Innovation Missions Powered by Behavioural Sciences

This course is for you if...

• You're looking to find innovative solutions that will work and which can be delivered sustainably
• You recognise that certain voices and needs are going unheard, and you want to bring lived experiences into your process
• You want to escape entrenched bureaucracies so your organisation can evolve and design new services
• You're trying to understand how you can lift your head beyond the day-to-day to look at the holistic, long-term picture
• You are tasked with bringing people together across teams, organisations, sectors and even countries, to make change happen

Throughout this course you will learn how to...

• Frame a challenge from your own work as a mission
• Collectively arrive at the vision of a 'better future' you're working towards
• Hack your brain to 'think backwards' so you can problem-solve more creatively
• Use collective wisdom to get to richer possibilities
• Develop tangible, testable ideas to learn what works and what doesn’t
• Take care of group morale when things don’t go well (which will invariably happen)
• Use behavioural science tactics to create fun, maintain engagement and make progress, fast

Why Brink

Over the last six years Brink has brought together changemakers to answer the kind of questions that require more than a single solution. Questions like...

• How do you create resilience against shocks to our climate and ecosystem?
• How can we improve vaccine uptake in vulnerable communities?
• How can access to medical oxygen in low and middle income countries be accelerated?

Over the years we have developed a tried and tested approach for bringing people together to make productive progress and foster the kind of collaboration that results in real world, long-term impact.

Now, for the first time, we’ve distilled what we've learned into a six-week course, delivered by the Brink team and some of the partners we've worked with along the way.

What you’ll learn

• The power of backcasting: The tools you need for thinking backwards and how to take people on the journey of working backwards from a vision of a radically better future.
• Taking a systems view and designing for mutual wins by exploring lessons from mediation, conflict resolution and biomimicry.
• Enabling crucial conversation by leveraging collective intelligence, experts, those with lived experiences and being jacked into the voices of everyone that matters.
• Making participation generative: How to go from from ‘the wisdom of the crowd’ to testable hypotheses.
• Knowing ‘When to know in order to do’ and ‘When to do in order to know’: How to design experiments, test assumptions and use what you learn in the real world to generate better hypotheses.
• How to foster psychological safety in your collaborators.

Time and place

⏰ Thursdays from 0900 GMT until 1200 GMT
🗓️ Starts: Thursday 7st November 2024
🗓️ Ends: Thursday 12th December 2024
📍 Place: All online, Zoom link will be provided

• Abi is one of Brink's two co-founders and an organisational psychologist. She believes in the power of mindsets, collaboration, lifelong learning and what people and (mindfully designed) technology are capable of, together. For over 20 years she has worked in and around tech startups, government, academia and think tanks exploring how ideas make it out into the world and how best to back and coach the people doing the hard work of innovation. She holds a Masters in Organisational Psychology from UCL, a degree in Economics and is a trained coach and service designer.
• Alex leads the Better Futures CoLab platform at Brink, a growing portfolio of programmes tackling global access to oxygen, equitable access to vaccines, improving the livelihoods of the informal sector in Kenya, and addressing cancer-related fatigue for the most marginalised. What they all have in common is a continuously evolving approach that is systemic, multi-disciplinary, inclusive, and collective. Alex is a strategist with 13 years of experience, consulting for governments and large corporates across multiple industries such as healthcare, energy, manufacturing, big tech, FMCG
• Gita is an experienced leader in innovation, fundraising and marketing with over 15 years' experience in the commercial and non-profit sector in Asia and Europe. As Brink's Innovation lead she has been heavily involved in the CoLab programmes and is passionate about building a world where we create conditions and systems that truly have people’s needs at heart and take action that leads to impact.
• Johannes believes that through a combination of creativity and meeting our human fears, biases and beliefs head on we can deeply change the world. As Learning Lead at Brink, he works with people, teams and organisations to practice ways in which they can be creative and brave. His coaching style is informed by his experience in human-centered design, innovation strategy, facilitation and psychotherapy.