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Welcome

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I'm an academic, writer, sometime bureaucrat, CEO and social entrepreneur, curious about how the world works and how to improve it, and now a Professor at University College London.  I work to create, spot and implement good ideas, mixing practical action with longer-term strategy and imagination, and collaborating with national governments, global organisations, NGOs, foundations and businesses. 

My latest books are 'Another World is Possible' on reviving social and political imagination, which came out in 2022, 'Prophets at a tangent: how art shapes social imagination', published early 2023, and 'When Science Meets Power' published winter 2023/24.


Over the years I've worked in civil society, government, business and academia; overseen investment funds and chaired companies and charities; had jobs ranging from cleaning homes to selling door to door; and hopefully gained a good perspective on how the world works and how it can be changed for the better.   Most of my career has been devoted to developing ideas, methods and practical solutions that can help the world handle its newfound complexity and interconnectedness – mobilising knowledge and collective intelligence; prioritising strategy and long-termism; tackling social and ecological harms, and combatting powerful contrary forces and tendencies that make us meaner, stupider, more violent and more blinkered than we need to be.

This website brings together writings, ideas, videos and other materials. The blogs section is where I float new ideas and share ongoing work. I hope you find the site interesting and useful.

What I'm up to... 

  • At UCL, I've been teaching a strong cohort of MPAs and undergraduates on a new degree linking engineering, science and technology to social change, focused on systems and their transformation.  I'll be teaching a new MPA course on intelligence and algorithmic governance in early 2025.

  • Helping lead the International Public Policy Observatory on COVID with work on many fronts, from net zero and education to care, including current work on topics including net zero and freight (and the last mile of deliveries), home retrofitting, society-wide conversations, and spatial inequality, with a current project on evidence around innovation districts

  • Editing (with Scott Page) the interdisciplinary academic journal on Collective Intelligence (with Sage and ACM) which launched in 2022.  I recently published a paper on collective intelligence and collective stupidity.

  • Doing work following up a European Union programme I chaired on 'Whole of Government Innovation' working with national governments on how to better align the work of many ministries and agencies

  • Following up my new book on science -'When Science Meets Power' - which was published by Polity Press early 2024, and fleshing out the options for next generation science and technology policy​

  • Creating a new 'Institutional Architecture Lab', TIAL (tial.org), focused on the design of new public institutions, which launched in early 2024 and is now working with the UNDP, various national governments and cities as well as developing new theories and methods

  • Supervising 4 fantastic PhDs, Basil Mahfouz, Martin Valdivia, Eleanor Williams and Alex Klein.

  • Finishing a book for Columbia University Press on 'exploratory social science', following up a report for the New Institute and the 2022 Academy of Social Science annual lecture. Linked to this I'm chairing the advisory group for a new  AHRC project on strategic design for the UK

  • Writing reports on topics including transferability, evidence ecosystems, the 'right to truth' ,  institutional design and generative shared intelligence

  • Giving talks (about 100 a year) around the world, as well as podcasts and gatherings of all kinds, and trying to do much more listening than presenting

  • Developing and promoting ideas on global AI governance, the design of new cities, the right to truth, and how to renew democracy​

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