Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Living Council: A Manifesto for Practice: Rethinking the council as a living system

Living Council: A Manifesto for Practice: Rethinking the council as a living system

Gemmel Von Döllinger, Jens

Paperback

General Computers

ISBN13: 9798292927020
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 18 2025
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.72
Height: 0.51 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A new way is possible because the old one is no longer working.

I didn't set out to write a book. Like many of us in public service, I've spent years focused on the urgent: budgets, restructures, service redesigns, transformation plans, and the daily push to do more with less.

I've worked in councils under pressure, with staff on the edge, and systems stretched beyond what they were ever designed to do. I've also seen sparks of brilliance, neighbourhood teams who solved problems together, frontline staff who innovated in silence, leaders who quietly reimagined what councils could be.

And I've asked myself, over and over: Why isn't this the norm? This book is my answer.

The Living Council is a practical vision born out of lived experience, of leading change in some of the UK's most complex environments, of witnessing first-hand what works (and what doesn't), and of believing that local government deserves a better operating model than the one it's inherited.

I've called that new model the Living Council.

  • Because it breathes. It adapts. It learns.
  • It's not locked in hierarchy or weighed down by bureaucracy.
  • It puts prevention before crisis, people before process, and purpose before paperwork.
  • It uses data and AI intelligently, but never forgets the human at the heart of it all.

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