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Making social change and having fun doing it

  • Categories Next Economy, Staff, Thought Leadership
Audra Williams

Audra Williams

Changing bureaucracy isn’t easy, and can’t be done alone. It requires hard work and strong partners. Happily, the Festival for Creative Bureaucracy is up to the task. Their aim is to help bureaucracies feel more competent and confident to address the big social, economic, and political problems of our time.

They are guided by the following three questions:

  1. What then is the incentives and regulations regime to achieve that?
  2. How can we enrich the inner life of the bureaucracy and empower people and the organization?
  3. How can bureaucracies rethink and refresh their relationship to the civic and business worlds?

More than 1,400 people attended last year’s Creative Bureaucracy Festival festival in Berlin, but of course the festival had to move online. Attendees had access to 100 hours of programming over the course of five days.

One of those sessions was Making social change and having fun doing it, a conversation between Creative Bureaucracy Festival President Charles Landry and our CEO Tonya Surman. You can watch that conversation here:

Here’s our favourite excerpt:

“In this work there are the builders and the fighters. And the fighters are so smart and critical and they can jump into things, but they don’t seem to be having as much fun as the builders. I’m definitely a builder. I like to try new things out and give things a shot and have as much wonderful people around me as possible co-creating these ideas and solutions because I guess we never really figured out that we couldn’t.” 

Do you have an idea about how to make bureaucracy more creative? We’d love to hear about it! Become a CSI member today!

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