Earlier this year Nesta and Public Digital published The Radical How, exploring the ‘operating model’ for mission-driven government.

The report asks: how should you set up teams to make progress on complex societal missions? It draws lessons from pioneering teams already working in Whitehall, as well as from Nesta’s own experience of becoming a mission-driven organisation.

The question of operating models is only one aspect of the ‘how’ of missions. Nesta Group CEO Ravi Gurumurthy has described the big idea behind missions, exploring what mission-led government can learn from the past as well as the aspects of missions that need to be new.

In a post accompanying The Radical How, I talked through some wider principles of mission-driven working and related implementation questions.

At Nesta and the Behavioural Insights Team we’re keen to keep contributing to these important debates about the ‘how’ of missions.

To that end, I wanted to share an update on a new initiative, Mission Public, in which we’re working with organisations including the Institute for Government, the Georgetown Better Government Lab, and the Future Governance Forum, and looking to the pioneering work of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP).

We’ll keep adapting as we go, but in the spirit of working in the open, here are the four themes of work we’re progressing.

One of the big risks with a phrase like ‘mission-driven government’ is what is sometimes called ‘mission-washing’; lots of people start using the word ‘mission’ and a few central teams and roles are created — a ‘Mission Delivery Unit’, ‘Mission Directors’ — but nothing really changes.

That would be a shame because mission-driven government is a substantive agenda, inspired of course by the groundbreaking work of Mariana Mazzucato, and informed by public intellectuals like Carlota Perez. And so if the terminology is used with precision, mission-driven working entails far-reaching changes to the way government functions.

The first area of work we’re undertaking is therefore all about definitions. Helping to define more precisely the key aspects of mission-driven government and their practical applications. A core part of this work is being done in partnership with the Institute for Government (IfG), who bring a deep understanding of the machinery of Whitehall and beyond.

Together with the IfG, we’re looking at the key components of missions; what tools, systems. and cultures are needed if government is to work in a more mission-driven way.

We’re drawing on lessons we’ve learned during Nesta’s own journey to becoming a mission-driven organisation. This includes using a broader repertoire of tools, beyond the traditional Whitehall toolkit — for example, challenge prize, venture-building, enabling work on data infrastructure, and mechanisms for long-termism.

We’re also going to apply these concepts and tools to real world challenges, working through some case studies of real world missions. For example, how to decarbonise home heating, or close the school readiness gap.

Alongside our work with the Institute for Government, we’ll also keep sharing proposals from Nesta and the Behavioural Insights Team for other capabilities to support missions. An example is the idea of a Citizen Participation Service — a centre of expertise in citizen engagement that would own and develop digital tools and processes for citizen engagement.

During a recent fellowship hosted by the Australia and New Zealand School of Government on the theme of ‘human government’, I spent time with public sector leaders across these countries. One point that came up repeatedly in these conversations is that systems don’t change from the top down. A new system grows out from the middle, or from the edges, of the existing system.

This echoes the literature on innovation, which describes pockets of ‘transformational practice’ growing from within a system. It means that in any large-scale change — like a shift to mission-driven government — a lot of the work is about supporting and learning from changemakers in the system.

Many people have been applying aspects of mission-driven working in public/civil society institutions for years, even if partially, and often without using these words.

People have been leading cross-discipline teams that work towards outcomes; or they have set moonshot goals to inspire people and to encourage innovation; or they have developed techniques for working in complexity — trying to catalyse changes in the wider system.

One way to think about the rise of mission-driven working, then, is as an emergent pattern. An overarching framework/terminology/philosophy is starting to make sense of, and bring tighter coherence to, practices that are growing in the system. So it’s not a ‘top down’ change so much as a process of cohering and codifying and systematising emergent practice.

This is why networks are important. When you bring people together it can create a legitimating environment for good work that’s happening. Networks of practitioners can also be an anchor against mission-washing.

We also shouldn’t overlook that changing a system from within is exhausting, so it’s valuable for change-makers to have support from their peers. Plus, because everyone at the frontier of practice is still learning, it’s useful for people to draw lessons from what others are doing.

