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Hey!

Work in Progress was about sharing the work with rough edges, the unfinished business and the stories of what might be possible. We had over 1000 people sign up to the 9 sessions to hear and learn alongside our speakers. We hope we leave you feeling nourished, soothed or inspired. We certainly are.

You can now catch up on any of the calls you missed, with all the recordings available online. A resource we'll be coming back to, and hope you do the same! Thank you again to all our fantastic speakers for your generosity and candidness.

Lots of you messaged me about the music we used, here’s a playlist on Spotify for you all, it’s collaborative, which means you can add tracks others might like. We're always up for new music so do add stuff in if you fancy it.

Thanks again,

James and Jesper

All the recordings

1. Why institutional innovation? We need governments that are relevant and legitimate, Pia and Sir Geoff had a conversation on what that might actually look like. (Some slight internet wobbles on this one).

2. How to spend it: public spending as a public service. Governments spend trillions each year, that's serious market and even society shaping power. We asked Sascha Haselmayer, Dom Campbell, Jess Lee and Jakob Schjørring: are they spending it well?

3. Innovation transformed by action research. Mumbi, Maggie, Lily, Kyla and Lindsay from the 'Transforming Cities from Within' facilitation team shared their work towards transforming how public sector practitioners confront complexity.

4. An education for the very modern public servant. Martin, Beth, Subho, Sally, Daniel, Rod and Sam get into it on what the curriculum of a modern public servant looks like, and how best an education for a government fit for today takes shape.

5. Creating a learning organisation. Most institutions feel disjointed or siloed, slow, sometimes ponderous; Gina and Bas shared their work on creating a 'learning network’ with UNDP's Accelerator Labs. The image above on the rhythms of a learning network is theirs.

6. Public innovation lab futures. Lindsay, Mathias and Stéphane discussed what the value and potential of labs are in an era that’s past ‘peak labs’. Maybe the future of labs is a touch clearer now.

7. Thriving social R&D ecosystems. What if we invested in social R&D as much as we did in technology? Chris and Jason talked of growing a field as well as why we’ve better R&D processes for developing a new biscuit (no joke!) than social service systems.

8. The future of public policy. For innovations in policy and public design the future is already here, it’s just very unevenly distributed. Mikko, Albert and Thea shared some of the interesting things they’ve seen.

9. Are missions the answer to everything? The short answer?Possibly not said Darja and Christian, but for now, they’re better than pretty much everything else we have going.