I’ve spent the last 20 years travelling the world telling people how to fix problems faster. But the reality I encountered taught me something else entirely. The quickest way to really change the world is to slow down and listen. A day at a notorious London prison truly opened my eyes. — “He who rushes ahead, doesn’t go far.” (Lao Tzu from the Tao Te Ching, 6th century BC) London, 2014. I am strolling up the Caledonian Road, or ‘The Cally’ as locals lovingly call it. As I leave London’s futuristic Kings Cross Station behind, small boarding houses, betting shops, letting agents…

Every procurement is an opportunity! We founded Citymart in 2010 to raise the world’s expectations on city procurement. Our mission was to help city leaders treat very procurement as an opportunity: to innovate, to save money, win contracts and improve life for city workers and residents. We helped cities and businesses unlock these opportunities through high-quality methodologies, information and advice, wherever they were in the procurement process.

Citymart BidSpark was an innovative market engagement technology and methodology to deliver transformative results. In essence, it matched procurement against a global database of hundreds of thousands of vendors using natural language processing, to trigger curated notification workflows to help potential vendors easily opt in and out of opportunities. Here are some results, in numbers. — Nashville

The Problem Urban environments continue to be transformed by economic growth and technological advancement. The advent of online retail has led to a massive increase in deliveries in cities all over the world. In city centers, this positive development has also had negative consequences. The uptick in delivery activity has led to…

The Problem As urban centers around the world increase in population and density, the waste produced in each city has also increased. Cities regularly encounter challenges related to their ability to scale waste collection, recycling and composting. Increased interest in sustainability has led cities to wonder how waste can be effectively diverted…

The Problem The issues facing disadvantaged communities in a modern city are complex. Poverty, health, education, employment and crime are interrelated, but in many municipalities, responsibility for programs that address these issues is spread across multiple public and private stakeholders. The atomization of public services has led cities like Dallas, Texas to…

Let us start with buying a lamppost. Or, more accurately, with the light it emits. Each global city operates tens of thousands of streetlights at significant cost, since illuminating our streets, squares, and sidewalks also consumes a lot of energy. How cities procure can deliver dramatically different results. — Over the past fifteen years, LED lighting technology has become a viable alternative for cities, offering the same light at significantly lower cost — and as a result, lower carbon emissions. That is what led cities like Sydney to test the performance of LED lights as early as 2009, resulting…

After 20 years of travelling the world, telling people how to fix problems faster, I invite you to The Slow Lane, my small publishing experiment. Each week, The Slow Lane will give you a bite-sized story about truly transformative change. — Let me take a moment to explain. A lot of things happen really fast around us. Amazon delivers in a day. Many of the apps we use give us instant gratification. New solutions come seemingly out of nowhere, and within a few years they are everywhere. The secret behind this speed is that they avoid anything that…