Creating New Institutional Architectures - A Conversation with Sir Geoff Mulgan

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Anyone working in education is dealing with lots of different kinds of organizations, from schools to education ministries to regulators to commercial providers to parents' organizations, and some of them work pretty well. But I think if you were redesigning them in 2025, they would look very, very different to what we've inherited.

Hi everyone. Thanks for joining me for this week's episode. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. Systems change, or in fact any change in formal education systems, is notoriously hard. Research and innovation across the sector has been historically weak, but as the stakes get higher for much-needed change, we have to get better at harnessing the collective intelligence of what we know from young people to practitioners in classrooms every day, as well as parents and leaders across the system. This week's guest has been working at the heart of this issue since the 1990s. Sir Geoff Mulgan is a professor at the University College London and co-founder of the Institutional Architecture Lab. He held previous roles as chief executive of NESTA, the UK's innovation foundation, and had roles in the UK government, including director of the Government Strategy Unit, director of the Performance and Innovation Unit, and head of policy in the Prime Minister's Office. Geoff has been instrumental in the founding of many other organizations, including the Young Foundation, Demos, Uprising, The Social Innovation Exchange, the Australia Centre for Social Innovation, and Action for Happiness. Geoff recently chaired a European Commission on Whole of Government Innovation and is the founding joint editor-in-chief of the journal Collective Intelligence. Geoff is also a prolific author, and his most recent book is When Science Meets Power. You can find all of his other books listed and linked in the show notes.

Thanks, Geoff. Great pleasure to be able to chat to you. We've had quite a few of your, probably, friends and colleagues on the podcast before. So Michael Barber, Joycey Johns, Olli-Pekka Heinonen, a few different people I'm sure you've crossed paths with in multiple spaces. So yeah, great pleasure to be able to talk to you.

Thank you for having me.

Fab. Well, yeah, my first question is, do you ever sleep? Because it's a significant job to keep up with the speed at which you churn out papers and books. And just deeply fascinating stuff about all sorts of topics.

I certainly sleep, and I strongly encourage people not only to sleep but to do nothing. It's very important we digest that content. And personally, I can only do that by switching off, walking in forests. You know, the silence we need in order to cope with the chatter of the world is probably even more pressing now than in the past.

No, very true. But sorry, slightly facetious opening question, but I just, it's amazing how much you do produce in terms of all sorts of different topics, which relate to what the podcast is about, the future of education and more broadly, hopefully the new and more dynamic institutions and relational institutions that we might need, but also just a phenomenal range of other topics that you cover. So yeah, firstly, thank you for all of that. It's incredibly inspiring and I've loved following it for a long, long time. But yeah, I mean, what I'd love to talk about if we can is your most recent work about the kind of with the redesign of institutional architectures that I think you're working on quite a bit now, particularly as it relates to education. But just to set the context for people, this is a perhaps an over, overdiscussed topic, but the current context for these kinds of things, you talk about dynamic context as the new normal. But I think even more than that, I'm struck by how you've identified this kind of fatalism and pessimism that's out there in the bit of the zeitgeist about some kind of global ecological and economic collapse is inevitable. And your work seems to shine a bit of a different kind of a light. So yeah, perhaps you could just say something about the, the context in which you think this work is important.

Well, perhaps just to say where I'm coming from is a sort of slightly confusing career. I've worked in local government and national government and European. I've been involved in commercial startups, charities, community projects. So I try and see things from multiple perspectives. And to to try and link ideas, quite abstract ideas, to the very practical. I'm now in an engineering department, which is all about being very practical. And that's increasingly got me focused in the last 2 or 3 years on the question you raise, whether the institutions we have are fit for purpose. We're speaking as in New York, the UN is hosting its Summit of the Future, and Antonio Guterres, the Secretary-General, has repeatedly said we actually need a revolution in our institutions. They The ones which made sense 30, 50, 100 years ago often just don't. They're not well fitted to the tasks. And in education, that's kind of obvious. Anyone working in education is dealing with lots of different kinds of organizations, from schools to education ministries to regulators to commercial providers to, you know, parents' organizations. And some of them work pretty well. But I think if you were redesigning them in 2024 or 2025, they would look very, very different to what we've inherited.. And I increasingly worry, as the UN does, that if we fail to reinvent, reimagine our institutions, we will fail to deal with all the different crises, ecological, political, social, which so obviously surround us. So that's what's, I guess that's where I'm coming from.

