Our closing Friday session riffed on William Gibson’s line that “the future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.” We went in search of the people and places that were already showing us signs of what our future possible systems might look and feel like, to show us that yes, the future’s already here. We just need to notice it.

Finances and capital wield immense power over the systems we live and work in, as Charlie outlined in our first session yesterday, it’s clear that at some point we generally became beholden to money. It calls the shots, it dictates the terms, and above all; returns on everything. But gathered today were people who saw a broken financial system, and who also saw possibilities too, people who wanted to move away from what Charlie called “capital in command to [...] capital as servant”.

Target’s can be useful, guiding our actions, determining our incentives and forcing clarity around what our goals actually are. Trouble is they’re easy to game, rife with power dynamics, and prone to all manner of distorted outcomes. No wonder then so many of us in this work can feel like we hit our targets but completely miss the point.

Charlie laid out a premise; the common logic of social innovation is to scale, to dream of reaching unicorn size; the assumption being that bigger is better. But is a single solution or organisation likely to impact the shape of people’s lives, even at scale? Do the systems at play shift in ways that address the underlying issues, or open up new possibilities?

The main questions we held right across our Monday sessions were: why should we bother trying to shift a system? And how can we deliberately innovate the systems we have to create new ones fit for the challenges of our time? This is what we heard from people working in the health and education systems.