 Welcome to New America. Good morning everybody. I'm Paul Butler. I'm the President and Chief Transformation Officer here at New America. I'm so delighted that you all have come from near and far and very far to be part of this conversation with our team and with a very, very special guest. New America as we describe it now is building a new practice of public problem solving. Focused on the who, the what, the why, the how of really advancing social impact and change. We're delighted to have this conversation today as a part of that larger effort and so glad that you're here to join us and to be a part of this experience. It is not often in such a privilege when we get to work with people that really, really inspire us and inspire our work. And this morning you're going to be a part of one of those very special privileges. To talk a little bit more about that work to talk about that inspiration and to talk a little bit more about how we're going to spend the morning together I'm going to hand off and introduce Tara McGinnis who runs the new practice lab and is hosting our very special guest today. So I invite Tara to come and join us. And it is such a delight to be here with you, some old friends and new friends. I'm incredibly energized by the past few days. Tisha and I and some friends and audience have been joining Hillary Codden and her design workshops in Baltimore. But before we jump into her work I thought many of you touched the work here at New America in different ways that I would just take a moment to tell you about the new practice lab and it may make sense and logic about why we drew a kind of fellow traveler from the UK here to the US. Next slide. See. So at the core we're a small startup team inside New America that is focused on helping the government in partnership with many of you who are in government deliver its promises to families. I just want to pull up and this is these are common problems for many of us but every year there are billions of dollars of existing public funds that do not reach those for whom they're intended. One small example is even in that expansion of the child tax credit 6 million families are still not able to reach it because of the administrative burden. You see this on an annual basis and food assistance. So much of our benefit delivery today is happening through the IRS. Billions of dollars every year and the gateway to much of that assistance is free tax assistance, 95% of those who are eligible to get assistance. So this is largely because our institutions were designed for our institutions and not for the people they serve. I don't need to go through these headlines some of which are would drove the gray hairs on my head in healthcare.gov but this isn't just about delivering what we have when we do new things when we give unemployment insurance to gig workers when we expand to think about creating a new social policy as we did in Obamacare. This isn't just about making what we have reach people. It's about how we design the next generation of policy in collaboration with those for whom we're serving. I just want to do one depressing chart before I hand this over for inspiration to Hillary and there's deep complexity about what's driving public trust in government but if you look at this Pew data over the last decades, I think people think about Richard Nixon's resignation and a set of reforms that came but the single lowest moment in government is the launch of healthcare.gov which coincided with a government shutdown and I think the impact of these failures are not the only thing eroding trust in government but they add up and so when we think about our work here at the lab we think about this larger small D democratic project of ours and it's just our belief that if every experience you have with government is terrible then you are it's going to be hard to turn around public trust. We do this in two core ways we have many partners here in the audience and online that are in the work of digital delivery that's one part of what we do over the past two years we've run 12 sprints for public sector partners different departments of labor we've worked on paid leave, tax credits a number of family policies we do that work in every one of these sprints we've interviewed over 200 families are in contact but our belief is that we cannot deliver our way out and we design policies with the knowledge of how we're in the work on delivery so our thesis is that and you'll hear this this is why we invited Hilary to come here today we cannot fix what ails us with the practice that we have been using we need to work in new ways it isn't just about new ideas and observing Hilary's work on radical help on the welfare state was a real inspiration for me with many of you we think that we need more imagination in what are we designing towards so without further ado I'm going to introduce my friend and colleague if you haven't read radical help there will be probably a new book on this body of work but we brought her here to help us elevate this experience of imagining how we would build institutions differently Hilary thank you Tara so I mean I'm so honored and grateful to be here to be a fellow at the new practice lab I mean I feel blessed really by the kind of generosity like in every way of kind of intellect spirit the team I mean it's really an incredible it's an incredible thing for me so I'm really honored I'm just just over a week into a three week visit that is taking me coast to coast so I've been in New York I've been running workshops in Baltimore like Tara mentioned and I'm going this afternoon to Detroit and I think I have about half an hour I give my carbon footprint to kept here I might take a little more just to make it kind of worth the planetary impact of my visit but I'll try not to I mean really I'm here to kind of test replicating an inquiry I'm doing in the UK into good working lives and the future of work organization and I'll say a bit more about that in a moment but I