Fighting the Fear of Imagination: Growing Institutional Capacity For Better Futures

Mikko Annala leads Demos Helsinki’s Governance Innovation team. His job is to ensure that governments are prepared to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities of 21st Century. 

In his daily work, Annala and the team push governments to think and act beyond the boundaries of obvious. He has gained in-depth understanding of governments and their machineries through working in various domains of governance and cultural contexts, such as Finland, Sweden, Australia, Estonia, Latvia and the United Arab Emirates. Among many other efforts, Annala has been integrating experimentation to national policy making process; adding long-term aspects to budgeting processes; and designing learning programmes for building Next Era capabilities for employees from various different governments.

Sophia Robele is a Consultant for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). As a Foresight Specialist with the UNDP Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific, she supports the design and development of efforts to embed anticipation, long-term thinking and imagination into UNDP’s decision-making processes and offers to governments. She is concurrently a consultant with the UNDP SDG Integration unit (HQ) supporting capability building and learning infrastructure for „awareness-based“ collective action, to help development practitioners engage with the inner and relational dimensions of systems transformation for the SDGs.

Her previous work with the UN has spanned numerous development areas, from food security to health systems, with a cross-cutting emphasis on advancing structural change. She is interested in the nexus between social innovation and equity, particularly through systemic design.

Indy Johar is an architect, co-founder of 00 (project00.cc) and most recently Dark Matter, Studio Master at AA.

Indy, on behalf of 00, has co-founded multiple social ventures from Impact Hub Westminster to Impact Hub Birmingham, along with working with large global multinationals & institutions to support their transition to a positive Systems Economy. He has also co-led research projects such as The Compendium for the Civic Economy, whilst supporting several 00 explorations/experiments including the wikihouse.cc, opendesk.cc. Indy is a non executive director of WikiHouse Foundation & RIBA Trustee and Advisor to Mayor of London on Good Growth.

Most recently he has founded Dark Matter – a field laboratory focused on radically redesigning the bureaucratic & institutional infrastructure of our cities, regions and towns for a more democratic, distributed great transition.

Dark Matter work with institutions around the world, from UNDP (Global), McConnell (Canada), TFL, GLA (London) to Bloxhub (Copenhagen)

He has taught, lecturedat various institutions from the University of Bath, TU-Berlin; Architectural Association, University College London, Princeton, Harvard, MIT and New School.