The collaboration challenge: how places can keep moving through chaos

Chaos images - front cover of Spectator and Economist magazine.

A fast start to the year makes it important to find time to make sense of events and what they mean for us.

Headlines scream chaos at us. Donald Trump’s statements this week alone – on Greenland, threats of increased tariffs, slurs against NATO troops and peace boards with Putin – are enough to make the head spin. And maybe that’s the point.

We can’t know what this means for the global economy, security and the values that many world leaders seemed to share until recently.

Canadian PM Mark Carney’s incredible speech at Davos highlights a ‘rupture’ in these values. His call to other ‘middle countries’ to become beacons in ‘a world that’s at sea’ resonates. Canada’s response to Trump’s aggression – on taxes, investment, defence spending, and closer partnerships with Europe – seem hugely impressive set against the trivia served up here.

Could it be a defining moment? If you have 15 minutes, I’d recommend watching it.

The rupture Carney speaks of has been a long time in coming. Now it’s here, addressing it feels like the biggest collaboration challenge of my lifetime.

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Britain isn’t broken, but Jenrick shows that politics is bust

Broken Britain flag

If you want to know what’s wrong with British politics and the media’s relationship with it, Robert Jenrick’s bumpy landing at Reform UK offers a solid starting point.

“It’s time for the truth. Britain is in decline,” he said on Thursday, after arriving late to announce his defection to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK from a Conservative Party he once aspired to lead.

Opportunistic, noisy, and clumsily handled, his announcement and the media reaction to it neatly sums up the Westminster bubble’s failure to look beyond personalities that increasing numbers of people can’t stand.

It farcically followed Jenrick’s sacking from the shadow cabinet after Conservative aides found a draft speech announcing his defection lying around before he had a chance to use it.

This was the ‘irrefutable evidence’ of Jenrick’s disloyalty Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch cited when confirming Jenrick’s sacking on social media.

Jenrick went silent for hours. Badenoch scuppered Farage’s plan to publicly welcome him to an ‘insurgent’ party which increasingly resembles a failed old guard that Reform’s leader eagerly sets himself against. 

And the media lapped it up.

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What next for blogging and X? Changing two old habits for 2026

What next?

I’ve been thinking about what to do with two long-standing communication habits I let drift for different reasons in 2025.

The first one is blogging, specifically this blog after a year in which I’ve published very little on here.

I was a civil servant when I set this blog up in 2010. I used to write very often about what I was doing and thinking. It gradually grew a following without getting into trouble with my employer.

Four jobs later, I lead a small very busy PR agency with around 20 clients on its books. We did a hell of a lot last year. At times it felt like I barely had time to draw breath, let alone write here. This infographic from the team sets out some of our achievements in 2025.  

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Starmer’s red-tape crackdown won’t fix the trust problem

Starmer gives a speech in Hull in March, surrounded by people in a crowd

Overly cautious, hidebound by process, blocking the path to progress.

So said Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer as he voiced frustration over public bodies’ collective process problem which he says obstructs the government’s growth ambitions.

His address in Hull last Thursday highlighted familiar complaints about a lumbering state, which play out more vividly in American politics.

Bits of government – notably the quangos* – don’t work together well, or quickly enough, it’s claimed. There’s too much duplication, with comms teams coming in for special mention. Organisations announce endless, repeated consultations which masquerade as action. And politics finds itself in a ‘defensive crouch’, ducking big decisions.

All this while housing and energy costs rocket, patients wait for hospital treatment and living standards slide.

Those sentiments underpinned his headline-grabbing pledge to slash bureaucracy by abolishing the body set up to run the NHS in England.

I think you get more from listening to a speech as it’s given than you do from reading the pre-briefed, slanted headlines. You can catch it here.

The points about regulation chime at least in part with complaints by Liz Truss – remember her? – about red tape strangling growth. Tanking the economy with a recklessly disastrous mini budget didn’t help either, in fairness. But here we are today, with process in the firing line.

As someone who worked for a quango in a comms team and has run a few consultations, I feel drawn to offer thoughts on the speech and where it leaves us. There’s loads more to say on collaboration, culture and why good regulation matters.

If you want another take on how we got here, The Economist’s leader from January sets it out well.

For now, here are three things that struck me about a speech that, let’s not forget, came from a Labour Prime Minister less than a year into the job. That he’s speaking in such tones at all is noteworthy.

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Your call is not important to us: how ‘efficiency’ kills good service

Unsatisfied customer holding frown icon on wooden circle. Conceptual representation of customer satisfaction evaluation, depicting bad service, negative review, and low score.

“We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying.”

Cory Doctorow on the decline of tech services in the FT earlier this year

I return to comments like this while processing a constant frustration nagging at me since setting up Distinctive in 2022.

Not the biggest challenge, for sure. Working through disruption caused by the mini budget was more severe. Moving office at short notice just before last Christmas more stressful.

But it’s ever-present, and hiding in plain sight. A barrier to progress, sapping energy, and draining my sense of humour. All made worse by the feeling that it shouldn’t happen at all. But it does anyway.

A post from O2, extolling the virtues of it customer service.

I’m referring to days of precious time wasted trying and failing to contact big organisations – banks, public bodies, utility companies and tech providers.

All say they are there to help. Some sell their services on a promise of simplifying customers’ lives, while making any contact with them complicated, arduous and slow.

They lie. These empty pledges mask a painful reality of badly designed tech that blocks meaningful human contact. This is laid bare in the recent UK Customer Satisfaction Index by the Institute of Customer Service, which found satisfaction levels at their lowest level since 2010.

It’s what writer Cory Doctorow’s ‘great enshittening’ describes; a process of decline in services we rely on, as companies chase efficiency and leave customers wrestling with clunkiness at their own cost.

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DP World storm highlights big questions about our economy

Investment summit backdrop with PM at conference on October 14 2024

In the end, it was little more than a storm in a tea cup.

Weekend headlines led with suggestions that £1bn in investment from Dubai-based DP World was at risk because of a minister’s comments about its operating company P&O.

The comments from Transport Secretary Louise Haigh likened P&O to a ‘rogue operator’. She added for good measure that consumers should boycott the company for laying off hundreds of employees and replacing them with agency workers in 2022.

For all the furore, the government’s set piece investment summit went off today with DP World’s investment in the London Gateway container port intact.

The funding is one of a raft of commitments outlined in a £63bn package today, which promises to create 38,000 jobs across the country.

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