No, amazing. And it, it's fascinating actually, cuz I was watching, we, we ran an event as part of the UN Summit for the Future side events with the Festival of Hope. And I was really struck by, there was quite a lot of critical voices in different ways at the UN, at the summit, or, and around just on social media, just about how often these events just are repeated and people are saying the same thing. Marginalized voices are not included. The same kind of panels and hierarchies are reproduced. And there was a lot of kind of criticism of that. At the same time, as you're saying, António Guterres is talking about— so I guess I'm interested, what role do you see that they can actually play themselves, the UN and these massive rigid organizations. I mean, is the change going to come from there, or is it going to come more from elsewhere?

Or, well, it certainly won't come from the top and from the UN. And if we're hoping for them to fix things, good luck. I mean, always change happens from some interaction of bottom-up, top-down, horizontal. It's almost never one of those on its own. It always involves some mix of actually hierarchy, but also, you know, egalitarian community action and, and individualism. And, you know, one of the starting points a wisdom in thinking about organizations is recognizing all of those usually combine in systems which work. If you make everything completely flat, completely egalitarian, it usually falls over pretty quickly. If you make everything top-down command and control, it also falls over. And so the, the challenge is finding what mixes of these work best for our times. So perhaps I might mention one thing I'm working on at the moment. Partly in Chile, actually, was the starting point. There's a very simple question, but one I hope relevant to everyone listening to this, which is how is the intelligence of a whole school system organized? How does it think? How does it observe? How does it interpret? And we've been looking at two very recent examples, which in a way are test cases, the first being the pandemic, where every school system in the world had to invent completely new ways of working in a very short period of time. And there the question is, well, how did different systems make sense of what they might want to keep after the pandemic? And it turns out very few have good answers to those questions, right? Nearly all just reverted back to what they were doing in 2019. And the second is ChatGPT, this very powerful family of new tools with large language models come along. They could have great potential for education, we don't know. And so again, the question is, how in reality do school systems cope with a new opportunity like that, and how should. And in our research, and I've seen the same in many countries, there are remarkably weak systems for organizing intelligence at that most basic level— observing, interpreting, analyzing, running experiments in parallel, sharing data— so as to get the best out of either a threat like a pandemic or an opportunity like AI and make sense of how to use them. So this is one of the glaring institutional gaps in pretty much every school system in the world, the underorganization of intelligence. Learning to help the whole system work better and make sense of new challenges. It's, it's almost stunning that most teachers basically rely on a few circles of friends, maybe sometimes a bit from the internet, maybe a bit from here and there, but it's, it's very underorganized and it's fairly random if you're a pupil whether you will actually benefit from the intelligence of the system as a whole.

Yeah, absolutely. And I guess, I mean, it's probably not that dissimilar to other kinds of modern institutions, but it's always been a deep irony to me that, you know, a social institution so devoted to learning apparently is so bad at learning itself, right? So I absolutely hear you, but, but also I would say, I think observations of the pandemic is that there was an adaptation amongst a lot of people, but not necessarily in most instances a new way of doing it. It was more like, how do we take this transactional way of working, but shift it to a new medium or a new platform? I'm not sure how much there was a radical rethink of the thing that we're doing, this educational exchange that is going on and how it could be different to meet this moment. It was more of a How do we shift the medium? I don't know whether you would agree with that from what you're seeing, but—

so I was part of quite a big study done about halfway through the pandemic looking around the world at what was happening, what was changing, what was being done. And the messages were complicated. You know, most children, many children really struggled without the socialization of being at school and the face-to-face interaction, but there was quite a big minority who preferred it and really thrived better. So that's a challenge for any school system. How do you handle that? There were things like parents meetings going online, which actually most parents seem to prefer. Yeah, but, um, some kept that, some didn't. But as I said, the meta-message was how random things were, and the default was just to go back to the way things were before.

