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Patterns – the right level for place-based change? I think the Pattern Book from John Hitchin and Anna Waldie is starting one level too high.
It’s great. Not a collection of ‘good examples’, branded models, generic principles, or instructions on scaling! The 13 patterns are recurring mechanisms, with conditions, dependencies, evidence, failure modes, and very useful diagnoses: depleted, latent, constrained, captured, absent; ‘build capacity’ is wrong if the capacity is blocked or captured.
Their follow-up, ‘Problematising the patterns’, is very cool: takes the problems in its own framework seriously.
The patterns aren’t of a type; some practices, some organisational arrangements, some change processes, some economic dynamics. That’s fine, but actor, mechanism, domain, effect need separating analytically. Power goes deeper still, it’s not just another category. Who defines ‘the place’? Who names assets? Whose relationships count as social capital? Who has decision rights? Who bears risk? Who captures value?
I’m cautious about ‘investable patterns’; make something legible to funders and you’ll be asked which pattern you’re delivering and what it cost per unit of outcome! And if we connect central proof-‘should someone fund this?’-with local learning-‘what is happening here now, to whom, what should we change?’…results are predictable!
My push comes from having approached this from the opposite end for nearly thirty years: work from people’s purpose and demand at the boundary of public services to identify real signal, real work, and the authority, capability, information, resource that need to be organised around it; a slightly different idea of ‘place’, where it isn’t necessarily the container we start with, but may be the locus at which enough relevant demand, authority, risk, resource, learning can be held to act sensibly. So patterns are very useful inside a place operating system, but they aren’t the operating system.
James Plunkett say ‘this doesn’t scale, it spreads’-I’d push rewilding further: you don’t spread a forest. You can spread knowledge and practice. Change national rules and measures. Build networks. Change permissions. Develop capability. Pool risk. Give places time. The living arrangement still has to grow.
Something I’ve been trying to say in relational public services: scale doesn’t mean replication; we can scale the conditions for good local judgement. We’ll see four transfers when it becomes real:
-sensing moves -> people’s lives
-authority -> the work
-resources -> where they’re needed
-learning becomes consequential; able to change the frame
If not, ‘place’ will be institutions coordinating better.
For v2 I want anti-patterns, adverse effects, power and equity through everything, distinctions between kinds of pattern, combinations, sequencing, contraindications, and more on institutional patterns of authority, money, risk, measurement and learning.
The Pattern Book is good enough to deserve this kind of trouble.
References
John Hitchin and Anna Waldie, ‘A Pattern Book of place-based change’.
A Pattern Book of place-based change
2 days ago · 6 likes · John Hitchin and Anna Waldie
Hitchin and Waldie, ‘Problematising the patterns’ – their own critique and agenda for improving v1.
a day ago · 2 likes · John Hitchin and Anna Waldie
John Hitchin, Michael Little and Anna Waldie, ‘A working classification of place-based change’ – the earlier taxonomy and mechanisms work.
A working classification of place-based change
a year ago · 1 like · 1 comment · John Hitchin, Michael Little, and Anna Waldie
James Plunkett, ‘Building a civic statecraft’ – particularly ‘this work doesn’t scale, it spreads’ and the ‘civic rewilding’ idea. https://medium.com/%40jamestplunkett/building-a-civic-statecraft-0fe73aba0d2e
The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI), ‘Our Town: reusable patterns’ – patterns explicitly offered for recombination and remixing rather than programme replication. https://tacsi.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/TACSI_Our-Town-toolkit_Reusable-patterns_2021.pdf (acknowledged by John and Anna)
Some of the thinking I’m bringing to this:
My ‘degrees of relationality’ model – including the place operating system, citizen space, and ‘standardise when you can; personalise when you must’.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_relational-public-services-good-transactional-activity-7434526591252082688-DA_l/
My piece on ideology and place-based working – especially the problem of central legibility/control and the need to make power and ideology visible.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_systems-complexity-leadership-activity-7317844311910330369-obgp/
My ‘crisis to capability’ demand work – purpose → need → presenting demand → provision, and the argument that cost and demand are outcomes of the whole system rather than simply attributes of the population.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_complexity-publicservices-withyou-activity-7320341918352039938-hFre/
Earlier RedQuadrant demand/contact work on customer purpose, value/opportunity/failure demand, variation, contact, flow and learning from the boundary. Some of that material goes back to the mid-2000s; I’m currently pulling the threads together into the newer work on contact-driven transformation and relational public services.
chosen path 