#37 Thea Snow – Collaboration and Reimagining Government

Cool Collaborations

I am speaking today with Thea Snow, Director with the Centre for Public Impact for Australia and New Zealand. Thea’s worked previously as a lawyer, a civil servant, and as part of the Nesta Innovation Foundation in the United Kingdom. In our conversation today, we talk about reimagining government and the role of collaboration in that reimagining, about storytelling, sense-making, and imagining, and about complexity in systems change. I’m sure you’ll enjoy our conversation.

Some links to some of the things we discuss during this episode:

• Thea Snow
• Nesta – The Innovation Foundation
• Centre for Public Impact
• Book: Thinking in Systems, A Primer by Donella H. Meadows
• Webinar: Reimagining Government 2022: An ANZOG and Centre for Public Impact Series
• Australia and New Zealand School of Government
• Australian Centre for Social Innovation
• Cassie Robinson
• Geoff Mulgan
• Octavia E. Butler
• Otto Scharmer
• Hand Up Malee - Collective Impact Initiative
• Michael Quinn Patton on Utilization-Focused Evaluation
• Blog: The (il)logic of legibility - why governments should stop simplifying complex systems by Thea Snow
• Book: Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott
• Funding Program: Stronger Places, Stronger People
• Certainty Artifacts blog by Thea Snow
• Book: Radical Help by Hilary Cottam

Your host for the Cool Collaborations podcast is Scott Millar. Scott is the principle of Collaboration Dynamics, where he often works as a "peacemaker" by gathering people with different experiences and values and helping them navigate beyond their differences to tackle complex problems together.