through the design, testing and coordination of a range of interventions at a range of geographic scales and different timescales.

Do we not all deserve to wander into our local town/city centre on a Saturday morning and feel some degree of energy and vibrancy?

A core requirement in addressing challenges of this nature is to orchestrate and steward a collective effort in service to the change that is both necessary and possible. It requires mechanisms to release those with the vision for change to take action to realise that vision, across public, private and third sector.

This is my space, helping those working on such hard problems that could have outsized benefits. That list of seemingly unconnected pieces of work I articulated earlier? They are all ways of experimenting with different means to an end, micro challenges to the prevailing paradigm that constrains how we organise in society and in the way our government, organisations, teams and systems operate. I believe we need a new paradigm; indeed, I set out an early articulation of this in the RSA Journal a few years ago which I later developed much further.

Change of this nature also requires us to operate at various levels of time and space.

How do we put out the fire in such a way that it’s unlikely to occur again because we understand and address the conditions that caused it? To relieve the presenting conditions – which themselves are evidence of the failure of our current systems – while at the same time changing the structures and processes that hold those systems in place. To alleviate homelessness while at the same time addressing its causes so no one has to sleep in doorways and underpasses. To provide food while addressing the causes of hunger so no-one has to suffer the degradation of going to a foodbank. To regenerate our high streets, while at the same time seeking to change the structural barriers to that rejuvenation so that everyone can hang out and have fun on a Saturday morning. To build local resilience and community capacity to respond to disasters while at the same time changing the structures of oppression so those disasters are less likely to occur.

I’m driven by the need for such far-reaching change. What’s served us in the past is unlikely to be what we need in the future. What got us here won’t get us there. We need to work contemporaneously across the immediate and the longer term. In different dimensions, across the local – where the results of failing systems show up the most clearly – to the national, where so much of the power is held, and the global, where structural and geopolitical forces play out back in our towns and cities.

Perhaps its my geographer’s desire for contextually-appropriate interventions that address the needs of different places, my auditors desire for good governance, my behavioural scientists desire to work with the grain of human psychology, my convenors desire to break down silos, my social innovators desire to challenge convention and be more experimental, my systems thinkers desire to understand interactions between parts, my evaluators desire to establish learning and feedback loops, and my strategists desire for coherence between ends and means.

This combination of skills and experiences places me outside of most career labels, job descriptions and professions. I think it places me in a space to orchestrate the wide variety of work needed to create the change we need. I’m not sure there is a name for that. Orchestration is a start. Coordinating the parts to align towards shared ends. Perhaps ultimately this sounds exactly like my current consulting work: helping teams and organisations make the change that’s necessary for the impact that’s possible.

I describe it as being a change strategist.