It feels like the world needs big ideas. Systemic crises call for bold moves guided by grand plans. I love hearing a good tune sung in that register. This week I’ve repeatedly encountered the opposite: starting small, but starting.
It’s not necessarily that I’m cynical about the grand plan, bold move approach (that’s a conversation unto itself); it’s that I’ve been struck by the power of the emergent plan, tiny move approach.
One of those moments was in a conversation with a potential partner for a healthcare project. There is immense need in this sector, and in this community specifically. It’s tempting to either/both infinitely study every detail of the context, and/or imagine an elaborate system for state of the art clinical service provision. That doesn’t make sense, for two reasons.
First, when there’s 0, you need to start talking about 1 before you start talking about 10. Anything more seems unrealistic or overly instrumented; it makes people wary. By getting to 1, you build trust, and you need trust to move from 1 to 2, and eventually to 10, with integrity.
Second, if you jump to 10 on your own, you miss all of the opportunities for collaborative ideas that might emerge along the way. Working in genuine partnership, listening, and remaining open might reveal new paths to 10—or a non-integer number emerging between 3 and 4—and those are often the greatest source of civic value.
Later in the week, I was meeting with a group of government innovators whose excellent software development work may become the foundation of an international collaboration to create digital public infrastructure. Here again, I had my eyes on the end game, unspooling threads like shared resources and distributed contribution into massive implications for civic value.
Another voice in the meeting, a wiser one, continually refocused on the next immediate step: getting people into a room, and simply having a conversation. That suggestion completely changed the valence of the conversation. We shifted from skeptical nodding and vaguely agreeing about abstract ideas, to genuine excitement for moving forward, meeting peers, and exploring ideas together.
Then I got a text message from a friend, collaborator and brilliant strategic designer that said, “I’m feeling extremely tactical these days.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised by these moments. Emergent discovery is what we do at Field States, after all; the experiment is our bread and butter. When you’re attuned to moments, and those moments align to point in a single direction, it’s worth looking that way.
Over a year ago, I used Substack as a means to publish a series of increasingly elaborate posts: theoretical constructs and personal observations and speculative stories. I’m proud of that writing, but also recognize that the newsletter became a bit… much. Writing soured into an anxious chore, so I stopped (Suddenly! The final post was titled “Preventing Future Public Loss (Part 1)”). Now I’m (re)starting small, with some observations from a fairly normal week of work. More to come.