What this space is for

Tidy Content is our shared practice. Most of our time is spent working in public service roles, so we don’t take on long delivery projects.

Instead, this space holds the parts of our work that need room to breathe — writing, talks, early creative projects and the questions we’re exploring.

We’re open to small, focused collaborations when the fit is right.

Writing and projects

We write about content, services, trust, systems and the messy work of making things better. We’re also beginning new creative work — including a book we’ll shape in public through our monthly letters.

On trust and the systems that scale it

Newsletter · 2 min read

Some thoughts on how trust underpins the way we navigate work, institutions and each other when the world is too complex to manage alone.

On the quarrel of the old and the new

Newsletter · 2 min read

Exploring how teams can honour what came before while making space for new ways of working, thinking and designing services.

Words, services and culture

Essay · 4 min read

Why language is never just surface-level content, and how it shapes the cultures and systems people have to move through.

Collaboration

We occasionally work with teams on small, focused pieces of work — conversations, reviews or short sessions that help people see things more clearly.

If you’d like to explore something together, get in touch. We’re based in Wales and usually work remotely.

On incremental improvement and revolutionary change

Tidy Content
Dec 22, 2024
1 min read

Updated: Feb 19

We tend to think of progress as a straight line: a smooth, steady climb from past to future, from old to new.

But progress is not without resistance. History doesn’t always flow, it often wrestles. Messy and sometimes unpredictable, evolution moves forward against opposition.

As with scientific advancement, progress isn’t always gradual and incremental, as philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn noticed. Within a ‘paradigm’ - a shared way of seeing, thinking, and understanding - knowledge accumulates steadily, building on what we already know and incrementally improving our understanding of the world.

Until it doesn’t.

Every system eventually reaches its boundaries. Contradictions emerge. Paradoxes surface.

Conflicting narratives clash as we encounter the limits of what can be thought, understood, and communicated.

The framework that enables us - that helps us experience and make sense of the world - now struggles to cope. If the limits of my language are the limits of my world, then broadening my horizons demands a new language, a new way of seeing.

Sometimes incremental improvement isn’t enough. Progress grinds to a halt, and the only way forward is radical reimagination.

At these breaking points, the old way collapses under its own weight, making space for something else. Reinvention becomes unavoidable, and a revolution takes place.

Giving birth to a fundamentally different way to think, see, and speak about the world. One that integrates the old narratives, expands on them, and transforms our understanding of everything.

Progress is both a birth and a duel: a dance between the old and the new, and a conversation between gradual steps and seismic leaps.

Steady and incremental until only revolution can clear the path forward.

A design practice where we explore content, services and the systems behind them.