🧵 Abstract concepts, illustrated in visual ways There are always/often multiple stories that fit a given set of observations (aka "underdetermination of theory").

https://twitter.com/ininteraction/status/1071041955310780416

*Writing Good Emails for Fun and Profit*

At @staatslabor we run a weekly "learning session". Not long ago I did one on email writing.

Why? Writing good emails is a superpower, and it's not taught often enough.

🧵 So here are 11 practical ways to write good emails: Before we get there, a few quick *preliminary thoughts*:

🛠️ Email is a tool. Like any tool, you can use it well or you can use it poorly.

🚀 None of this is rocket science. It’s easy. Yet few people do it. If you do it, you will almost effortlessly differentiate yourself.

This week I was asked to give a presentation about some lessons we might be able to learn from Switzerland's crisis management in this pandemic. It was a welcome opportunity to take a step back and reflect on that.

- a thread 🧵 Going into this, one could have thought that Switzerland should be able to nail this. And yet - judging by almost any metric - we didn't/aren't.

I've been cleaning out my notes and wanted to share a short thread with four things I've learned/I've been wrong about/surprised by in the context of the pandemic.

The usual disclaimers apply (Twitter doesn't allow for a lot of nuance, your mileage may vary, etc. etc.). 1️⃣ Narratives are (much) more stable than I would have ever thought possible.

Switzerland is, by any sensible metric, doing badly in this pandemic. And yet this hasn’t filtered through to public discourse. It boggles the mind.

Loved all the generous responses to the question below. Thank you.

Here's the current structure of the argument on "new forms of organization in public administration (as a response to a changing environment)" (subject to - *a whole lot of* - change)

[Thread]

⬇️

https://twitter.com/dannybuerkli/status/1297481832112566275

(Note that this is for an audience which is inside government but is primarily composed of pragmatic practitioners, so this isn't the Association of People Who Are Deeply Into Public Administration Theory or what have you)

🧵There have been a few good pieces written about ‘learning in/from a crisis”, some of them from a government reform/innovation angle, some from a more general learning perspective.

Below are a few that I’ve found useful. I might continue to add new ones as I find/read them. “Is anyone deploying ‘Innovation and Learning’ people alongside COVID-19 Response Teams?” by @whatsthepont

whatsthepont.blog/2020/03/18/is-…

🧶 There are lots of myths and misconceptions around self-management/self-organisation.

This is because we often know what we are stepping *away* from (positional hierarchy, 'power-over') but we're less clear on what we're stepping *into*. Addressing these myths is important. We can all figure this out eventually but why not speed up the learning if we can, particularly for people who are new to the organisation?

So, here are my 11 favorite myths about self-organisation:

🧵Mental models/frameworks help us understand the world. All models are wrong but some are - as they say - useful.

I've been thinking about which mental models I'd hope would show up in a 21c public policy/admin course. Here's an initial (no doubt incomplete) selection: 1) 3 Horizons: What's being born & how can we help it to arrive well? What's being disruptive & how can it be harnessed? What's dying & how can we help it let go and leave well?

This video by @KateRaworth provides a great primer:

[Created by Bill Sharpe]

[Thread - it's *framework* time! 🧐] As we're thinking about the future of government at @CPI_foundation and as we're exploring the shift from *enablement* to *empowerment* (see image) we've come across a couple of great "from-to" models. Here are some of them: 1/ @NewCitProj's table showing the shift from subject -> consumer -> citizen (citizenshift.info) cc: @jonjalex

1/ [Thread with loads of book recommendations] We've done some work at @CPI_foundation that I'm really proud of. Many would agree that managerial methods have run their course (optimization and efficiency, customers, best practices, hierarchies, ...). 2/ What is less clear is what we could and should reach for instead. We've had a go at articulating an answer to that question: centreforpublicimpact.org/the-enabling-s…