A larger reality: helping governments escape the local maximum

Back in September, James Plunkett and I launched The Centre for the Edge, a new collaboration between JRF and Kinship Works. We are interested in how public institutions can renew themselves in a moment when the systems that once felt stable are faltering and increasingly disconnected from the vibrant alternatives emerging at the edges. We want to explore how to help public institutions bridge to these new practices and possibilities — not to drag them into existing domains, but rather to adapt and learn from them.

This week, we’re publishing 2 essays that explore questions of data, measurement and control mechanisms. James kicks off the story with a question: is government stuck in a ‘local maximum’? In the first of our pieces, he uses the image of a robot vacuum cleaner trapped under a sofa to explain this concept: imagine the machine, busy, diligent, and incredibly efficient within a tiny patch of carpet, but fundamentally unable to see the wider room and what cleaning might be needed there.

He argues that this limited view is the condition that many governments find themselves in. The systems, tools and standards that once brought huge gains are now at risk of delivering diminishing returns. Our governing institutions remain highly competent in the kinds of work they were built for — namely technical administration and linear problems — but these types of work are vanishingly rare in the messy, relational, emergent challenges that define 21st century life.

So, a ‘local maximum’ is a situation where institutions have optimised themselves so tightly around a narrow set of assumptions and methods that they can’t detect, let alone reach, a better possibility space beyond their current horizon. That is a serious problem in these times of rapidly escalating and intensifying crises. James’ essay traces why this might be happening, and how it shows up in standards of evidence and control mechanisms. He also begins to explore what it would take to widen our field of view.

At JRF we are both learning with the people who are ‘building beyond’ current systems, and experimenting with what it means to do that ourselves, designing beyond traditional philanthropic models of grant-making practice. From this vantage point, James’ arguments resonate strongly for me. I see the exhausting friction that future builders face when they try to bring new practices, new epistemologies, or new forms of value into institutional spaces that struggle to recognise them. I feel it myself, viscerally, as I attempt to do this inside philanthropy.

So if, like me, you buy the idea that government is stuck in a local maximum, what would enable administrations to get out from under that sofa? James argues that government needs to broaden the narrow evidence standards and control mechanisms that currently limit its field of view, so it can see and support a wider range of promising alternatives. He explores how institutions could rebalance their efforts away from optimising individual programmes, and move towards higher-level learning. In practice that means experimenting with new methods and new institutional forms, and it means developing new ways of discovering what works. I agree with all of this. In my piece that responds to James, I offer 3 further reflections that build on his arguments.

Learning as infrastructure

James’ framework invites us to consider the eyes that governments use to see the world - evaluation methods, data hierarchies, risk tools, evidence standards. My own experience working inside and around central and local government suggests that our deepest blockage is less about the specific methods. Rather, I think it is about how public institutions understand learning itself: what it is, and what it is for.

There are brilliant people working across government who see this, but institutions still tend to treat learning as a retrospective, audit-focused activity - something that happens after the real work is done. Yet in complex environments, learning is the work. It is the infrastructure that helps us navigate uncertainty and tune into weak signals. It is learning that helps us to adapt as new insight comes into view, before failure forces our hand.

Examples from around the world show what it means to put this shift of perspective into practice. For example, the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) portfolio approach to strategy treats learning as a continuous sense-making cycle, integrating community insight, practitioner experience and data to reorient plans in real time. Wales’ work on future generations similarly attempts to embed distributed foresight and intergenerational stewardship into the machinery of government.

These and other examples are early signs of what it could look like if institutions saw learning as collective intelligence rather than compliance - a form of live insight, drawn from diverse networks beyond the organisational walls, that helps us manage risk in complex and fast-changing contexts. If we want to escape the local maximum, we need learning infrastructure that expands, rather than narrows, our field of view.

Epistemic justice: expanding what counts as knowledge

James’ analysis rightly identifies that our evidence standards see only a small portion of the social practices that create value. Again, I think the roots of this problem go far deeper than method alone. They are also about whose knowledge counts in the first place.

Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice is helpful here: the harm done when people’s capacity as knowers is diminished or not seen. Public institutions often privilege certain ways of knowing - technocratic, quantitative, expert-defined - while discounting others that also matter: lived experience, relational knowledge, community wisdom, Indigenous epistemologies, experimental practice on the ground.

In creating these kinds of hierarchies of knowledge, we calcify and contract our collective intelligence. We make it harder to see the full landscape of possibility. And we risk entirely failing to see or value the rich vein of innovation happening at the margins, rooted in these alternative ways of knowing: communities building new forms of care, belonging, stewardship, regeneration.

So, if government wants to broaden its field of view, it needs to invest in epistemic justice as a core capability. This means diversifying who gets to generate knowledge, of course. It also means expanding what is considered legitimate evidence in the first place, and building reflexive systems that are better equipped to hear unfamiliar insights, without forcing them into the existing script that’s more comfortably familiar.

There’s an obvious moral argument here, of course. But I also think there’s a straightforward operational argument too. A system that excludes whole categories of knowledge will always be stuck in a local maximum of its own making.

Imagination as a form of anticipatory insight

Finally, James invites us to venture into new terrain. He suggests governments could stretch their muscle and experiment with new methods. He encourages institutions to consider testing unconventional approaches in order to look beyond the familiar perimeter fence. I’d love to see more of this. And I think that one of the most powerful tools we have for this kind of work is often undervalued and under-resourced: the practice of imagination.

At JRF we have been working with a growing community of imagination practitioners across the UK who are supporting communities to envision and prototype different futures. So often these small acts of imagination - the ‘what if?’ questions - are the seed from which fresh possibilities flow — new social enterprises, new governance models, new networks of mutual care. Imagination here is not escapism but anticipatory insight: a way of rendering the future just visible enough that we can begin to act into it.

Governments around the world are starting to take this seriously. Finland’s Committee for the Future, Ireland’s anticipatory governance work, and a wave of civic imagination labs all point to a growing recognition that you cannot govern well if you cannot see beyond the present. Just think: imagination less as an indulgence, and more as critical infrastructure for good government (check out our toolkit if you want to make a start).

Towards a larger reality

James’ essay offers a clear explanation of how we’ve got stuck and why our current tools keep us there. He makes some brilliant suggestions for immediate ways in which we might act. My response piece offers some further reflections on the new capabilities we might need to grow in institutions. If institutions can recognise the trap of the local maximum, there are plenty of ways that they can broaden their field of view. And in doing so, they might just find that the landscape of possibility is far wider than it currently appears. The challenge now is to build institutions capable of seeing it.

We hope you enjoy the 2 pieces together, and we’d love to hear what you think.