Instead of supporting talented and committed teams to seek permanent solutions to our most serious challenges as we do in the sciences or in the technology sector, we fund tightly controlled five-year plans.

Our most ferocious challenge today is to avoid the reactionary tendency to go to war with our problems.

My colleagues and I had worked on many challenges singularly: food and energy security, child malnutrition, water stress, and security issues. Almost all of these were happening in Yemen simultaneously, creating the perfect storm of complex challenges.

A good invitation is mythic, a call to adventure; it incites romance and excitement, and it raises our game. A good invitation takes craft to get right.

Addressing complex social challenges requires deep strategic commitment coupled with radical tactical flexibility.

The first is that social labs are not projects. A project has a beginning and an end. Project-like thinking has been the dominant approach to addressing societal challenges.

This means that when faced with a real need to adapt our behaviors to a new reality, we as a society are unable to do so. Decision-making power and the control of resources rests with a narrow class of technocrats occupying BAU spaces, characterized by habitus.

Finally, for social labs to actually have impact, they must be systemic in orientation, aiming to address social issues at their root cause.

situation. An event is the creation of a new possibility”