What we do
What we do is help organisations make a better world, by using learning and design to change systems.
How we do it is what makes us different.
And, to explain what we mean,
we’d like to introduce you to our model of transformation…
Transformation is on the cards.
These are the things that matter most to our model:
Our model of transformation, in words:
We love the mutuality of working in common cause with others who, like us, hold onto their authenticity to create something they believe in. We’re an incurably curious lot, so we love learning what works and we like applying what we learn to help design something better (and then learn how that works).
All of this is in the service of the impact we want to have in the world: not just helping repair people and the planet when they’re already damaged, but preventing the damage in the first place.
And we want to help reset the causes and consequences of so much of that damage, especially the equity between people; whoever and wherever they are.
And we’re at our best when we’re working on systemic change that has the greatest impact on the greatest number.
We used our own card game on ourselves! This is the Transformational Index: a fast, forensic, and fun way to work out what matters most to an organisation and the change it wants to see in the world. We’ve used it to help 200 clients. 201 including us.
Our clients tell us these things are what make our work distinctive.
Like many of the organisations we work with, we’re here to make a difference not make a fortune. We’ve hard-wired that into our DNA by choosing to be a charity with an asset lock.
And as well as being a team that believes in something, we want to use our skills in the service of change. Amongst us, our experience and expertise is in facilitation, systems analysis and design, learning tools, social and financial alignment, research and evaluation, organisational psychology, impact measurement, communications, and social investment.
Our clients are often the change-makers, the risk-takers, and the game-changers who want to make the world a better place.
This is one reason why many of our engagements are as a learning and design partner to trusts, foundations, charities and social enterprises. Being a learning and design partner makes the best of our abilities: helping organisations learn what’s working for them and what isn’t, co-designing something better, learning how that works, re-designing something even better; repeat. For organisations, it solves the equation of how to evolve and adapt to their ever-changing challenges in an unpredictable world. Gone are the reliable days of making a three year plan, evaluating it at the end, and then making another three year plan. The world isn’t like that anymore.
We put the same things in an action wrapper too: running our own ventures in youth inclusion and the design of social tools and games to share. We think that if our advice is good enough for the organisations we work with, it’s good enough for us. We want to tackle challenges ourselves as well as help others do the same; to live and breathe reality as well as theory.
“Consultants often do a good job of recycling what you already know, but in a neat and coherent way. Working with the Curiosity Society is so much more valuable than that: they change how we think.”
Seb Elsworth, Chief Executive at Access