Messynote #1

I’ve been trying and failing to get back on the weeknotes wagon for a whole year, so I’m trying something a bit different. Inspired by the excellent conversation at Radically Good Community, I’m starting a regularly irregular series of Messy Notes. 

The messy, incomplete, unresolved thoughts bouncing around my head that might resonate with other people who like to think about design, equity, leadership, ethics, creativity, joy and change. I work in a digital agency and primarily with public sector clients, but these notes are not particularly domain specific. Who even knows where the edges are in 2026?

This time, I’m thinking about: 

When did care become a luxury good? 

We’ve been living in austerity, in artificially created scarcity for so long that fundamental care for each other has started to feel like an added extra, a luxury for the privileged few. I'm seeking out abundance - curiosity, kindness, care and joy don't have a subscription fee (yet, at least).

What shifts, what changes, if we explicitly work from a foundation of care. Care before speed, care before efficiency, care before scale. Those other things have their place, for sure, but not without constraint and not without care.

I’m not just talking about the care industry here, but the broader concept - prioritising the lived experiences of the humans impacted by the things we make, do and say (and the things we don’t). 

Efficiency is the means, not the end

There is a lot of focus on efficiency, especially in the public sector. Through one lens, this is great - less waste, less friction, outcomes realised more quickly. 

But through other lenses, this focus on efficiency as an end goal starts to crumble. Who defines what is waste and what is valuable? What if friction is an important signal that we need to layer in more care, or provide more support? What if the outcomes we reach quickly are the wrong ones, or create more harm than the problem they solved? 

Efficiency is a mindset, not a goal. It’s not always the right mindset for the job.

How do we prioritise care in environments where every metric, every goal, is focused on cold, hard efficiency? 

When I take these two things together, I can see that starting from a foundation of care as a non-negotiable doesn’t prevent efficiency, but it does constrain it. It focuses the efficiency on delivering something better, not just delivering something. 

What if we act like the better future is already here? 

Not everywhere, all the time - but in spaces where we hold the edges and steward the power, can we resist the pull of the current state to show ourselves and each other what can change when power is shared, equity is the baseline, and care is the norm? What possibilities emerge when we aren’t aiming for scale but instead considering our impact on people and planet first? What can we achieve when we name the tensions instead of smoothing them out?

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. 

I’m borrowing this phrase, often attributed to US Navy SEALS, because it applies here. Whether we’re talking about the cost of doing it right versus the cost of doing it twice, or the slowness that comes from doing the work to bring a whole organisation with you as you make a huge change, or just slowing the pace enough that your great initial idea can mature and flourish into something even more brilliant, it’s always worth challenging the vague urgency and short deadlines that are creeping into every aspect of our working lives. People who have worked with me before know I have a little set of questions I dust off regularly, and one of them is ‘what happens if we don’t do this for 6 months?’, often followed by ‘what happens if we don’t do this at all?’. 

More than once this has upended an entire roadmap, finally refocused on what’s really important, and loosely held enough to inspect and adapt as we learn. Challenge urgency and prioritise purpose, because slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

Final thought 

Remember, please, that the future does not exist yet, and it belongs to all of us.