innovation communications tactics such as:• Building visibility with “tips from the lab” newsletters, blogs, guides, or tools. Skip the jargon. Put something tangible into the hands of staff.• Helping managers by creating team briefs, case studies and articles for team meetings.• Inviting executives for briefings to build your pool of champions.• Packaging presentations for staff meetings and manager conferences.• Creating basic education programs to help staff and teams solve problems on the job.

Government policy innovationPublic services innovation (including service design and digital)Science and technology — governments employ thousands of scientists, engineers and researchers. Labs can think of ways for them to become more effective.Management systems innovation — “innovate” how government innovates to build skills, capacity and culture.

Labs can be a useful piece of the innovation puzzle if managers adopt a systems-thinking strategy, thinking more about their role within the wider government, department or company. They need to shape a culture within the whole organisation that is more open to new ideas, and this could be addressed by focusing more on communication.

Some governments say labs build a culture of innovation. While a comforting idea, it’s wrong. Research from 2017 has found that while many companies and countries are investing in labs, that does not mean they are becoming more innovative. It concluded, “[Innovation] takes a lot more than opening a lab. It takes a disciplined approach on a number of fronts.”

One aspect of the Orientation part of Boyd’s OODA loop is analysis and synthesis. This relates to deduction, or going from the general to the specific, and induction, or going from the specific to the general. By analyzing and synthesizing our observations and interpretations, we can generate new orientations towards what we are perceiving, so that we can act more effectively.

Through her writing Easterling often forces architects to re-envision their role in the making of space around the world, extolling the virtues of knowing how versus knowing what. She also encourages them to consider creating “active forms” — time-released protocols that manage spatial levers, exchanges, and switches — in addition to “object forms,” or what we commonly think of as buildings.

In The Beginning of Infinity, physicist David Deutsch defines The Principle of Optimism: “All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.” From that principle, Deutsch writes, flow a few implications that help understand optimism:Optimism is “a way of explaining failure, not prophesying success”: If we’ve failed at something, it’s because we didn’t have the right knowledge in time. Optimism is a stance towards the future: Nearly all failures, and nearly all successes, are yet to come. Optimism follows from the explicability of the physical world: If something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being possible is not knowing how.In the long run, there are no insuperable evils: There can be no such thing as a disease for which there can’t be a cure, because bodies are physical things that follow the laws of physics. If you want, you can call it “realistic optimism” or “pragmatic optimism” or “realistic skeptical optimism” or whatever you want to call it in your head to make it feel less doe-eyed, but the actual definition of optimism captures those, so I’ll just call it optimism.

My team worked like a lab. We focused on (2) to design new services and (4) to create staff and manager resources to improve internal and external services. Every lab should focus on (4) as this drives everything.Labs should be a beacon of insight and knowledge. Prehn was blunt in saying that staff should “climb down from the ivory tower and avoid the tendency of labs to define themselves in opposition to the rest of the organization,” adding, “Please, lose the arrogant attitude.” That’s sound advice.

Conversely, preserving one’s own integrity is a way to protect shared trust and therefore effectiveness.

In a seminal paper, “Representational Genera,” the late philosopher of AI John Haugeland argued that a unique feature of human understanding, one machines lack, is an ability to describe a picture or imagine a scene from a description. Understanding representations, Haugeland wrote, depends on “general background familiarity with the represented contents — that is, on worldly experience and skill.” It is our familiarity with representations, like the “logical representations” of words and the “iconic representations” of images, that allow us to ignore scribbles on paper or sounds and instead grasp what they are about — what they are representing in the world. 

The tragedy of the cybernetic revolution, which had two phases, the computer science side and the systems theory side, has been the neglect of the systems theory side of it. We chose marketable gadgets in preference to a deeper understanding of the world we live in.

True communities are simply groups of people who keep coming together over what they care about.

Risk is likened by the authors to a puzzle.  It can be solved by existing information ordered in the right way. Uncertainty is like a mystery – we are missing information and in particular we are beyond the limits of statistical reasoning.  The authors argue that most of the big world decisions we currently face – whether in business, epidemiology or politics – are radically uncertain.  We are operating in conditions of mystery where our knowledge is imperfect and variables are constantly changing.  Climate, economic and social systems are not linear.  They are subject not just to multiple variables and action, but also to what people think.

Boyd’s work demonstrated his mastery of analysis and synthesis. His work drew on a variety of influences, adapting them into a coherent synthetic account of strategy writ large. Osinga lists these influences in the following chronological diagram (p. 121):

Individuals or organizations that can understand themselves as complex adaptive systems are at a competitive advantage against those that do not.