Yeah.

And not to try and systematically work out what the lessons were, you know, what could become online. Do you do flipped learning? Do you segment your pupils in a different way depending on their cognitive styles, and so on. And say, we literally haven't found any country in the world which can tell a good story of how it made sense of this extraordinary one-off experiment, right, to in a way learn some longer-term lessons about schools.

No, it's fascinating. And I mean, I've heard you talk a lot about, and you write a lot about, that idea of kind of experimental governance, or just, you know, trying things out. But it's such a difficult thing to do, particularly in social policy and educational policy, because it's in a more of a scientific technological frame, you know, you can, you've got these things you want to experiment with, let's say, that are not people and their lives. And, you know, I have been on the receiving end of parents saying to me when I was working in Berlin, you know, we don't want our child to be part of the experiment as we were trying different things in the school. And so it's not to position parents as always the barrier. There's many different reasons in the system why there is a, a nervousness about experimental governance or experimental approaches in social policy and education. I don't know, are you seeing that shift or where, where, yeah, where are you hopeful that that might, some of those attitudes might change as we feel the desperation of, of, I think, the creaking institutions that we have? Yeah.

So as you say, no one likes the idea of them or their kids being a guinea pig in some crazy scientific experiment of boffins in white coats with flip charts. But I think there's a much more modest approach, which is quite healthy. And some teachers do this anyway. Which is you do little experiments, you try a slightly different teaching method with one class than another class, see what happens, or maybe a different approach to kids with special needs. And the crucial missing bit is ideally if you had 50, 100 teachers doing slight variants, they should be sharing the data. So there is some common sort of intelligence about what's being learned. If you're doing anything more fundamental, then you definitely need the consent of those being experimented on, as happens in health. All of health depends on experiment. But it also depends on consent before you turn people into guinea pigs. And the weird thing in education is most experiments are actually done on whole school populations at once. Yeah, certainly in my country, the UK, that's been the norm of education policy. You try something out on millions and millions of kids. You don't actually do it in a more stepped, more scientific way. So overall, I think we would— we all benefit from more staged experiment. Try it quick and small before you try things out big and expensive, but it's not really part of the culture yet. And parents definitely aren't lobbying for this, except perhaps where things really aren't working for their kids. Teachers could be, and I think should be, much more the advocates of a scientific, experimental approach to their craft. And governments often try and do things too quick, or they do things in sort of lurches rather than in a steady, systematic way.

Yeah, it's—

I was—

I really appreciated your paper about exploratory social science because I think there's also the role for the universities in the education, you know, teacher education departments to take on more of an exploratory research role in, as you say, synthesizing some of that data, maybe from across different contexts or different schools.

Yeah, what I mean, I had a— I was in Copenhagen at the end of last week where they had their Faculty of Social Sciences and a new dean, so we'd be doing an event for her accession as a dean talking entirely about exploratory social science.

Great.

And in my view, some social scientists should be doing exactly as you say, working with practitioners, trying things out, running experiments, tapping into the tacit knowledge often of teachers and pupils and parents as well. But also, and this relates to the institutions point, I would love to see the universities do rather longer-term thinking. I call it maquettes.

Taking—

this is an idea from architecture, wherever you're building a building, you first do a little model of it so you can interrogate it, see whether it makes sense or not. And I would love to see equivalents of that for maybe the classroom or the school or the— actually, the community of 20 or 30 years' time, where there may be lots of technologies involved, but to actually try and describe possible desirable futures so we can then discuss them and interrogate them and see what makes sense. And there's a fair bit of that in edtech, but it's usually very tech-driven. And I think we need more maquettes which are as social, as much about the organization, the human interactions, as they are about the hardware.