wanted to kind of quickly go through a kind of arc of three things this morning one is to talk a little bit about practice why I think you know why I'm so happy to be here at the new practice lab I think we have to have different practice then to kind of touch a bit about the ten year experiment I did on the future welfare systems which led to radical health and then to kind of finish off with what I'm doing now work I call revolution 5.0 that the kind of work work sits within I think the most interesting bit will be the discussion so anyway hopefully this can also tee up things so that we can kind of have a proper dialogue but let me start with practice I mean I think that to create change we have to work in new ways we can't really possibly expect the tools that we use in kind of industrial systems in the 20th century to create the systems we need now and I guess you know for 30 years or more this is really kind of what has stuck is stuck on my wall and what kind of guides the work that I do and I think on one level it sounds really obvious but actually you know like the work that the new practice lab is doing kind of in methods is very rarely braided through kind of policy work or intellectual work and it's really important to bring the two together and I started thinking about this three decades ago I worked in Africa, I worked in Latin America I worked in communities where poverty was really really stark and I worked with institutions, I worked for Gurrah Army, I worked for a very famous large that you'll all know not for profit, I ended up at the World Bank and all of these institutions were full of really well meaning people with a lot of resource and I observed as every time somehow that resource did not meet communities and even if it did the consequences were not always positive and were not always as intended and very often if they were good they didn't stick and it made me think you know that I just have to kind of think of a different way to work, I need to kind of go back to the beginning and I need to relearn and actually almost 30 years to the day I left my apartment in Dupont Circle and I moved here to this barrio in the Dominican Republic it's a place where 40,000 people live it's under the main, any of you who know Santo Domingo it's under the main suspension bridges of the city it's currently being bulldozed actually and I was there just without an agenda and I was there just to observe the Jesuits came the international charities came I was just kind of living there and observing and learning and thinking and beginning to kind of experiment with different methods that could bring out emotions that could support people to talk about what really matters you know wherever we ask questions from we always have power if we're in an institution and it's quite hard to get around that how could we begin to get around that so on the right are kind of some of the women of the barrio and you just see like the really early work which was literally with pebbles and ripping up paper and making stuff it was really really simple and then over the years I've been kind of sort of I don't want to say making it more sophisticated because I've still been experimenting but thinking about a design process I definitely knew that I couldn't take these pebbles to work kind of on the streets of London because people would just laugh at me but how could I kind of keep that kind of methodology going and so I think 50% of my work all the time is kind of experimenting the methods I'm using here in the States you know this is another iteration bits work, bits don't work, I take bits out the whole time but I guess the thing is I just want to say that you know that this is really important to me the kind of how I work is as important to me as kind of as the work itself and so through this work I get to know people like Kate, this is the kind of radical help the welfare state work and Kate you know she is somebody who is unwell she's overweight she can't walk to the bus stop she has a life that is really about managing pain and she has nine doctors that she has to meet and managing those doctors is pretty much her kind of full time job and so we spent time, I spent time with Kate and also with the doctors and when we bring the doctors together they tell us well you know actually we can only see a little letterbox of her life but now we see her whole life in front of us we realise that she doesn't need any of these drugs they don't work which of course Kate already knows and so you know we need to think about something else and so this is kind of one of the projects I did which is a health project looking at the fact that the biggest challenge we face in our health systems today is not actually about infectious disease despite the pandemic we've just been through it's the fact that at least one in four people in our societies are living with constant pain with chronic conditions and we need to think completely differently about how we think about health and that you know our health systems do not give us health, health starts in our homes, our communities our workplaces and we need to kind of think again so that's one of the challenges I've been looking at I get to know people like Ella I'm actually not sharing you Ella but Ella lives on a very tough run down we would call it housing estate would you call it a project what would be the kind of translation of the yeah public housing but I mean we have good public housing and not so good public housing this is not so good public housing and like many of the mothers I work with she has two mobile phones so one is to for a very tight knit community that she trusts and the other is for basically managing the welfare state so she has 73 different professionals intervening in the life of her her partner and her children and you know the family suffer from this kind of range of problems you know the children aren't in school there's a history of debt, of domestic violence and you know by the time I met