Innovation missions, powered by behavioural sciences
In this 6-week online course you’ll learn about Brink’s approach to using behavioural sciences to make missions happen.
You’ll learn how we build coalitions of people around a shared vision for a better future and turn their ideas into reality.
- Beta cohort begins June 3rd, 2024.
- Huge earlybird discount of 90% for sign ups before 8th May.
Over the last six years, Brink has brought together changemakers to answer the kind of questions that need more than single solutions and any single group of people.
Questions like...
- How do you create resilience against shocks to our climate and ecosystem?
- How can we improve vaccine uptake in under-immunised and vulnerable communities?
- How can access to medical oxygen in low and middle income countries be accelerated?
Brink’s CoLab model is a tried and tested approach for addressing these questions. Each of our CoLabs has brought people together to make productive progress and foster the kind of collaboration that results in real world, long-term impact.
Now, for the first time, we’ve distilled what we've learned into a six-week course, delivered by the Brink team and some of the partners we've worked with along the way.
Over the six weeks you'll be guided through the essential steps needed to set up and run a successful collaboration around a mission. You’ll learn how to use behavioural science to…
- Collectively imagine a tangible ‘better future’ and learn why thinking backwards is a hack for your brain that leads to more creative problem-solving
- Create a sense of belonging quickly and use approaches to get to richer possibilities through collective wisdom
- Develop tangible, testable ideas that you can use to learn what works and what doesn’t - and how to take care of group morale when things don’t go well (which will invariably happen)
- Use incentives, defaults, biases and other behavioural science wisdom to create fun, maintain engagement and make progress, fast!
It’s our first time running a course based on our own approaches, so we want to share our first attempt with a small group of friends to benefit from your feedback on how it all works.
Discover more about this course from Brink's co-founder, Abi Freeman:
About Brink
Many of the world’s biggest challenges are preventable. We have enough food, resources, and technology. So, why do these problems still exist? It’s because we often forget an important factor: human behaviour.
We are all complex and unpredictable humans, and don’t always react to things the way we might expect. Brink majors on this insight by bringing together behavioural sciences with innovation approaches, tapping into real human behaviours to help solve problems in health, education, and the environment in a way that truly benefits everyone.
We call it Behavioural Innovation.
Who is the course for?
This is for you if your work includes any or all of:
- Frontline innovation: finding solutions that will work and can be delivered sustainably
- Inclusive design: starting from the needs and voices of the most marginalised first, and bringing lived experience into the room
- Organisational change: helping entrenched bureaucracies with designing their services
- Systems thinking: thinking holistically in the long term, going beyond the day-to-day
- Working with people to make change happen: bringing people together across teams, organisations, sectors, countries or all of the above
All you need to join is:
- The curiosity to engage with the topics
- A commitment of min 2 hours each week for 6 weeks for the learning sessions, with plenty more to dive into in more detail if you're captivated
- A pinch of impatient optimism that there’s a better way to make more impact, faster, and the belief that you’re a person who can spark and support that kind of change
What you’ll learn
- The power of backcasting: The tools you need for thinking backwards and how to take people on the journey of working backwards from a vision of a radically better future.
- Taking a systems view and designing for mutual wins by exploring lessons from mediation, conflict resolution and biomimicry.
- Enabling crucial conversation by leveraging collective intelligence, experts, those with lived experiences and being jacked into the voices of everyone that matters.
- Making participation generative: How to go from from ‘the wisdom of the crowd’ to testable hypotheses.
- Knowing ‘When to know in order to do’ and ‘When to do in order to know’: How to design experiments, test assumptions and use what you learn in the real world to generate better hypotheses.
- How to foster psychological safety in your collaborators.
Time & place
⏰ Mondays from 1300 BST until 1600 BST
🗓️ Starts: Monday 3rd June 2024
🗓️ Ends: Monday 8th July 2024
📍 Place: all online, Zoom link will be provided
Beta testers, assemble
Our June programme will be the first time we’ll be delivering this particular course in its new format, so we'll be looking for feedback and suggestions for improvement from our first cohort.
Tickets are £4000 with an early bird discount of 90% (that's £400 per place) for sign ups before 8th May. Spots are limited, to sign up and secure your place, simply click through:
If you are interested in purchasing four or more course spaces, please contact us directly for personalised discounted rates. You can reach us on [email protected]
And if June doesn't work for your schedule we are running more cohorts in October this year and January 2025. If you'd like to reserve a spot for a future course you can enter your details on this page, and we'll be in touch.
Our instructors
- Abi is one of Brink's two co-founders and an organisational psychologist. She believes in the power of mindsets, collaboration, lifelong learning and what people and (mindfully designed) technology are capable of, together. For over 20 years she has worked in and around tech startups, government, academia and think tanks exploring how ideas make it out into the world and how best to back