Why this practice exists

I've spent twenty-five years working with Canadian institutions. Public healthcare, public services, transit and postal systems, utilities, performing arts organizations. Different sectors, different mandates, different scales. The common thread is that they all serve multiple objectives, often in tension, with resources that are stretched. The work of prioritizing what to do, what to invest in, and what to defer is harder than it should be, in part because the tools for thinking it through were built for narrower situations than these institutions face.

This practice is where I work through the project that gives it its name. I believe the tools and approaches I am building contribute to strengthening institutions I care about: healthcare, public services, the arts, the systems that hold them together. The Public Goods is the place I explore what strengthening these institutions actually requires. What works, what doesn't, what I'm learning in active engagements, what I'm learning from other people doing related work.

Most of the tools institutional leaders have for measuring what they produce are partial. They count one ledger at a time. They were built for settings where one set of metrics was the right set, and they get applied in settings where the right set is multiple, includes incommensurable goods, and lives outside any one ledger. The result is decisions defensible on the metrics they use, with everything outside those metrics held outside the decision. That is part of what strengthening these institutions requires: better tools for thinking through trade-offs that real institutions actually face.

The work concentrates in three domains: healthcare, including northern and Indigenous health systems where the conventional capacity math produces wrong answers; the arts and performing arts, where brand value and audience economics determine whether institutions survive; and public services, where the gap between mandate and delivery is often an experience and capacity problem before it is a funding problem. Reconciliation runs through all three.