Real Good Insights

Ideas for building a better world

Real Good Insights develops ideas arising from the practical and conceptual work behind the organisation.

Community & Capability
What capabilities does a community build through engagement and participation?
By Julian Knowles30 June 20263 min read
A community may accumulate capabilities that are not visible in attendance figures alone: knowledge of who can do what, trusted relationships, coordination capacity and the ability to initiate activity independently.
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Social Systems
There is more capacity for good than our institutions know how to use
By Julian Knowles3 min read
A substantial amount of social-good activity begins from an assumption of scarcity: insufficient funding, insufficient expertise, insufficient organisational capacity, insufficient people willing to contribute.
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Coordination
Social good often has an orchestration problem
By Julian Knowles2 min read
Some social opportunities fail for reasons that are relatively easy to identify: there is no viable intervention, the required resources do not exist, or the incentives of the relevant actors are incompatible.
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Social Infrastructure
Social infrastructure can be productive infrastructure
By Julian Knowles4 min read
I use social infrastructure to refer to some of the relationships, routines, shared spaces and connective structures that make certain forms of social action easier to initiate, coordinate and sustain.
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Measurement & Agency
What changes when we measure increased human agency as an intended programme outcome?
By Julian Knowles3 min read
I became interested in agency as a programme outcome because many familiar measures describe what a programme delivers without describing what changes in the participant’s capacity to act afterwards.
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Agency
How do you determine whether the choices available are enough to increase agency?
By Julian Knowles2 min read
Agency is often associated with choice, but the relationship is less straightforward than it first appears.
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Systems
What becomes visible when you model the whole situation?
By Julian Knowles3 min read
The boundaries through which a problem is presented are often inherited from the organisation receiving it.
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Ecosystems
How can one capability create value across an ecosystem?
By Julian Knowles2 min read
As Real Good has developed as a portfolio rather than a single programme, I have become more attentive to the distinction between an initiative’s direct outputs and the capabilities it leaves available for subsequent work.
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Community Insight
Using community insight to uncover organisational blind spots
By Julian Knowles2 min read
Organisations inevitably observe the world through interfaces shaped by their own functions.
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Systems & Growth
How positive social change can compound
By Julian Knowles2 min read
I use compounding cautiously because the language of exponential growth can be imported too casually into social systems.
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About Real Good Insights

Some of these essays are about agency and capability. Others are about communities, institutions and the organisations people build together: how they coordinate, what holds them up, and how they can keep doing good over time.

We’re most interested in the places where the usual words stop working. What’s the difference between a programme that gives someone a service and one that leaves them more able to act for themselves? Can a community have capabilities that none of its members have alone? What changes when you stop looking at a problem by itself and start looking at everything around it? What can communities know that organisations can’t work out from the inside?

Real Good Social is still working through these questions, and writing is one of the ways we do it. Some of the ideas here are early. We share them anyway, because thinking in the open is how our ideas get sharper, and how they eventually get tested against what actually happens.