Yeah, I completely, I couldn't agree more. Cause I feel strongly that the collection of things we're learning from AI and from the pandemic is that actually education is a fundamentally human relational exchange that people, they struggle with when they don't have, and it has all sorts of other unintended consequences when you are in relation with people in spaces that is not about the tech. And just if I can, the other, the other point to reflect on is the vested interests of the tech, cuz I think that's also another challenge when you think about really doing exploratory social science research. A lot of the exploratory approaches have been historically pushed quite strongly by the tech companies with particular visions for the way they want their platform to be used or whatever. I don't want to sound too conspiratorial about it, but I think, I think there is clear evidence, like for example, with the emergence of 21st century skills coming out of groups of tech companies that were advocating for certain approaches in education that I, so I think I just would want to be wary of that when we're talking about national policy or beyond. Yeah.

I mean, they're bound to do that. They've got their interests. They are profit-seeking companies. And in a way, the task for an education system and a government is to create the more neutral space.

Yeah.

And in relation to AI, a few years ago when I was running Nesta, we persuaded the government to give us a fund to commission new AI tools which could help teachers, which might help with marking or assessment. And it didn't quite materialize the way I wanted it. Half did. But the idea in some ways was very simple. Create a space where you could be taking the best ideas from the tech world, the startups as well as the big companies, but test them in real life school settings, see what works and what doesn't, and then distill that into some evidence which the whole system can use. The problem is often ministers who don't have much of a background in technology, they become captivated by it, they see it as magic, magic, something you just spray on as a solution for everything, is nearly always disappointing in reality. But I would love— this is one of the reasons I'm keen to train politicians in engineering and tech and science, so they're better customers in a way. They know how to ask the right questions. And I see even more this year than in the past an incredible naivety about AI. I'm actually quite a fan. I think AI will have all sorts of benefits for parts of our life, but it will also have lots of risks.

Yeah.

And we need the spaces and institutions which can do that assessment intelligently. And in most countries, it's not really clear whose job it is to do that. So therefore you tend to oscillate between overselling evangelism by the tech world, and then I think excess skepticism and hostility on the other hand from people who've seen it all, you know, oversold in the past. And that, that's not really No, absolutely.

But, but then maybe a third constituent in there that I've heard you talk about is the slightly detached from the practical action academics. And so, and, and that's one of the things I've really appreciated about your work is that it's very much rooted in how does this idea work in reality in a particular context? Cause I think the, the flip side is you can also have academics who are interested in the ideas, but sometimes get a bit detached from then perhaps more fatalistic or, or wherever they, they go with that. But they get, they're somewhat detached from the realities on the ground of testing the ideas. So I think that intersection of all those things is an important space. But it's also interesting, the question is who is doing the convening between those stakeholders, right?

Exactly. It is definitely a vice of academia. Most of your incentives are to write things, journal articles, and therefore them making sense on the page or on the screen is what matters most. And reality is actually slightly less important. Personally, I find it much more interesting to test an idea in the real world and get the— there's a word which is much messier, it's often more challenging, more problematic, but to me it's more energizing than just having an abstract message you can do as a talk again and again and not worry too much about what happens when the rubber hits the road. I mean, perhaps I could give you one example of that, which I, I'm working on, and I still don't really know the answers. And so I started working a few years ago on this, which is really the question: how do you help young people, teachers, and so on navigate probably quite profound changes in jobs and skills over the next few years? Lots of jobs will probably disappear, lots of new ones come about. And I've been involved in various attempts to both map the present— what are the current jobs, the pay levels, what could be the 5, 10, 15-year future— I've done this in the UK, in the US, and then in Bangladesh was part of a big program trying to then create a kind of collective intelligence system, which could also guide schools as to what they might be doing with kids or might provide help to students to decide on their skills choices. Now, this is a big, difficult exercise. It involves lots of data, lots of models, lots of, I say, tacit knowledge about different patterns. But almost everywhere in the world, it doesn't have an owner., as a task. There's quite interesting fragments in Singapore, Australia, Canada, as I say, in Bangladesh, we've created a sort of network of countries in the Global South keen to do this better. And in a way it has to be done iteratively, developing tools which an 18-year-old or a 50-year-old can use to make sense of their own options. What skills might best protect them against job loss in the future? But you can't do it abstractly. You have to do it for real and then test and improve in reality. And I'm, I'm a bit astonished in a way, in 2024, I probably started working on this 8, 9 years ago, that we're still so far away from what's needed. And every couple of months I do sessions in secondary schools in Britain with 16, 15, 16-year-olds. They're not getting any guidance really at all about the world they will be wanting to make a living in in a few years' time. And it's quite hard for teachers to do on their own. It's not their skill set. It's not really rewarded by, say, in my country, by the government, which is focused on exam results, not actually on life chances and careers. So yeah, I think this is exactly a problem. And the academics, to be honest, aren't very helpful on this either, right? Because their contributions are a bit too abstract. They're lists of possible 21st century skills, maybe, which don't really fit everyday reality.

