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🤦 The Machinery of Hope in Crisis: What the UK Inquiry Teaches Us About Building Better Systems
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Please have a look at our corresponding Substack episode.
There is a moment, inevitable in any prolonged crisis, when you realize that the structures holding everything together were not built for this. They were built for normal times—for the manageable friction of everyday governance, the predictable choreography of departmental silos, the comfortable assumption that someone, somewhere, has a plan.
The UK’s COVID-19 Inquiry reveals something more unsettling: sometimes there is no plan. Or rather, there is a plan—several, actually—but they’re tucked away in different filing cabinets, written in different languages, and most crucially, never speak to each other until the moment when silence becomes catastrophic.
This is not a story of malice. It’s a story of structures that failed precisely because they were designed for peace, not for plague. And that distinction matters.
Core decision-making and political governance: COVID-19 Public inquiry UK M2 V2Â
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