Statecraft · in English
On institutions that cannot correct their own errors
A working archive on the Dutch administrative state, read as a sample of late-modern patterns.
Statecraft examines what happens when an evident error can no longer land in the institution that produced it. The papers here describe the architecture that absorbs failure without learning from it, the sociology that selects against the knowledge required to see it, and the design choices that could open the apparatus back up.
The Netherlands serves as the lab case. It is small, densely governed and well documented, and the symptoms of late-modern public administration show up here early and visibly. The diagnosis travels; where it does, the paper appears in English alongside the Dutch original.
Written from Lisbon, under House of Viridian OÜ (Estonia), by an interim manager with twenty years inside Dutch executive agencies and municipalities.
The work follows two lines.
Dissociation is about organisations that know something and act otherwise. The reports say what is going wrong; the practice carries on. Both exist side by side, year after year, and nobody has to choose. Four series follow this pattern: inside the organisation (Series I), in its effects on citizens (Series II), from the position of those who work within it (Series III), and at the scale of the European Union (Series IV).
Grammar is about rules that remain in force after their reason has gone. Everyone applies them; nobody can still explain why. The series Orphaned Design describes what a rule needs in order to stay open to adjustment, and what takes its place when that is missing.
Both lines use the Netherlands as their example; the pattern occurs elsewhere too. The standalone publications apply the same concepts to current cases.
The corpus in one map
The corpus · two lines
§ 01The corpus
Five series, two pillars
The series carry the argument; the standalone publications apply the same vocabulary to specific dossiers. This is the shortest route into every part of the corpus.
Dissociationthe error of simultaneity
Grammarthe error of sequence
Standalone publicationsmost recent
§ 02The book
Interim Management for the Public Sector
Direction in motion · Dutch edition: De Richting van de Beweging
The book to which this thinking practice is a prelude, in an English and a Dutch edition. The argument that runs through the book — that interim leadership is a craft of redirecting movement rather than imposing direction — is also the argument that runs through the papers here, and the papers can be read without the book.
The introductory paper of the series returns inside the book as the bridge between Part I (the movement) and Part II (the method).
Keep me posted on publications →Statecraft
What we can do is work on places where connection is organised, in the knowledge that we do not know whether the sum of those places yields a restored system or a retrained one.
Dissociated Organisations · April 2026