So, I mean, that was, maybe is, I'm not sure, out of date, but the role of Nesta, right? I mean, I, that, that part of what you were describing there, I think was what I was talking to Joyzie about, what, 2, 3 years ago now on the podcast. So I, I'm not quite sure what, where Nesta sits as a quasi-governmental publicly funded research body. Is that, I mean, do you think, do you feel there's a role for people in that interstitial space?

Well, you do need intermediaries and say Nesta is an intermediary. It's based on an endowment and I was keen. We did quite a bit of work in education. It had done long before I arrived. Yeah, that's largely stopped now and I'm not quite clear who in the UK is doing this. In Finland, which is always an interesting country on, on education, Sitra, which is its similar big foundation, is moving more and more. I was there last week into societal innovation.— and try to see what role it as an intermediary can play. In a few weeks I'm in Korea, which has again, an extraordinary recent history in schooling, both good and some bad. And again, there I try to look in a much fresher way at the role of design, the role of technology, the role of really co-producing new solutions with the frontline staff, but with backup from intermediary organizations. So I think it's very hard for any system to do this without some help from some kind of intermediary, which isn't, can't be the government ministry.

No.

Well, exactly. But I'd love to ask you about the studio schools because I think, I mean, so there's been multiple things you've been involved in, in this space and Learn Direct, I think was a directly related project to what you were just speaking to about skills and social mobility and development of industry needed capacities, but the studio schools example was I think so interesting to me because it was, there was a really significant buzz, let's say, around it 10 years ago, a bit more than 10 years ago in terms of what was possible and what this was about. And you did, gave the TED Talk about it and it was all, you know, there's a lot of buzz. And I'm, so I'm really curious as I was doing the research for the podcast, it felt like a multiple times in your career you've been there with the idea, but the context at that moment wasn't quite ready for the idea. And I think I heard you reflect on that in relation to LearnDirect and Studio Schools as well. So I don't know how you— yeah, what could you perhaps give a bit of context for what Studio School was and then what happened in terms of how did, how did it work?

Yeah, well, I mean, with everything in life, timing matters, right? And I've definitely got timing wrong on a few things. So I mean, LearnDirect was originally conceived in the mid-'90s as a kind of platform-based online digital, you know, repository of, of, of skills of all kinds. It did come into existence at one point. It was the second biggest educational organization on the planet, I think.

Yeah.

Half a million students or so, but was never really understood by the government. It never had interest in the media.

It still exists.