Ella the municipal government said well you know we spend a quarter of a million pounds a year on Ella could you come and help of course actually the story is that not a single penny of that touches Ella's life but that's kind of that's you know something that we came to but I mean one of the reasons that Ella is hiding behind her two mobile phones is that she is really terrified that the state will take her children away you know children are taken away in the UK at an astonishingly escalating rate and if you are poor or you live in a community of color you're 17 times more likely to have your kids removed and everybody who knows somebody who's had this experience and mainly what people do is evade help because they don't want this to happen to them and I also spend time with amazing people who work within our welfare systems teachers, nurses, you know carers these are usually professionals who are utterly committed to the work that they do but they are completely exhausted of trying to do good work inside systems that weren't designed for what we want to do to find our own workarounds, hopefully not being punished for it but just trying to work in conditions that are unsuited today and I think that this is the problem that we face is that we are trying to kind of address deep social challenges with post-war legacy systems which were designed for something completely different and are out of step so radical help is really, I put a question mark because I'm in the US and I don't know whether you'll agree with me but radical help is a kind of argument that in the UK at least that our systems are beyond reform and we need to build very different sorts of institutions and that is I think because we face very different problems today, problems like loneliness chronic conditions I've talked about immigration, migration demography a planet that is on fire and I think what's really important about these problems is not just that they weren't foreseen in the Roosevelt New Deal or the kind of beverage welfare state, it's that I think these problems are completely different in nature and that to grapple with these problems every single person needs to be involved that we, you know this is about millions of actions under a kind of very big vision and I think that it doesn't really matter how great our kind of CEOs or our presidents are or whatever I mean it does matter but that we are not in a world any longer where we can kind of pass a solution from the top to the bottom and yet we have these kind of very, we don't have anywhere else to go so in the UK you know we're very very fond of our national health service for good reasons but we have 70% of the expenditure on people who do not have a condition that we can yord in a medical setting but with nowhere else to go they go to those medical settings and people, well meaning people in these kind of industrial hierarchies try to kind of solve the problems so a lot of my work is about how do we kind of turn these systems on their side and how do we create these horizontal systems that are extremely open and braid together professionals who we really need neighbors, communities in different ways so that we can begin to kind of use expertise, use institutions but use kind of everyday living and knowledge to begin to solve problems in new ways. The other thing that I think is really different is that our societies have changed and one of the things, I'm only talking from a British perspective so afterwards we can have a conversation about how much this kind of applies in the US but you know I think that there are still very unquestioned assumptions it's like we redesign welfare as if the kind of landscape in which we're standing has not changed around us and one of those things is the idea of the kind of white nuclear family where the woman would do the care and that everything is kind of arranged around the idea that this person is there. We have very different family structures those structures vary depending on where we come from and we can no longer, not since about the 1950s have we been able to depend on women to do the care and yet this lack of care, this lack of thinking about care is beginning to kind of tear all other systems apart. And finally the other thing that I think the third and final reason that I think the systems cannot be reformed and have to be rethought is poverty. So you know poverty is growing, I come from a country where there is deepening inequality I'm a trustee of the Joseph Roundtree Foundation which has collected the most respected poverty data for about 200 years and in 2016 we had to invent a new category of destitution because the poverty we have in the UK has been captured by those poverty statistics that began before the welfare state so you know that's obviously kind of a critical problem and I think that it might feel like we've gone a kind of whole way around and that we're just back to where we started but I think that there is something very different about the poverty today and one of those things is that we have this condition we call in work poverty in the UK so you can be in work but you are still not able to kind of support your family and that is one of the reasons that I'm the other reason is this, it's about relationships because we have a poverty of relationships and that we don't know each other anymore and one of the things about particularly about technology and the way it's kind of widening the economic gaps between us it's widening geographical gaps it's kind of enabling some people with dizzying kind of sums to move to different places you know there's this big gap between those who are basically dependent on the algorithms of high finance and those who are doing the work of care and depending on precarious wages or worse and so we know that this these sort of income gaps are kind of reflected in geography that we don't live near each other we don't join the same thing but this matters because increasingly social research is showing