Innovation for an irrational world

• The problem: Many solutions to the world’s most pressing crises fail to make a meaningful difference.

• Why it matters: Despite having the resources, talent and ingenuity to solve some of the world’s most pressing systemic issues; preventable challenges like the climate crisis, food insecurity, infant mortality, etc, remain unsolved.

• The solution: Recognise that we are inherently irrational and unpredictable beings, and design solutions that take those behaviours into account in order to shift the way people work together.

Many of the world’s most high-stakes and urgent crises are preventable.

There is enough food, wealth and natural resources to go round, and there is no shortage of invention, technology or talent to make it happen. There are many talented people around the world who are, right now, working hard to stop or reverse critical issues like the climate crisis, food insecurity, infant mortality, learning poverty, wealth inequalities, and other systemic issues.

But often these people share a guilty secret: they know, deep down, that their efforts aren’t going to make a meaningful, lasting difference.

Why does that doubt persist? Why do these preventable challenges remain unsolved?

I (along with my cofounder Lea Simpson and everyone we work alongside at Brink) believe it is because there is a single but vital component that is not being taken into account: human behaviour.

People are messy and unpredictable. We all respond differently to incentives based on our environment. And yet, work in areas such as health, education and climate is often designed as if the world and the people in it are neat, linear and rational.

If we want to deliver real world, enduring impact then we must recognise that it’s real (often irrational, always human) people that are doing the work of innovating. And if we want to deliver the outcomes we seek for people and the planet then we must explore and unlock the human behaviours that we need to get us there.

Putting the human dimension front and centre means you can shift the way people work together, move away from dogmatic theory, received wisdom and rigid programmes and towards creative, frequent iteration.

We call this approach Behavioural Innovation.

Behavioural Innovation focuses on creating the psychology, skills and emotional strength required to do hard things well. It helps changemakers shape the kind of environments that incentivise innovation and to develop cultures of psychological safety, so people feel confident to take risks, speak up, change their mind as they gather new insights and learn as they go.

Creating contexts that stimulate progress and change

Behaviour is shaped by context - you only need to look at how you yourself behave when you’re in the office versus in the comfort of your home to see how true this is. So our work focuses on how we can create those kinds of environments that drive innovation. For example, when we set out to understand why low- and middle-income countries lacked access to oxygen provision, we saw a number of organisations and innovators, all solving small, individual parts of this huge issue. Creating the Oxygen CoLab with UNICEF, Grand Challenges Canada, BMGF, UNITAID, and PATH brought together all parts of the system for the first time and put the collaboration (Co) and experimentation (Lab) at the heart of their efforts. Creating an environment that encouraged testing and learning across the system, together meant that today life-saving oxygen concentrators exist where they never have before.

Coaching towards the curiosity and courage needed to bend the curve of progress

Brink works hard to foster environments where psychological safety is present, so the teams we work with are spaces where anyone is able to ask challenging questions of each other. In 2021 council officials in the city of Matola believed they had a problem of tax evasion. Their starting mindset was rigid, assuming the worst of their citizens and aiming to build a solution to ‘crack down’. We worked with them to hit pause on building an ineffective solution and shift towards an innovation mindset, moving them from telling residents what to do, to listening to their ideas and learning from what they were observing. As a result, they stopped working in silos and began sharing solutions; going from cracking down on tax evasion, to building solutions that made it easier for residents to pay tax.

Crowding in ideas and insights to solve the problems of our time

In this era of systemic issues powered by globalisation and volatility, no one solution or expert is going to solve them. That’s why we design open innovation methods to crowd in ideas from experts, and from those closest to the problem. Often these are the same people. Our work with the impact accelerator TRANSFORM to design an approach to the future of work in Kenya, meant understanding the current realities for its 15 million entrepreneurial Kenyans who constitute the ‘informal economy’. To do that, we spoke with and learned from 400 Kenyans via phone interviews, in-person conversations, and focus group discussions. The trends we were able to see across market segments, and the understanding of people’s lived experiences, fed into a vision for the sector shaped by the people who work in it, and which covers business models, needs, challenges and aspirations.

We do not claim that Behavioural Innovation is a magic bullet. Unlearning ingrained instincts is no easy thing. The biggest barrier to changing any system, organisation or culture is that people, we all, need to cling on to the kind of handrails (plans, hierarchies, targets…) that give us that comforting but illusory sense of certainty.

But, if we’re able to recognise that it’s not the ideas that create change that we hate, but the unfamiliarity they represent, then incredible things can start to happen. The real world has real people in it and no one is better placed than civil servants to put people at the centre of their work.

Brink is a team of psychologists, strategists, designers, creative thinkers and technology optimists. We use a framework we call behavioural innovation to shape our work and our worldview. We are lucky to work with governments and public servants around the world, with donors and philanthropic orgs through:

1. Open innovation: designing and running funds to invest ideas, unearth deep insight and create spaces for learning.

2. Innovation carve-outs: creating spaces for innovation to be freely pursued within existing organisations and systems. Typically this is a small grant and technical assistance to investigate, test and prove (or not!) the validity of an idea in order to catalyse change in the bigger system.

3. Innovation Missions: moving systems forward with cross-sector collaboration, bold goals and a participatory approach.

All in service of accelerating impact and delivering the innovation we need for people and planet.