It was privatized in 2010, but to me it was a great disappointment. And now it's fascinating. Everywhere in the world wants to create platform-based intermediaries of that kind. And probably we, we were were 20 years too soon. Studio Schools, in a way, likewise came out of an observation that a significant minority of teenagers, particularly in the UK and other countries, were not thriving in very academic, exam-driven education, and that a different model, which was much more project-based, much more team-based, much more working on real-life stuff outside the school, would not only be more motivating for them but actually also help them get better exam results. Yeah. And so on. And as you say, there was a lot of momentum. There was— we designed quite detailed curriculums, assessments. Several dozen schools were set up in the UK with backing from, uh, government and the regulator. But then we hit really three massive problems. One was a shift of tone in the government and a schools minister who remained there for more than 10 years, who was totally hostile to both the diagnosis and the prescription of studio schools and gave it them no backing at all. And he believed kids should be taught, yeah, Latin and so on, yeah, traditional classrooms, and everything else was diversion. It happened to coincide with a sharp education recession, sharp cuts in money. And then there were a series of more detailed issues, mainly with further education colleges, which had set up many of the schools but were then themselves facing a pretty much a 50% cut in funding and so had to retrench, and the new institutions, as often happens, were the first victims. So it's been a very painful thing to watch, I'm sure. I'm still basically convinced the idea is sound, not for every pupil, but in any major city, I think you need at least one or two of these studio schools. Some of them were phenomenally dynamic and creative, linked to things like the space industry or construction or fashion. They showed exactly, you know, to my mind where education could be going in the next 20 years. But the hostility of the environment, both political and financial, was terrible and unusual. I mean, I think we were unlucky in that respect, that our timing was quite so badly wrong. But I hope, yeah, maybe in the late 2020s, they can have another wave.

Yeah, well, with the new government, hopefully, in the UK. But absolutely, I completely agree. I mean, I've, I spoke to Viv White from Big Picture Learning Australia schools, and so Big Picture Learning in the US and then in Australia, and they've been incredibly successful with a similar kind of model. Yeah. And the production schools in Denmark and, you know, there's all, there's all sorts of good practice examples of a similar kind of thing. And again, I, this is something I really appreciate about your work. It's not new actually.

No. And, and, and we tried to create a network of the similar-minded schools, as you say, quite a few in the US. We drew on Denmark, Turkey. There were pockets of very similar thinking from Italy and Spain to Taiwan. Uh, they didn't have any formal network. And if I was doing it again, I might have tried to speed up or improve the learning system for all of these schools, which we didn't really do, but we didn't claim anything was original in Studio Schools. It was just an assembly of fairly well-proven elements. Adapted to the English context.

Yeah, but that, but that's such a shame. I, I feel it again and again that it's positioned as this new idea that will never work. So this, it's got this kind of strange communication around it rather than looking at, and this, and you do this all the time in your work, is looking actually at centuries, in fact, of examples of innovation in different ways that we can draw on. And why are we not looking at those practical examples that have worked? To keep drawing. I wonder whether some of that is, and Viv faces this in Australia, I know, a deep-rooted bias against so-called vocational education, because I think there's, I just feel that there's a blind faith in this, in the Latin and the Greek and the academic, whatever that is. Right. I don't know why, but Switzerland seems to have managed to avoid that. And so there's, there's cases where it hasn't happened, but it feels like it's still a very live issue, I think, in education.

Yeah, I mean, I love traditional academic stuff. I write books. I love history, which is one of the reasons why I like seeing the antecedents of our ideas. Yeah, but I think you're right. In some countries, there still is an incredible status bias between abstract cognitive thought and doing stuff in practice with your hands, and that is quite damaging. It's a very weird thing in a country like the UK because the Industrial Revolution was entirely built by engineers. Years tinkering with stuff, but then the elite who benefited from it all went to private school and Oxbridge and see a world only in terms of the academic education which worked for them, and therefore always been biased against the opposite. Now Germany, Switzerland, many other countries don't suffer so much from those biases. I'm now in an engineering department because I like the engineering ethos, which is rigorous, is demanding, but also is always iterating with the real-world realities of bridges or manufacturing plants or whatever else it may be.

Yeah.

And to me, I would love to see our governing elite a little bit more influenced by that kind of engineering ethos than the sort of bookishness of writing white papers or speeches which work beautifully on the page, but may not— so often don't work in the real world.

No, absolutely. But I guess there's also another part for me which is something more systemic. And, you know, in your paper about the exploratory social science, you talk about the fact that the people with the deep knowledge are actually not the ones with the space and the freedom to do that kind of iteration and that creative exploration. And the ones without the deep knowledge are busy trying stuff out, but not learning from failed previous experiments. But I, it also feels like there's something else there as well. And this more speaks to, for, for example, Indy Johar's work and the, the relational governance paper you've wrote. And just something more systemic. I mean, you've, you've, you've used the metaphor of mycelium and rhizomes, there's something else there as well, which is a little bit beyond our grasp, I think, at the moment, which I feel I'm skeptical that the engineering approach will ever get to, if, if that makes any sense.