that it's who we know that defines our life more than anything else it defines what work we'll get it defines who will take care of us it defines what will happen to us at the end of our lives and and we you know this is an issue that our current welfare systems our current social systems I should say can't even see let alone think how to address so I think when we think about the social systems we need we need to think about the kind of really gritty finance side of course but we also need to think about this relational side and that's kind of what drove these 10 years of experiments so I had I worked kind of iteratively with a set of ideas testing them and this was the kind of set of ideas that informed the welfare work I'm not going to go through them all but the first thing is I think we need a really big vision and that might sound really obvious but what I see in the UK is that we don't have a vision anymore what we have is maybe we have a thing of like why don't we go out and fix this service or why don't we kind of go and you know make this more efficient what we don't have is a question about how are we going to live our lives how are we going to flourish and then to make that not a kind of empty political slogan we need something very very concrete that we can do and in my work it's been about shifting from a kind of scarcity needs based system to thinking about how we provide a set of capabilities and how we ensure that those capabilities are there which I can kind of talk about so what does this look like in practice am I still clicking okay so to go back to the to the health example what we developed with Kate and people like Kate is a service that we called Wellagram so what we did was we set up in clinics in London and in the UK doctors have a term for patients they call them their heart sync patients I don't know if you have this term here in the US so the heart sync patient is the patient that when they walk in the door and you know you've got 10 minutes to see them you know that this is completely like not going to work because this person has got health conditions they've got economic conditions they probably haven't got any decent housing they're involved in a 10 minute doctor's appointment so we literally sat at the side and we said everybody who's a heart sync patient you just send them to us and we'll work with them and we had these people that we called relational workers that's a drawing of Amy one of our relational workers on the side and her role wasn't to talk about health at all but to actually listen and in the beginning of course the listening process takes time because nobody thinks they're going to be heard but once they realize like Kate said oh you're actually listening to me people start to talk about it and Kate said well what I would like to do is I would like to do it again and this was really typical but nobody really chose a health intervention we didn't talk about health problems we talked about lives and people chose things to do so Kate chose a voidary because she felt it would give her a bit of space she's caring for her partner and it's a very familiar story she's got all kinds of other things on her plate and this would give her a moment of space and then that kind of built trust and then you know Kate would come back and then they'd build the next thing and they gradually worked through issues and at first like the clinicians were really suspicious like first of all we weren't asking about what was wrong with people and then we had all these weird interventions like embroidery that did not look like health interventions but what was great about working in the public health system was that we had data so we could track over kind of you know a year, two years like this is kind of like our first 2000 people over two years what is happening and to their amazement they saw kind of like concrete health changes you know issues around kind of heart conditions it's people who had never given up smoking giving up smoking and so on and also kind of re-engagement with work and community because part of this is to start with individuals and then to kind of move on to kind of social groups and so on so it was a success I could say and so what about Ella? Well with Ella we moved on to the estate where she lives and we asked if we could work with 12 families actually first of all I asked the municipal authorities like can you introduce me to a family that have successfully exited your system and have had all these workers around them and their lives have changed and they said no let's go and live with Ella. So we were there six months, we were there you know on the sofa when the social worker comes to call when the police officer comes knocking when the kids go missing after dark when there's a fight, when the loan shark arrives you know when you're looking for a kind of reduced meal at the end of the day whatever it is we were there and slowly building trust and then building this program we called life I'm obviously skirting, skating over the surface all of this but there were only two rules to life the first one was that families would leave the change all the workers around the families to step back and then families chose a team around the family but the role wasn't to signpost them to any service it was for the families to decide what to do and then those people to be in support of the family and the second rule thing was this is that we said we will change the 80-20 split because because we've been kind of shadowing professionals at the same time we saw this kind of astonishing picture where 80% of the resource of the professional is actually spent on the bureaucracy it's actually worse than that 84% is admin 12% is meetings 14% this is actually Ella's 12-year-old son Tom but even the face-to-face stuff is driven by the bureaucracy so it's like you know I'm saying to Vonticia like you know were you in school today have you taken any drugs like I'm not having any kind of actual conversation