Futures Director. It’s definitely the strangest job title I’ve ever had but I loved the challenge I’d been set.
It was 2018 and the social housing sector was facing myriad challenges. My role at the sector's trade body, the National Housing Federation, was to support the industry to explore what its future could look like.
I had a blank sheet of paper and the unusual brief to think creatively.
For someone employed to think about the future I very quickly concluded that predicting what the world was going to look like in the next five years, let alone the next 10, 20 or 30 was a fool’s game.
Brexit and Trump had proven that in the preceding years. None of us could have imagined then that Covid was on the horizon.
My view then, as it is now, is that the best way to predict the future is to create it.
So I decided that was exactly what we were going to do and I designed a nationwide experiment.
We would create five teams in five UK cities, made up of people from across the sector and give them 16 weeks to invent new solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing social housing. They would look at everything from poverty and homelessness, to housing quality and ageing with dignity. And, crucially, participants would need no experience of social innovation, just an entrepreneurial spirit and passion to make a difference.
The approach was unique. No one had ever attempted social innovation at a sector-wide scale before and we didn’t know if it was going to work.
16 weeks later and we were blown away by the impact. In less than four months participants had gone from blank sheets of paper to inventing impactful new ideas that took them all the way to No10 Downing Street. They met the Prime Minister who was so impressed by the quality of their ideas that she organised a dedicated roundtable with leading experts behind that famous black door.
More than 360 people from over 200 housing organisations got involved. In a sector that often struggles to collaborate this was hugely significant and I’ve lost count of the number of times CEOs tell me even now about the impact that had on their organisation’s innovation capability and culture.
Finally, the ideas they created were all outstanding, so much so that a number of them continue to have impact as their own social businesses over five years later.
I still remember Laura from our North East team sharing the story of her grandmother, who refused to have a grab rail on her home because it was ugly and stigmatising. Thousands make the same choice only to have a fall and then require them, facing injuries that could have been prevented, and feeling shame and disappointment. In response she and the team designed beautiful invisible adaptations – a grab rail that was also a hanging basket, or a soap dish, or a toilet roll holder.
From having never done this before five years later their products, Invisible Creations, have won multiple awards and are in homes across the country. They’ve gained support from No10 as well as UK Research and Innovation and their latest product line has been developed in partnership with the Royal College of Art.
And I remember the London team sharing how the way we build homes hasn’t changed in centuries and their insight that a lack collaboration was getting in the way of driving up the quality we need. Their idea, Building Better, has now become a collaboration of 30 housing providers with a collective 260,000 homes working together to deliver thousands of new houses using modern construction methods (MMC). Trina, who was on the programme and continues to lead Building Better today, is now strategic advisory board chair for the Government’s research into MMC.
Trina and Laura, just like everyone on that programme proved that with the right support, people can achieve the most extraordinary things.
They showed that in a world as uncertain as ours, the best way to predict the future, is to create it.
Public Life has been created to bring this uniquely impactful approach to communities in every part of the UK.
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