Yeah. So in, in the work we are doing on institutional design, almost the first thing we do with a team or a government is try and explode their metaphors to think much more of organic metaphors like mycelium or fungi. Or onions, or flotillas, or networks, not blocky pyramids, not mechanistic. And nearly all the interesting organizational designs of now are integrating some much more fluid, organic concepts, though often there still is some, you know, hierarchy and some more engineering-like structure. But I think that's where we have to go. And I draw a lot from biology, which is fascinating on evolution and forms. And one thing biology tells you is they're incredibly diverse. Anyone who thinks their particular model is the answer to the future of the world, whether it's, you know, DAOs on blockchain or something else, should read a biology book. You know, the natural world is about diversity, right? And, you know, a good society will have a lot of different kinds of organizational forms, some maybe super command and control, some very flat, some very fluid, mycelium-like, some perhaps a little bit more like pyramids. And it's their interaction which creates a healthy living system. And of course, ecosystems have predators at the top. They're not all harmony either. I hope in the next few weeks and actually months, we're publishing various things about really metaphors to think with.

Oh good.

How to expand our repertoire of, of imagination. Yeah. And then you need the people who really know the circumstances the school system in a town or whatever, to draw on that and then synthesize it in a way that makes sense for them.

Yeah, absolutely. I love that because it's, it's that mesh. I've also, I've read you talking about meshing as well, that mesh work, and it is very deeply human and relational work, right? And the idea that, because obviously certainly a universal blueprint is not gonna be the answer, but any kind of a blueprint which is decontextualized from the place in which the thing is growing and the people are relating in it is also not gonna be the answer. I feel. So yeah, yeah, it's fascinating, messy work.

We try not to produce any blueprints as a result, but to work collaboratively with teams on the ground, and they do most of the real work, which is adapting to context and then internalizing in the relationships. As you say, most things in reality are based on human relationships. It's like teaching. You can only really know something when you've had to say it to another group is only when you've internalized and embodied an idea and then maybe applied it that you really understand it. Just reading a book or watching a TED Talk isn't much help because it misses that moment of digestion and internalization when you transform it and make it your own.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I mean, it just— I feel so often for the, the educators in the schools and the universities who are trying to do some of that mesh work. They do it every day with young people in classrooms, but actually the accountability structures and the different educational policy structures around them are so rigid and perhaps narrowing in some contexts even rather than opening up possibility, you know, narrowing with new public management, those kinds of things. I think I feel it's a really disheartening place to work sometimes now. I wish deeply that it was different.

Yeah, I quite often do sessions with school leadership teams, the networks of schools, mainly in England, And I guess my hope is, and this applies to other fields, not just to education, that if we can build the commons of shared intelligence, that's knowing what's actually happening, which kids are thriving, what things are being taught, what the evidence is, and so on. If that becomes an orchestrated commons, you don't need so much top-down, you know, bureaucratic accountability and rules and inspections.. And for me, that is the hope for the future, that we invest much more in shared intelligence, and therefore can slowly wind down the often deeply demoralizing top-down, to my mind, 19th century bureaucracy and its 20th century versions like new public management, and sometimes the use of AI, which takes that to an extreme and leaves the individual teacher and pupil just as a kind of passive cog in someone else's wheel.

Yeah. No, and your book, When Science Meets Power, it's, you know, those logics of the different approaches coming in and meeting, I think is fascinating. So yeah, no, thank you. Thank you, Geoff. I mean, it's so interesting. There's so much in your work that I think is relevant and so important now. I really would love to follow and encourage others to follow your work with Institutional Architectures Lab. Fascinating stuff. And yeah, thank you very much.

Thank you. And watch this space, as I say, we'll be doing quite a lot with the UNDP in particular the next few months. Hopefully providing tools and prompts and frameworks which are useful to practitioners.

Amazing.

Thank you, Tim Logan.

Thanks so much.

Pleasure.

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