In this session Charles Leadbeater and Jennie Winhall take a deep look at the story of system innovation in three stages. Learn from the past as they explore how systems have changed historically; grapple with the present to understand exactly why we need system change now, and prepare for the future as they lead us through a discussion on what new kinds of systems we need and how we can all make a contribution to their creation.

While system innovation can at times feel daunting and beyond our reach, Charlie and Jennie offer a practical guide to help us embrace the key roles we can play in driving change. An ageing population, rising inequality, the impact of digital technologies and an unstable job market have created widespread uncertainty about the future, which has only been amplified by the Covid pandemic. Now is the time to build innovative, better and different systems.

Charlie and Jennie have worked together for more than 15 years, building social ventures and innovating new public services. Their focus on system innovation is born from the frustration they have felt watching promising solutions fail to scale because they could not budge deeply entrenched systems.

Charlie’s work as a policy advisor within government, to local authorities and think tanks, has led him to conclude that system shifts take place only when people come together from all levels, drawing on the perspectives of a whole host of institutions as well as people with lived experience, from the ground up.

Jennie, co-founder of the renowned public service design agency Participle and now Director of Social Innovation at the ROCKWOOL Foundation, offers her expertise on how systemic challenges can be reframed as opportunities in order to create radically different and more effective approaches.

Jennie and Charlie started the System Innovation Initiative at the ROCKWOOL Foundation because they found themselves having the same conversations with people in many different systems about how to shift them. Many people know wholesale system change is needed, and they want to bring it about, yet they lack the tools and methods to do so. This talk, ‘Why now, why you?’ will set the tone for the entire festival with its focus on the how to of system change, encouraging people to act deliberately and collaboratively to create the new systems we need.