because I've got to get the information for the forms to kind of take back so we said to workers we'll use a simple piece of technology we will invert this 80-20 split you will spend 80% of your time doing the work and of course everybody wanted to join because you do not become a social worker to fill out forms you become a social worker because you're completely committed to kind of supporting people I mean one thing so we built this program I mean it's kind of iterative I'm showing four stages but it's kind of it's not a kind of you know people move through and they move backwards you're allowed to kind of people do move backwards often at the point they're doing best other things come in and we kind of build around like this I mean one thing I want to say is that you have to be very very brave to support this work in the UK like if you are a public official nothing will happen to you if you keep your head down and you just kind of keep going but if you say publicly that you know this isn't working we're going to really take a risk on the framework and we're going to kind of reinvent especially with families that seem to be very risky you're very very brave and I think that the you know the leaders I've worked alongside with our really exceptional people and this one of the kind of cities where we kind of took this family work was Wigan and Wigan is you were just reading about Wigan Wigan is a once very wealthy place of kind of mining that's fallen on hard times and we started our family work there and we kind of started in one neighborhood we moved to another and then leaders in Wigan began to start their own experiments they kind of took the methods they began to kind of you know start and this is how it works like everything is very cheap this is kind of like a meeting there's a woman in the middle who's facilitating lots of stuff falls over fails very early we learn from it we kind of go back you know that's fine because you haven't kind of invented something and put loads of money behind it and then you kind of move it out of the policy work and we have to kind of start in this I think this is why my work is very much in this technology revolution because it's this kind of digital mindset of tinker start small kind of reiterate not the sort of industrial kind of roll out and scale kind of model I don't think that is kind of the way we should be going and in Wigan they invented this story they had this big story called the deal and it was about and you know this is not just the kind of I mean you can stop at a bus stop in Wigan and ask somebody about the deal and they'll say hard Donna who's their leader you know people can tell you this story it's like really a big baggy story that people in Wigan live inside and it was about a new relationship that would transform the city so the leaders gave assets back to the community land swimming pools and this wasn't some cynical thing about getting rid of things that they could no longer afford to manage I mean it's a place without enough public budget so they gave public budget as well but it was about giving communities assets so then they could build other things off those assets and like the political leader said to me look these things aren't ours anyway why are we kind of managing this and managing this is a public asset let's kind of give it back to the public and everything from recycling to housing to care for children was slowly transformed and I think that over ten a ten year period Wigan became a beacon for 21st century systems that people visited from all over Europe and I mean my work is translated into Danish there's a kind of relational welfare institute that started in Norway and Denmark to kind of further the work and I take learning visits from Scandinavian systems to Wigan to see the work that they have done I mean it's an extraordinary story in a city that really does not have much resource and has a complicated history but just kind of visionary leadership and basically really amazing people on the ground so some of the I just want to kind of finish up on the radical health section but some of the work that I've been doing is inside systems what I call inside the belly of the beast thinking about like how we can support you know people in health systems social workers to kind of do the work they want to do and some work like my work with older people is outside the system it's like thinking about in from the community out what can we do and here again you know we started in the community with older people playing games helping out finding out what people want and they said two things somebody to take care of the little stuff somebody enough to go up the ladder and fix the light bulb before we fall over and we need to be reconnected to people in our neighborhood we want to kind of go out and do things together and so we invented this thing called circle which is like a kind of cross between a concierge service and a social club you pay a very small monthly sum and this is what it gets like on the ground you know there's somebody to go and do what you do whether it's kind of share a lift because you want to watch cricket because you want to play the piano people do all kinds of things and they drive those activities and the impact has been profound in terms of kind of social connection in terms of kind of reducing unplanned hospital visits by 25% reducing other kind of demands on services that were there because of loneliness people kind of using services as a way to connect rather than kind of being able to kind of forge relationships and again this is kind of entirely demand driven we took sales force we kind of hacked it together to put in kind of the first one was in Southwark which is like a part of London with about 800,000 people and we just put on all the time all the places that there were and kind of made it visible and made it kind of accessible to people and then kind of have a very small team that's really important that kind of invite people