Selected blogs - Geoff Mulgan

I’ve written a book on exploratory social science for OUP which will come out in the second half of next year It extends various other writings I’ve done (eg for the New Institute in Hamburg or a recent piece on an ‘ARIA for social sciences’) and the annu…

I’ve written a book trying to put in one place lessons about what works in public innovation, from structuring teams to finance, experiments to evidence, citizen engagement to technology, systems to adoption.

In ancient China, everyone had to bow before the emperor, and ordinary citizens also had to ‘kow-tow’ to officials and magistrates: prostrating the body and touching the forehead to the ground.

‘An enthusiastic philosopher… had constructed a very satisfactory theory on some subject or other and was not a little proud of it.

A few years ago I wrote a blog with Vincent Straub - setting out in some detail how data governance could evolve, with a proliferation of data trusts of different kinds to handle everything from health to financial data, research to consumer data.

How should we understand what is good or bad about growth?

Is it possible for an organisation, a system or a society, to become wiser?

I've written an overview of how skills for running governments are provided around the world - by governments' own colleges, universities and online - and how this provision might be improved.

[this post was first published a day after the election of a new Labour government in the UK in July 2024.

Every government is, in reality, a flotilla of many departments, agencies, tiers rather than a single thing.

We are used to the idea that knowledge progresses, and that fields cumulate understanding over time.

We live in a world full of lies, distortions and misinformation.

Having worked in this space for several decades I'm often asked about the desirability and viability of states becoming creative, entrepreneurial and innovative.

This piece looks at the role of stories in social and political imagination, from analogy and metaphor to the universal patterns found in stories across the world.