So, as part of Mission Public we’re looking to convene practitioners of mission-driven working. This will learn from and complement the great networks that already exist, most notably the UCL IIPP’s Mission-Oriented Innovation Network and the OECD Mission Action Lab.

As always in our work, we’re inclined to test and learn, perhaps by hosting some conversations for practitioners alongside our public events to understand better what would add the most value.

So if you’re a leader working in this way and would be interested in joining a nascent practitioner network, do reach out to Louis Stupple-Harris.

If you’re trying to reorient an organisation around missions — whether in government or in wider civil society — it’s helpful to have access to what might be called ‘implementation architecture’.

One example is an evaluation framework — a way to assess your progress and guard against mission-washing. To make sure you’re not just putting the word ‘mission’ on top of an old school portfolio of output-based, linear programmes.

We’re exploring the idea of a framework for evaluating mission-driven working, working with colleagues at the Better Government Lab at Georgetown.

This could be thought of as a maturity assessment — a way for organisations to measure how far they’ve gone on the (long) journey to mission-driven working. It could integrate with, or sit alongside, an outcomes framework — a way to answer the question: is this actually working?

We think an outcomes framework could be useful because many existing outcome/impact frameworks don’t lend themselves to mission-driven ways of working. Indeed the way we evaluate the work of organisations is a part of the problem that mission-driven working solves.

Organisations — especially public institutions — often have narrow measures of value, rooted in a paradigm of efficiency; they often measure what is ‘made’ — outputs or deliverables — not what changes as a result; and they often don’t think about the dynamic effects of their work.

Even when organisations measure outcomes, as opposed to outputs, they often use metrics that are short-term and that reflect organisational silos, or they use metrics that fall prey to the illusion of control, rather than reflecting the complexity of the ecosystem they’re working in.

It’s important to think about outcomes in a way that channels the spirit of mission driven working, for example by encouraging a tricky mix of long-termism and iteration. Or measures of agility and learning (‘how long are your feedback loops?’). Or metrics that capture the extent of public participation, or the extent to which the wider actors in the relevant system feel a sense of shared ownership over the mission.

We’re especially conscious in this strand of work that other people and organisations have already thought hard about this question of evaluation, not least through/with the IIPP, so we’re keen to understand from others what would be most helpful. Do reach out if you have thoughts.

Finally, there’s the question of hands-on support with implementation, i.e. where do you turn for help adopting mission-driven ways of working?

Having gone through this shift ourselves at Nesta — and we’re very much still learning — we know how hard it is. We also know there’s not yet a mature marketplace for advice. Indeed, some of the obvious go-tos — such as traditional consultancies — can entrench ways of thinking that are at odds with missions.

When it comes to advisory support for missions, we’re especially fortunate that Nesta and the Behavioural Insight Team (BIT) can combine expertise, since BIT has over a decade of experience advising public sector clients and others on the adoption of methods for testing and experimentation. This has taught us a lot about how best to support the adoption of new, more responsive techniques into the heart of government.

Again we’re going to approach this strand of advisory work with an open mind, to learn how we can be most useful. We’re going to start small by hosting one or more conversations for senior leaders in public sector and civil society organisations. This will be partly a primer on missions and partly an open discussion. We’ll be asking: what does it take to lead for missions? And what aspects of this agenda feel most challenging?

If you’re a senior leader in the public sector or wider civil society and think you’d like to attend a session like this, please register your interest.

As ever, this is all written in the spirit of thinking in the open, and this is a spirit we’ll carry through our work on mission-driven government, mindful that there’s so much great work happening in this space, from the UCL IIPP to the OECD Mission Action Lab to The Future Governance Forum, whose new report on missions is well worth a read.

In the meantime, if you haven’t read it yet, I recommend jumping into The Radical How. It’s an impressively clear and concise account of the operating model for mission-driven working.

And if you want to stay in touch with updates on this work, you can sign up to the Nesta newsletter.