in and kind of you know sort of work on the social blue side of things so again this is something that is would not have been possible before technology but it is not a technological system no older person needs to kind of use the website or like it's an in real time system that has had the economics turned on its head because like our aging service is all about fixed assets you know you own all these vans to take people places you own all these buildings and we've kind of turned that that system basically on its head so all this work this is just kind of like showing the kind of but all this work basically builds around these kind of four capabilities so I've been you know building on the work of Marcia Sen and Martha Nussbaum I think that idea of a capability is it's a very different ethos it really challenges power in our systems because if we take the idea of a relationship I can't do your relationship I can't give you a relationship I can stand by your side and support you to build that relationship but that is a very very different dynamic and that has been so important in kind of genuinely kind of turning these these systems around and I mean one thing I can't talk about now but it's about measurement and we had kind of whole set of capability measures and it shouldn't have surprised me but the thing that matters is relationships so all the rest is like you know I see it like a game of Jenga you can take things out which we have been doing in the UK because we have so little public resource but if you take out the relationship thing everything falls over and yet this isn't something that we're kind of looking at measuring building into our systems and also I think you know this is what we have in abundance we have each other and I'm thinking the whole time how can I invert things so one of the things that's really core to the work is I'm really interested in building systems that are stronger than more people who get in rather than the kind of current dominant narrative which you have is like you know 80 percent of the work is gatekeeping like do you really deserve this system do you really deserve this benefit no let's kind of turn it on its head and this is just this is one of our circles in Rothschild actually this is their 10 year birthday party it was about five years ago but I like it because you can see that lots of people joined and I think of course that the work that I'm describing is not radical I mean you're probably all sitting here thinking like but I do this work and I know tons of examples of this work and I really think that this kind of different way of thinking and working is all around us but the thing is it's very hard to fund it's like at the margins because it's about instincts it's kind of nascent it looks risky because it's about relationships and I guess the challenge that we've got really is like how and that again is kind of why the work of the new practice lab is so important is how do we kind of move these things that are around us they're like the new system growing in the ruins of the old but you know we've got to kind of really nurture them and help them to grow and you know I mean this is obviously my work is built off kind of William Beverage who wrote the Beverage Report immediately came and visited Roosevelt here you know when he wrote his famous report London was a kind of bombed out place we had a kind of terrible economy and you know he said this is a time for revolutions not for patching and mending and I think that we are right back in that time now and I guess that the Beverage Report is also a story about what happens when you have that vision and you say we're going this way you're not tearing down institutions you're kind of evolving but you're saying you know we're only going to have funding we're only going to kind of flow in this cultural system in this value system and then you know a very big story can happen like the British welfare state but talking of kind of revolutionary times I now just kind of want to say very quickly a little bit about about the work that I'm doing now the VR times are very fast shifting and I started the revolution 5.0 work partly because you know my work is about practice I've done this kind of 10 years of practice I wanted to iterate the ideas but also because I did not expect a book about the British welfare state to be kind of translated you know from Denmark to Korea and to have this traction and I realized that you know I needed to put it in a kind of different framework so I call this work revolution 5.0 and I started with a book about the history of technology and the history of technology revolution without throwing everything on the floor we wrote a kind of manifesto which would not have happened without Tara and Ann Marie we kind of got a week in Bellagio and we kind of workshopped this kind of manifesto which is if you like the kind of next iteration of the practice and is informing it and as I've said I'm kind of very interested in technology I think it's a moment of kind of fracture always but it's also a moment of opportunity of like a moment when things are kind of plastic if you like and if you've got an idea you are kind of able to run with it and to do different things so again the kind of question is okay so what can we imagine what can we build what would be the social revolution that is going to go alongside this technology revolution and I there are sort of three forces that I think you know are I mean the work builds on each other but just to say we know the technology in the middle here which is transforming the way we eat we sleep, we move, we work, we trade I mean everybody knows all of this the other is the climate emergency that is really calling us to re-evaluate every single aspect of how we live and the work that we do but we are not really talking in the UK about climate and work and you know what work needs to stop and how that transition might happen and then the third thing is this kind of because I think