Eleven months ago I wrote that the concept of Bromford Lab was to be retired. It was time to evolve to a new phase of strategic innovation.
I argued innovation had to be decentralised, and that one siloed hub of creativity tucked away in a corner of the organisation was no longer fit for purpose.
The next step was , as we began transitioning to place-based working, to make every place based team its own innovation lab. When I wrote the post the design had 77 of them. Post merger, it’s now closer to 120.
I still believe that. But reading it back, I can see what I’d missed. Decentralising innovation doesn’t change what innovation is. It gives you more people doing the same thing in more places.
The harder shift, and the one we’re now attempting with BFL Waypoint, is from individual innovation (tests and pilots) to systemic innovation.
What the Lab was actually good at
Bromford Lab was built on a specific and, for its time, correct set of assumptions.
That a small team with permission to fail could move faster than a large organisation.
That most problems could be scoped well enough for solutions to be tested cheaply.
That the main obstacle to change inside an organisation was internal caution, or culture, rather than external complexity.
So we ran small, cheap trials. Some worked. Most didn’t. That was rather the point.
The biggest thing the Lab ever produced was the neighbourhood coach role — there are over 200 coaches working across Bromford today. But even that, our proudest output, was a redesign of something we already controlled: our own job descriptions, our own operating model, inside our own walls.
In truth, almost everything the Lab did well was something we could do alone.
Three arguments that break the LAB model
Waypoint launched last week with three pieces that, taken together, explain why going it alone isn’t enough any more. They don’t entirely agree with each other, which may be the most useful thing about them.
Jas Bains, writing with Matt Leach, argues that the current operating environment isn’t a harder version of the old one — it is structurally different. Six forces converging at once: energy and resource competition, rearmament compressing the fiscal space, political instability, demographic decline, climate as an accelerating meta-threat, and AI sitting on top of all of it. Compound problems, not cyclical. His description of sitting in a board meeting spells out the challenge:
“Capable people working diligently through an entirely recognisable agenda, and nobody in the room asking whether the agenda was still the right one. The meeting reflected a sector still operating to a set of rules and assumptions built up iteratively over the last twenty years. At a time when rule books and expectations are being shredded and thrown away.”
In his piece, Mark Willis argues something adjacent but not identical. The sector is trapped inside short cycles — political terms, funding rounds, three-to-five-year strategies, annual budgets — and those cycles produce rational short-term behaviour that leaves structural problems untouched.
“When regulation, funding and scrutiny operate on short horizons, organisations naturally prioritise what is visible and urgent. Immediate risk is managed, compliance gaps are closed, and performance is stabilised. Over time, this favours firefighting over redesign, optimisation within existing structures over questioning whether those structures still work, and delivery against narrow, siloed objectives rather than coherence across the whole system.”
My own piece argues many of our challenges are best tackled locally, within the place or community itself. The people living with the problems every single day are the ones with the best ideas and motivations for fixing them.
“They know their streets, their neighbours, their challenges better than someone working in a remote office in another part of the country”
Here’s the tension:
Jas is telling us to look up and out at global forces.
Mark is telling us to stretch our horizon to decades.
I’m arguing the best ideas are on the street, held by the people living with the problem every day.
Those three all pull in different directions.
An innovation lab can only really serve one of them — the local, the immediate, the testable. It is structurally incapable of the other two. You cannot run a twelve-week experiment on whether your operating model survives a decade of compressed public spending.
The problem with TESTS AND pilots
Pilotitis is where promising innovations are endlessly tested in small-scale trials but consistently fail to transition into large-scale sustainable, widespread practice.
“Something brilliant is happening everywhere – just not consistently, and rarely for the people who need it most.”
Pilots happen under entirely artificial, optimised conditions, relying on dedicated project teams, time-limited funding, and highly motivated champions. Once this temporary scaffolding is removed, the innovation is exposed to the harsh realities of routine operations, such as complex IT integration and the need to redesign pathways across deeply uncoordinated teams and departments.
The Troubled Families Programme failed because it tried to tackle a massive, complex issue using a pilot mindset (rigid targets, strict timelines, conditional funding). The Wigan Deal succeeded because it abandoned the pilot approach entirely and focused on changing the underlying culture and trust within the community.
However, pilots have a lot of value. They can prove a hypothesis.
The fundamental issue though is that you cannot pilot your way out of a system problem.
From pilots to system change
A pilot tests a new part inside an old machine, while system change rewires the entire machine—and the people operating it.
When Bromford and the Lab co-created, tested and launched the role of the Neighbourhood Coach they were inserting a new part into an old machine. And true to form , over time, the machine re-asserted its dominance.
Bromford Flagship LiveWest is now attempting a full-on rewiring in three waves:
Making a named place — not a function, a region or a contract — the unit around which work is organised. It is pushing decision rights down to those teams and, harder, working out how residents hold some of that power rather than being consulted on decisions taken elsewhere.
It is trying to build a resource model that matches its long term stated horizon, so that a commitment to a place isn’t undercut by budgets set centrally and annually. It is using scale deliberately rather than incidentally aimed at changing the conditions in places, not just operating within them.
And it is taking an outside-in stance, starting from what a place needs and what other actors in it are already doing, rather than from what a housing association happens to be able to supply.
None of these is finished. Some have not even started. Together they are the component parts of system change.
Bromford Lab took us a long way — further than most of the sector managed. What it could never do was ask whether the agenda itself was right, and if it isn’t, begin to rewire the organisation for a complex present.
So if you’re working on any of this from outside housing — health, education, energy, local government, research, or building something you think we should be using — that’s precisely who Waypoint is built for.
Come and disagree with us.