What is a Curiosity Incubator, and why do we need one?

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 what is already being done in government, or is a LinkedIn influencer-style "this one simple trick will change everything" (spoiler: those are all fake), it's rejected out of hand. So no genuinely new approach can be thought of, much less built, and tried. And we return to business-as-usual, even as we all lament the fact that we know it doesn’t work.

But we can change this. This article by John Kampfner ("For three years I scoured the world for answers to Europe’s big problems – here’s what I found", Guardian, May 14th, 2026) is spot on in how other places and countries are approaching solving often much more complex and challenging problems than we face in Europe.

These other places tackle key challenges, not with default approaches we all know don't work, or waiting passively for massive new funding or explicit, point by point permission to try anything new. But rather, by pausing, rethinking, and rapidly coming up with new and practical solutions, across all of society. Often these new solutions when this process is tried don't cost more money, require structural change, or even permission, they just require effort, curiosity, and tenacity of purpose.

I was recently asked (I get asked this a lot) to “send something I can read, or like a kind of manual" that would convey the entirety of how to move into these new and more effective approaches to policymaking and solutions creation – as well as sum up 15 years of experience leading this kind of bleeding edge work around the world – in a way that can be read in a coffee break.

The question itself is revealing: here in the UK, we think that by spending half an hour reading a report or an article, we can absorb not just the end result of the solution created (which could be used to inspire new work), but somehow also deduce and then somehow also recreate the entirety of the context-specific work that the people who created those solutions did. (This will for any truly transformational project, by definition, generally not be public, simple, or easy to depict, absorb or copy).

This is the painstaking, ongoing, incredibly hard and unclear work and process of rigorous problem definition into thinking up new and untested solutions to try, trying them to see what works, failing often, and only after a lot of uncertainty, difficulty, and personal failure, winning through into something new that does work, and works well. None of this is contained in polished PDFs or blog posts (mine included). It would be neither ethical to share this kind of detail publicly, nor useful to try to follow someone else’s contextually-specific process, point by point, copying and pasting what they did to hope that by mimesis alone, we are somehow lucky enough to hit on a solution without doing the hard work of first identifying the problem where it actually exists in our domain, and building from there.

You can’t do it just by reading the 2% of the work the blogs talk about.

If you look really close, you can see the scar where the Titanic of government hit the iceberg of this work, which is what happens if we don't succeed in policymaking (but it doesn't have to)

[Sidebar on blogs and reports: I recently came to a realisation that I have been 100% mistaken about what reports and blogs are, in the UK/European (and in some cases, American) policy universe. My understanding, from my own work before I came back to the UK, was that the way this goes is that you do multi-year, complex pieces of transformational work with governments or large international organisations, full of the blood and guts of the visceral, difficult parts of change, helping fight against and build around the steep barriers to new thinking and better solutions, grappling with power structures and sometimes corruption of all kinds. And you sometimes lose more than you win, in the overall objectives across the board – but you make real progress in the trenches towards positive change, over years, down in the minutiae and the grime of this kind of work.

And then once you’ve done the blood and guts part, and you’ve worked with and held up your collaborators through all their challenges, through the political capital they lose by spending it on the necessary change, and the defeats not just the victories, eventually you write a nice, polished blog post or PDFed report about it. This mentions the “highlights” in allusive terms that are code for what the iceberg of hard graft over years really was, and for the risky work of what actually happened underneath all this smooth communications bumf.

But I’ve come to understand over the past year that I couldn’t be more wrong. Most of these reports and blogs that fly around aren’t the 2% comms on the top of the 98% iceberg of work, they’re literally all the “work” that was done – the report itself.

This is why it’s impossible to get the people who write these reports to be specific about the iceberg detail when you ask them what they mean. (They’re not being secretive – they just don’t know, and they don’t know why you’re asking, because they’ve never done a blood and guts piece of work. They think the work itself is the drafting of a report glossing high level concepts, and that’s it).

It’s really important to work this out if you’re not used to it, otherwise you’re in this sea of fog and confusion, thinking you’re talking to an expert, when actually you’re talking to a pattern recognition programme in human form, and we have AI for that if it’s your kind of thing, now. So I don’t blame the policy folks who think I can “just send a report” because that’s what the system says reasonable and serious work looks like, as opposed to knowing that the “work” of any realness or value ain’t in the downloadable PDF, it’s the 98% behind the PDFed comms].

Curiosity as the precondition

But because people ask me (and keep asking me), I will try to do some readable-in-a-coffee-break way-finding. Best way I can think of to do this is to point to what definitely doesn’t work.

Curiosity, into problem definition, into collective solutions building, is the universal process of new solutions creation for complex challenges – ones that can work. This article is excellent in that it illustrates different thinking, and what is needed by politicians to do more effective work like this - but the same is true for everyone in government, and everyone working on complex challenges (eg: all of us). What it doesn't do (and doesn't claim to) is show, or tell, how to do this work in practice.

Fun fact: one of the (tongue-in-cheek) working titles of the Curiosity Incubator was the "Intellectual Humility Incubator". Pretty sure mostly a response to its physical birthplace being Cambridge

That's because you don't just tell people who haven’t tried it to build a building. You need a multidisciplinary team of people including very experienced architects, and very experienced contractors, to create a building that stays up and works in multiple ways, over a long period of time, for many different people; in gravity, weather, climate change, through being used and misused by people, as part of wider infrastructure, subject to decades, or centuries.

Same for solutions building. Otherwise, absent asking people who know how to do this stuff to undertake an extensive teaching process, you’re just building something that might fall down, trying to figure out how to make sure it doesn't mid-build, and if you have parts that collapse, you figure out why, and rebuild incorporating what you now know. You can do that, of course (or you can build another building exactly like all previous ones that fell down, and just cross your fingers this is the one time that doesn’t happen); but that doesn’t seem like a very safe bet. Better to find some architects, contractors, surveyors, planning leads, etc, once it becomes clear that your houses keep falling down and rethink and re-create how you do this work.

The most common response I get when people ask me how we can do better on this is a variety of "I would, but that sounds hard". Well, yes. Good work is hard to do. But it’s better than consistent failure of business as usual, and as this article says (and for "mainstream politicians", read "all of us who work on policy solutions"):

Want to build something that works, lasts, and changes the world for the better? Curiosity Incubator

Accelerator for Good:

Accelerator for Good 2026.pdf

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