that when you look at the sort of social revolutions that have happened historically alongside technology revolutions what you see is that these kind of injustice issues of race and gender and sometimes of place are just moved around like something used to happen here and now we'll move it to the global south but we don't actually kind of tackle what is happening in our systems and I think you know we all know that we've got to the end of the road and I talk about revolution 5.0 because I draw on the brilliant work of a British Venezuelan economist who studies technology revolutions and what is exceptional about her work is that she's not interested in the kind of AI or well she's not not interested but you know it's not work about AI or fungible tokens or whatever it's work about how economic and social systems are transformed every time and she sees this pattern which is that there's technology, intense excitement there's a bubble, there's a crash there's a period of deepening inequality, turmoil usually a rapid growth of populist politics perhaps this is all sounding familiar to everybody and her analysis is that this cycle can only be broken when the state steps back in but that is very complicated every time and again this goes back to Tara's work because the state has to kind of evolve itself to step back in because the state at the beginning is part of the problem because it's got this industrial shape and it can't kind of step back in but you know I think the things to say about this is it's not the idea that technology dictates what happens it's not like oh there's this pattern there's a moment of rupture and what are we going to do in that rupture so this is kind of what has brought me to the work project I'm thinking about like what can work look like in that rupture we know that what happens in technology revolutions is that things that seemed really impossible can actually become common sense quite fast and one example I always give is the idea of the paid weekend you know that when people crowded into industrial cities the idea that the kind of work would be regulated better in Sunday that there would be this kind of wage that covered that would have seemed an impossible dream and yet it happened and now we see it going back so the other kind of story about this is that things go backwards and forwards so I've been leading this collaborative inquiry with workers in the UK it's a story as kind of I don't know whether Paul or Tara said this at the beginning about the imagination because one thing is that we have got to make big change but we cannot collaboratively build big change unless we can dream it and so one of the things that I've been looking at is where is the space for workers to collectively imagine what that could be like we're writing and reading a lot about work but it's usually kind of policy makers it's kind of you know very technologically driven or it's kind of quite nostalgic forgetting that lots of people actually did not do that well in the 20th century so where are the spaces that we can kind of think and so I've been going out I've worked in five post-industrial communities in the UK with four different types of workers they encompass you know carers nurses, grave diggers, nuclear weapon makers digital entrepreneurs, academics mechanics, gig workers, you name it and I run through this kind of series of exercises where I ask people first of all to draw their own lives to think about the ups and downs of their lives at the time in terms of emotions, work and learning I then ask them I give them a set of 64 cards with some blank cards and this wheel which shows relationships, money life purpose and capability and I ask them to talk amongst themselves they have to agree as a four what are the critical, these are some nurses in Barrow actually they're health workers, they're not they're not registered nurses but they're debating amongst themselves so it's very like facilitation what matters is not really where the cards are what matters is how the cards provoke this conversation and debate between the participants and then in the third stage I imagine the good working life I ask the workers to make a collage on the table of what an institution would look like in the 21st century that could actually support that life so I give people magazines Sherry Trevedi here has helped me you can see that your quality of magazines is much better than my quality of magazines in the UK I give them magazines, glue, scissors, pens and I ask my collaborators to kind of make on the table the work and I obviously just to touch on it, I mean it's been so rich I've had 200 encounters in the UK people have got really radical ideas about time how to reimagine linear lives way beyond four day week but kind of rethinking you know, working, learning kind of aggregating time really really interesting sophisticated ideas I think this is a group of refuse collectors am I calling it a refuse, have I got the right language now garbage collectors profoundly I don't need to sort the juggle juggle actually because this is not about jobs this is about what is a good working life and the most important thing is care which is not just about the redesign of care services and the status of carers which is a huge part of this work but it's about how we can manage care in our lives alongside work and how we can reposition work and rethink these we've been told that we have to kind of put production and reproduction separately but obviously lives don't work like that and then a really big thing about second chances is that it's the most impossible in the UK for most people who've gone down one avenue or persuaded one down one avenue to kind of get out of that avenue and retrain but the other really big thing is climate transition you know, many many well paid jobs that are kind of still good jobs are jobs that cannot carry on and in the UK we have got no policy for transition, we've got no thought about how you might get out of some