What we do
What we do is help organisations make a better world, by using learning and design to change systems.
How we do it is what makes us different.
And, to explain what we mean,
we’d like to introduce you to our model of transformation…
Transformation is on the cards.
These are the things that matter most to our model:
Our model of transformation, in words:
We love the mutuality of working in common cause with others who, like us, hold onto their authenticity to create something they believe in. We’re an incurably curious lot, so we love learning what works and we like applying what we learn to help design something better (and then learn how that works).
All of this is in the service of the impact we want to have in the world: not just helping repair people and the planet when they’re already damaged, but preventing the damage in the first place.
And we want to help reset the causes and consequences of so much of that damage, especially the equity between people; whoever, wherever, and whenever they are. And between homo sapiens and every other species on Earth.
And we’re at our best when we’re working on systemic change that has the greatest impact on the greatest number.
We used our own card game on ourselves! This is the Transformational Index: a fast, forensic, and fun way to work out what matters most to an organisation and the change it wants to see in the world. We’ve used it to help 200 clients. 201 including us.
Our clients tell us these things are what make our work distinctive.
Like many of the organisations we work with, we’re here to make a difference not make a fortune. We’ve hard-wired that into our DNA by choosing to be a community benefit society (for the world, not for ourselves), and charity with an asset lock.
And as well as being a team that believes in something, we want to use our skills in the service of change. Amongst us, our experience and expertise is in facilitation, systems thinking, design, learning, new economics, research and evaluation, organisational psychology, impact measurement, communications, and social investment.
Our clients are often the change-makers, the risk-takers, and the game-changers who want to make the world a better place.
This is one reason why many of our engagements are as a learning and design partner to trusts, foundations, charities and social enterprises. Being a learning and design partner makes the best of our abilities: helping organisations learn what’s working and what isn’t, co-designing something better, learning how that works, re-designing something even better; repeat. For organisations, it solves the equation of how to evolve and adapt to their ever-changing challenges in an unpredictable world. Gone are the reliable days of making a three year plan, evaluating it at the end, and then making another three year plan. The world isn’t like that anymore.
We put the same things in an action wrapper too: running our own ventures in youth inclusion, the design of social tools and games to share, and re-imagining the funding system for charities. We think that if our advice is good enough for the organisations we work with, it’s good enough for us. We want to tackle challenges ourselves as well as help others do the same; to live and breathe reality as well as theory.
“Consultants often do a good job of recycling what you already know, but in a neat and coherent way. Working with the Curiosity Society is so much more valuable than that: they change how we think.”
Seb Elsworth, Chief Executive at Access
Why it matters
We live in a complicated, complex world; yet we are often rewarded for simplifying, specialising and silos; putting the inconvenient and the uncomfortable outside a boundary called “not our responsibility”. There’s something missing here: joining the dots; and understanding the systems beyond our own boundaries.
For example, when the economy sees the environment as an ‘externality’ (aka ‘not our responsibility’), the consequences shouldn’t be a surprise to us. When charity law tells trustees to invest their money for maximum return and not maximum good, it shouldn’t be a surprise that charity money sometimes causes the problems charities are trying to fix. When we tell ourselves that GDP going ever upwards is a good thing, whilst GDP measures problem gambling, cocaine sales and uranium weapons; but not volunteering or looking after our own children…joining the dots matters.
This is what motivates us to work on systems and learning and design.
We imagine a future of joined-up dots. One in which impact on people and planet is integrated into the way organisations make their decisions; from the way they design and do their work, to who they work with and who they hire. One in which positive conversations between funders and change-makers mean that money is aligned with the mission of organisations and the values that matter to people. And one in which everyone understands how their different contributions influence the systems we collectively seek to change. There is openness to experimentation and learning, a willingness to back something for the long term, and a matching of resources to ambition. Collaborations become commonplace, deeper, and have the collective gravity to make changes stick. Funders back connectivity as much as activity.
We see design and learning as interconnected, where one necessarily leads into the other, combining action and reflection, evidence and intervention, one amplifying the other in pursuit of systems change… joining the dots.