And the different ways we tell and consume stories today — Human beings have a need for narrative. Stories are how we make sense of the past, rationalise the present and create the future. They are also the fabric that knits communities together through foundational tales, metaphors and shared meaning. Both how we tell stories and how we consume them has…

The next big innovation won’t be in ideas — it will be in how to make people listen to them — The organisation I work for, Nesta, is a charity focused on supporting social innovation. We’ve done this for the last ten years, raising the profile of great ideas and building capacity in the innovation sector. I increasingly think that innovation in the way we think about it today — new…

Digital transformation is about mindsets, not skills — FutureGov has been designing better public services for the last ten years. We’ve learnt a lot, and one part continues to ring true — you can’t transform a service without transforming the organisation it sits within. Transforming an organisation is fundamentally about working with people to help them do new…

Teams are living breathing beasts. They have their own traits and characteristics. A while ago I wanted to better understand how a team I worked in worked so I invited them over for dinner, with a twist. Of all the team building, Myers-Briggs analysing, preference sharing exercises I’ve ever done…

No one ‘delivers policy’. — I sometimes think of myself as a reformed policy wonk. Since my early career in a think tank I’ve become more and more disenchanted with the idea of policy: policy making, policy setting, influencing policy, delivering policy. For me, all of this starts in the wrong place — think tanks…

Avoiding making a professional class of problem solvers — If you work in a design, research or policy capacity you’re what I call a professional innovator. You’ll have learnt a series of processes and techniques and a way of thinking to help you work through tricky problems and come up with new ways of approaching things. It’s easy to…

Here are two ways government should be take advantage of the new system — Let there be no confusion here: digital welfare is a good thing. It’s a vast improvement on a paper or proxy service. Countless people struggled with the old system and when I was with Citizens Advice we would spend hours translating lengthy, jargon-filled forms into something that could be understood…

The principles we work by — Growing a design studio at Good Things Foundation has given the team an opportunity for us to think deeply about how we work and how we practice design for the specific problems we are trying to solve. This meant looking at three things: How design thinking builds on and complements…

We’re using emotion mapping to understand what really makes a difference in social interventions — I’ve lived without a shower or hot water for the past week after moving house. It’s not been that bad — swimming one morning and washing at a friend’s the next. But it added an extra layer of planning to each day and disrupted my fairly simple morning routine, where…