things how you might revalue the kind of real work of this century which of course is care and repair I think of that I mean the organisational structures that come up are largely also share common themes they're kind of mutual structures although people don't talk in those terms because they're not sort of perhaps familiar with kind of mutualism they again kind of centre well being in care at the heart of it I mean they're place based they emphasise good wages, predictable shifts lack of surveillance but this is not the conversation that's like we're humans you're going to give us that now how are we going to organise this place to repair the place that we come from to kind of build our sense of worth, our belonging to kind of connect the resource the good work that is in that place the people who don't usually get that good work and so on these are just kind of different structures so out of this I'm really out of time so I'm not going to be able to talk about it we can come back to it but out of this I'm developing this idea of a design code I think that we can't have a blueprint like the New Deal or the beverage report because we don't live in that era of blueprint like if somebody tells us if you tell me to go right I'm going to go left most of us are like that now so it's not going to work but what we do need is a kind of guiding ethos so out of this work I'm developing some ideas about what could that design code look like and could we test it so if I've been in Baltimore if we took the design code to Baltimore it would look completely different to Barrow where I'm working in the UK but could we develop things that support people that are like this is the work that we'll get funding so this is the four trillion flowing downwards it will only go to things that look like this that have these values, organizations that are working in this way so I was going to talk a bit but I'm already way over time really? but do you not think everybody online is like now really had enough like a couple or two more minutes or something okay so I have these five whole connected human beings in a social economy a lot of my work is about economics which I'm really not because then I really will go off down another half an hour kind of but I think we have to really think about what kind of work belongs in what kind of economy care cannot belong in a market economy we have to kind of think completely differently about how are the principles for kind of generative economic models of care how resource moves around how it's not extracted so there's a kind of lot of thinking about that the horizontal network institutions that make things through practice I think that practice builds ideas that become policy it's like a kind of inversion or at least a kind of circular system so I was just going to say a couple of things about this so this is Anne Marie and I developed this idea of safety and integrity and I think this is really important because some of the kind of assumptions I've already talked about the white nuclear family that inform the work but are always unspoken and one of these things is what is the human because every social system is designed around a kind of unspoken kind of human pattern and actually that human pattern right now is homo economicus it's this idea that we're kind of a rationalizing economic maximizing quite rapacious individual that's why the only thing that matters is your nation's GDP statistics and it's also why we have policies for instance in the UK that you say that work is always a good thing any work is a good thing even though you're going to starve on that work and you're going to kind of end up in the health system because you're so mentally stressed out work is still a good thing modern intellectual ideas whether it's physics the Carlo Revelli work for example or neuroscience or whatever is showing us that we are hardwired for connection and that we want many things we want to play, we want to compete we want to work but we above all want to be connected to each other so Anne Marie and I developed this idea of safety and integrity and part of this is like what would happen if we had we've talked about personas in design work but what would happen is if we kind of all the time remember that this is the human we are and then we thought about all our systems around that idea and then the final thing just to come back to is the kind of new horizontalist I really think it matters that we begin to design stuff that is like everything we do is part of a jigsaw so that we actually you know we design institutions not only and responses and systems it's not only that we design them in this very vertical way we also design them with quite boundary edges and actually what we need to you know we know that the kind of systems that work the fungi the mycelium the stuff that kind of holds up the roots of big trees and ourselves is all deeply interconnected so I think we really have to think as we do this work you know it's like how can we design things with open borders open boundaries how can we make sure that there's that bit of us that sticks out that is automatically going to connect to somebody else like what are we going to do about about that really so I think that you know the idea of the design code is that like it's five questions if you like and the question it's not the small one of reform it's not can we improve this service it's a much bigger one of like how are we actually going to flourish in this century and so the code is this bigger question and that we all need to ask like is this investment is this activity this redesign this innovation is it good for people for all people is it good for the planet is it going to connect us together so we can flourish and is it definitely going to offer the greater support to those who are most vulnerable and I guess that like asking those questions and designing around those questions is what I would think of as revolution 5.0 and now I'm going to stop thank you so much