Summary:
Create ‘Corkscrew Unit’, a team of creative, out of the box, thinkers tasked with identifying new approaches to solving entrenched problems and which acts as a point of contact and assessor of ideas crowdsourced from the public to solve society’s problems.
Policy:
This policy is about finding a way to make this competition a permanent place in UK policy, offering an opportunity to ‘crowdsource’ solutions to the country’s problems year-round and encourage more innovative and out of the box thinking to solve our most entrenched problems.
It is inspired by Winston Churchill’s call for ‘corkscrew’ thinkers in Word War II, which proved key to victory; the developers of camouflage, new equipment, and many of the innovations at Bletchley Park were these corkscrew thinkers.
I therefore propose that the government creates a team of corkscrew thinkers again.
Their role would be threefold:
1) To stand apart from the day-to-day workings of government, and instead focus solely on new and different ways to solve problems. By not having to implement policy on a day-to-day basis, they have the time and space to think about new approaches that most civil servants do not. This ‘creative brain trust’ could add significant value to UK policy development.
2) To act as point of contact and assessor for policy ideas from the wider public. A website portal would allow anyone to submit a policy proposal any time of year, in a maximum 1,000 word summary, which this corkscrew unit would assess. Any idea deemed useful would then be passed to the relevant department to action. This enables the crowdsourcing of ideas in an efficient way, without placing an extra burden on civil servants.
3) To come up with new ways of solving entrenched problems, by redefining the problem and solution in a creative way. Rory Sutherland’s example of the Eurostar shows the sort of thinking that could take place; instead of spending £6 billion building a new line into St Pancras to shave 30 minutes off the journey, you could spend £60 million providing free high-speed WiFi so people didn’t mind a longer journey as they could work on the train, or better yet spend £1 billion (saving £5 billion) to hire the world’s top supermodels to walk up and down the train handing out free champagne, and people will ask for the train to slow down.
While the Eurostar idea is perhaps slightly facetious, it still points to the value of a corkscrew unit; they would be tasked with re-defining problems and coming up with new solutions. Some of these solutions may not work, but that is not important; they still provide key insights into better ways to solve the problem, leading to eventual success.
In addition to the creative inputs into policy that this proposal would provide, it is also very low-cost; this team would be well-salaried to attract quality people but would otherwise have a tiny budget. They would be forced to think creatively to find ways of solving problems at minimal cost and maximum impact.
We have seen how this pandemic has caused a wave of innovation bred by necessity, so having a team of people in a permanent state of invention would provide huge value to government.
Of even more benefit from this proposal, the team does not need to be large; it could start out with just 20-30 people. As long as they are open-minded and creative, the value they offer is not only in the ideas they come up with, but in the ideas they identify and pass on from public submissions.
To maximise the quality of submissions from the public, those that were converted into policy would receive financial reward.
The MOD already operates a system like this called GEMS, where anyone can submit an idea that saves money or improves the workings of the MOD, and they receive a share of the savings if it is successful.
Having such financial awards for all useful policy ideas would entice a range of people to submit proposals for free, which the government would only need to pay for if they proved useful. Such a crowdsourcing exercise could prove very valuable, and also helps to enhance democracy by giving anyone in the country an opportunity to change policy for the greater good.
One of our greatest ever leaders, Winston Churchill, recognised the importance and value of corkscrew thinkers in one of the most challenging periods of our modern history, World War II, and it produced results that were critical to us winning that war. As we face our greatest challenge since then, we should employ the same thinking and create a new Corkscrew Unit to help us get through the Covid Pandemic and lead us to a brighter future.
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