At Nesta we're two years into a new strategy that seeks to decarbonise our homes, cut obesity in half for better health and close the early years disadvantage gap.

Anyone who knows anything about these knotty challenges will understand that these goals are ambitious. Very ambitious. And so the question arises… surely you can’t be serious? But we are serious! So why have we embedded such hard-to-reach goals at the core of our work?

The first thing to say is that we do think it is possible to hit these goals. The second is that we are very aware that it is improbable we will hit all three. Taking our goals seriously forces us to get comfortable with holding these two apparently contradictory ideas at once. On the face of it, this may seem naive: permission to stick our heads firmly in the sand and ignore the fact the odds are stacked against us. But in reality the opposite is true. If you know something is possible, you can conjure the optimism needed to run hard at it. By acknowledging it is improbable you can retain the focus needed to search for ways to beat the odds, keeping that glimmer of possibility alive.

Our healthy life mission, for example, is focused on cutting obesity rates in the UK in half over ten years. We chose this challenge because living with obesity is a major predictor of poor health and if we turn the tide on it millions of people will live longer, happier lives. But we know the direction of travel in the UK is not encouraging – clearly it's a monumental challenge that no one organisation could even begin to deliver alone.

Equally, though, it is absolutely possible to make a serious impact with the right sort of policies, laser-focused innovation and a fair political wind. Halving obesity would return us to the weight distribution of the population in the early 1990s. Since the 90s our energy intake has crept up imperceptibly so that today we eat around 8.5% more calories than we did the last time bum bags were in fashion. Our bet is that a combination of existing weight management services and relatively small changes to our food environments, at scale and sustained over time, would be enough to get us back to this healthier weight distribution as a population. The question then is what these changes should be, how much gain we’d get from each, and whether that gain would be worth it. That's why we're working on a blueprint to rank interventions, quantifying their likely effects to help us go all in on measures that will really move the needle.

It’s a similar picture in our other mission areas. In early years some local authorities have almost closed their school readiness gap. In decarbonising our home heating systems we pretty much have the necessary technology to successfully slash emissions by what’s required to help us on the road to net zero. Will it be easy? No! But not impossible.

We know of course that we are unlikely to succeed in all three areas. So why not just let ourselves off the hook a bit and set less ambitious goals where success is probable as well as possible? To this I give three reasons for shooting for the moon.

First, we should expose ourselves to the risk of failure in the service of really big challenges. Nesta is privileged to have an endowment and this means we have the independence and the resources to make some big bets and take some risks. The issues we have chosen to work on are not just big, they’re unacceptable, and they’re not inevitable features of the modern world. We picked these missions because there is a Nesta-shaped opportunity to tackle them and we should go after it with all we’ve got.

Second, the goals we choose inform the choices we make about where to invest our efforts. Modest goals can lead us to focus on predictable and linear pathways to impact. For example, if our healthy life mission goal was to improve the health of 5,000 people by targeting obesity we would invest in something like weight management services — we already know these interventions work so it’s just a case of widening access and improving completion rates. That’s not to say we are steering clear of clinical interventions. In fact, we have backed companies through our investment programme that directly affect appetite through non-surgical intervention including GLP-1 injectables.

An ambitious goal forces us to think about the kind of non-linear change that could improve the health of millions of people. This is a well-established benefit of moonshot thinking: the force of audacious goals pushes us to think differently. That’s why our health portfolio explores population level interventions that are likely to interact in ways that yield a result greater than the sum of their parts. It’s likely this means complementing medical intervention for those who need it with large-scale changes to food environments such as portion sizes, reformulated food recipes, and more transparent consumer information.

Third, having stretching goals forces us to think seriously about accountability. Take our recent work on the Money Saving Boiler Challenge, for example. Our evaluation of this campaign suggests that it reduced CO2 emissions by half a million tonnes a year. This is a great outcome and a huge return on our investment (to quantify this: the saving to consumers and government is estimated at around £446m in a single year, equivalent to over 20 years of Nesta’s annual operating budget). But equally the stretching nature of our overall target forces us to reckon with the fact that this campaign got us less than 3% of the way to the mission goal. This knowledge stops us from resting on our laurels. Instead, we can bank the impact of the Money Saving Boiler Challenge, take the lessons we learned and focus our efforts on areas with the potential for more transformational impact.

Moonshot goals make for tough task masters. There's no hiding if we fail and we know the odds are stacked against us. It would be easier all round if we focused on more modest changes, but at Nesta we have the privilege to aim bigger and shoot for transformative impact. Is it a bit daunting? Definitely. But it is also hugely motivating, and even if we get only part of the way that will make for a significant contribution to each field of work.

If you’re interested you can keep in touch with us here.