We are not living through a shift of ideology. We are living after ideology.

We are not living through a shift of ideology. We are living after ideology. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_systemchange-complexity-culture-activity-7353314060563611649-_kWj?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAACuq-oBecVFDW6PCf3lkoG-peMeuLBeoho Join the conversation on LinkedIn.

We are not living through a shift of ideology. We are living after ideology.

There’s no shared ‘ism’ to follow – or to fight
No consensus to push against or return to. In public service, we’re deep in the wreckage — the post-collapse moment where transformation strategies keep getting written, but no one really believes in them.

It’s not that people are bad, or even cynical. It’s that the words we use — outcomes, transformation, communities of practice, evidence-based, impact, #systemchange — no longer connect to a shared understanding of what they require of us. We’ve lost the practices, the communities that made them real.

We’ve inherited fragments. Frameworks without foundations. Rituals of reform that look like action but feel increasingly hollow.

Alasdair MacIntyre described this in After Virtue: a civilisation where moral language persists, but the practices that gave it coherence have broken down. Like a cargo cult trying to summon aircraft with bamboo antennas, we simulate meaning without regeneration.

And postmodernism was right about this: theories are underdetermined by facts. Meaning is always partial. hashtag#Complexity always exceeds control.

So what do we do?

We don’t pretend to return to clarity. We don’t layer on new jargon. We start in the mess. In relationships. In the day-to-day struggle to work well with others. In trying to be honest. In clarifying what we’re really here to do. In learning, not just performing learning. The problem is never ‘#culture‘, never ‘#leadership‘, it’s shared meaning.

Small islands of sense-making. Local coherence. Places where #purpose is reclaimed not through a new ideology, but through habits of collaboration, inquiry, and trust – that engage up and across in the hierarchy strategically so they survive.

That’s where #publicservice lives now. In the fragments. In the slow stitching-back of practice to meaning.

If we’re not going to rebuild ideology – what are we building instead?