What could be done about the crisis of imagination that is afflicting much of the world? We can easily imagine ecological disaster or technological futures but struggle to picture how welfare, health or democracy could be better a generation from now. Geoff Mulgan, author of Another World is Possible will share both diagnosis and prescription, looking in particular at the role of universities in helping societies to think ahead.  This event will be moderated by Professor Ngaire Woods. Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford http://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/

Governments around the world are ever more dependent on science and technology when making decisions. Yet while many countries have amazingly high quality science advice pouring into government, this knowledge often disappears into a black hole. Not only are processes not designed to synthesise and mobilise diverse sets of knowledge towards effective decision making, but public officials and politicians aren’t trained with the capacities needed to imagine things differently. What would it take to change that? How could governments embed collective intelligence organisation at their core? And how could we ensure a next generation of agile bureaucrats fluent in both synthesising complex evidence and dynamic speculative imagining? These are some of the questions tackled in this interview with Sir Geoff Mulgan. Currently professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London (UCL), Geoff draws on decades of experience moving between academia, government, business and the practicalities of how governments work to shed light on these questions and more. Follow the Creative Bureaucracy Festival -------------- Official Website: https://creativebureaucracy.org Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CreativeBureaucracyFestival Twitter: https://twitter.com/CreatBureauFest Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/creativebureaucracyfest/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/15837395/ About the Creative Bureaucracy Festival -------------- Every year over 1,000 international participants from government, politics, civil society and other change-making organisations join the Creative Bureaucracy Festival to share and celebrate outstanding examples of innovative public administrations. Under the headline “Creative Bureaucracy Festival Meets Science”, the festival joined the Berlin Science Week in 2022 and hosted daily digital conversations with leading experts on specific topics to take a closer look at the relationship between the public sector and science. Even in government there are excellent, creative solutions to almost all community issues - the Creative Bureaucracy Festival puts these solutions and the minds behind them in the limelight. The festival, according to its president Charles Landry, represents a shift from a "no because" culture to a "yes if" culture that embraces experimentation and new ideas. In doing so, the festival also aims to refresh the reputation of public administrations and attract imaginative new talent.

On this podcast, and in the world of science advice studies generally, we spend a lot of time discussing the science-policy interface and what should exist on the 'science' side of it in order to most effectively support policymaking. But Professor Sir Geoff Mulgan asks a different question: what happens on the other side of the interface, when policymakers are landed with a vast array of knowledge, theory and opinion, and have to somehow construct from that — and their own political and economic realities — an intelligible way forward.

In society and as individuals we have lost our imaginative skills. We no longer imagine a utopian society, only dystopic social futures. Is there an imagination crisis? If so, why? And how can we overcome it and find new paths to social imagination? How can we quicken social and public imagination in our organisations and in society? And what can we do as individuals and as a collective? Watch Sir Geoff Mulgan, Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London, talk about social imagination.

Time to find a new way to measure happiness. In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TED has created a program called TEDx. TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. Our event is called TEDxObserver, where x = independently organized TED event. At our TEDxObserver event, TEDTalks video and live speakers will combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events, including ours, are self-organized. http://www.ted.com/tedx

The floodgates are set to open when it comes to AI and machine thinking tools, but human wisdom will need to channel the flow, says Geoff Mulgan, Chief Executive of NESTA. العقل الكبير للذكاء الجماعي: جيف مولغن يتحدّث عن الذكاء الاصطناعي سيكون هناك فيض هائل من الذكاء الاصطناعي ووسائل التفكير الآلي، ولكن على الحكمة الإنسانية "أن تضبط هذا التيار الجارف، بحسب ما أعرب عنه جيث مولغن، الرئيس التنفيذي في "نيستا.

Recorded at the 2016 Annual ESPAS (http://espas.eu) Conference "Global Trends to 2030: Society and Governance" on 16 November 2016 in Brussels. Geoff Mulgan, Chief Executive, NESTA

Geoff Mulgan (CEO, National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) delivered this keynote lecture on 26 June 2019 at 'Tacit Engagement in the Digital Age' (www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/28385). An earlier generation of work on collective intelligence focused primarily on aggregation of individual insights and inputs for citizen science, web projects such as Wikipedia and crowd-sourcing ideas. The key insights of more recent work on CI is that the combination of functional elements of intelligence (models, observation, creativity, memory, judgement etc) increases useful intelligence, especially when these feed into cycles of action and learning. This highlights the need in everyday intelligence for ways of combining formal and informal, codified and tacit, whether in the hospital, classroom or political decision-making. This requires tacit information and knowledge to become less tacit so that they can be shared, interrogated and combined. I will suggest some of the practical and theoretical dimensions of this: - A general thesis about the growth of roles involving mutual supervision of machines and expert humans, formal data and tacit judgement, which will have the effect of making human judgement more formal and self-aware - A thesis about tacit knowledge in innovation, prompted by current work with the UNDP (mapping and supporting positive deviants, grassroots innovations etc) - A thesis about skill and how people can represent experience and competence in ways very different to the formal definitions of CVs and qualifications; or the thin descriptions and feedback of Linkedin; how this may help with the discovery of latent potential (this links to the current Nesta programme of work on Open Jobs) - A thesis about democracy, and how knowledge can be connected to experiences and feelings (with vTaiwan as a live example) There is a long history of tension between standardised metrics and representations on the one hand, and on the other the diversity of lived experience, especially the poor and powerless. Formal knowledge is associated with external power. These examples may suggest new accommodations between formal and tacit, new ways to get below the surface of data, and to reconcile the internal and external.

In the first edition of Nesta Sparks our Chief Executive Geoff Mulgan discusses what the world has learned about innovation over the last couple of hundred years - and why so much of what's said about innovation is wrong. Follow Nesta on Twitter: https://twitter.com/nesta_uk Like Nesta on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nesta.uk Follow Nesta on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nesta_uk