WRITINGS

In Government, what is a Place, rather than just a space? Primarily, the difference is in the complexity or layering of different kinds of infrastructure - the social, economic, political and community infrastructure that makes it more than just a physical space, be that at the micro-level (a street), or a megacity conurbation. What it isn’t, is a neatly-delineated box of “delivery targets”, with people wandering around as automatons waiting to be experimented upon. It’s an o

With the incoming new Prime Minister in the UK, Andy Burnham, transitioning from a mayor to national-level leader, and against the backdrop of the early success of “pothole politics” in New York from a public engagement perspective, creating a wave of national-level races following this political stance in the US, we’re revisiting what these kinds of sweeping changes require. "Pothole politics": in 1970s Baltimore, facing high taxes and crumbling infrastructure, with low publ

One of the core premises of our work in the Curiosity Incubator, and now in building the Accelerator for Good, based on our work in over 40 countries in over 120 projects in the past 10 years, is how to incorporate not just what “worked”, in finding solutions to our most pressing problems. But rather, incorporating all the incredibly important information, experience, know-how and capabilities creation of what didn’t work, into the design, content, and work of the Accelerato

Curiosity about how we can do things differently is the most necessary and potentially transformative element of new policy thinking - from leadership contests, to how we vote, eat, travel, and live. And it's missing in far too many of our current approaches. Curiosity about how we can find new solutions, and what those could be, is the mandatory precondition to finding said solutions, especially ones that work. Yet most often, unless what is being suggested is exactly like

In our Curiosity Incubator drive to move beyond the generic 'direction of travel' advice permeating so much of the discourse in UK government and policy circles at the moment, to focus on specific examples of how we might collectively work on improving it, Oliver Smith , Founder of the Daedalus Futures ethical AI consultancy, and Associate at Future Governance Forum, and Bridget, Curiosity Incubator Founder , co-imagine together a public innovation approach to 'rewiring the

In our Community of Practice co-creation thus far, one of the key themes has been how to get from point A (the current state of play in Government in the UK) to point B (variously – Mission-ready; rewiring the state, now Move Fast, Fix Things). All of these involve the core engine of learning and transformation in the civil service and public sector. Or: Learning to Transform, which was the lens for the work that in part inspired the idea of a Community of Practice, sharing w