Conversation enriched, senses heightened, imagination stirred

Scratching the Surface with the Partridges at Anthropy 2025

Picture the scene. You are part of a small group sitting in a large tropical atmosphere. You’re discussing how lost our young citizens feel as they  move from the world of school to life beyond. The conversation is disturbing; yet it is also hopeful, because you are hearing the experience of people who are making a positive difference. 

As the session nears its end, you notice a scratching sound. You look past the heads of the energised participants and up the steep hillside out of which your discussion space has been dug. You see two beautifully coloured tropical birds, foraging. I am later told they are roul-roul partridges. They emerge into the discussion space. You’re still caught up in the search for solutions. But also enchanted. 

That moment captured for me what is special about the Anthropy experience at the Eden Project. Conversation enriched; senses heightened;  imagination stirred. O, and that’s on top of the stimulus Tomorrow’s Company and partners were able to give by contributing part of the crowd-sourced agenda – to which I will return in a separate blog.[i]*  

An escapist three days? Far from it. In my first session entrepreneur and investor Piers Linney confronted me with the impact of AI, which is powering  innovation into ‘vertical take-off’...Don’t equate AI with Chat GPT, he said; all that is changing is the way kids do homework. AI offers the opportunity to put intelligence into everybody’s hands, for the benefit of society.

Linney said we have five years at most to capture the benefits of AI for our society before the ship has sailed leaving us behind to technological serfdom.

Matt Brittin, outgoing EMEA President of Google, described how Deep Mind’s AlphaFold 3 was revolutionising medical research. Proteins – the building blocks of life - underpin every biological process. Each protein has a unique complex 3D structure. Deciphering one of these used to take scientists years,  and hundreds of thousands of dollars. It can now be done in a weekend.

To seize this moment, all the speakers agreed, we need very different qualities in our newest recruits. We need people of imagination to create the businesses that will make the most of AI;  people able to think laterally; join up the new world in unexpected patterns. People who can conceive, design and build new applications to simplify and humanise the challenges that burden people.

Two themes emerged and converged in my overexcited head. Technology and Learning. First the implications of artificial intelligence for our concept of educational intelligence.  In this hurricane of change agility and entrepreneurship are the qualities that our young will need if the UK is to prosper.

Education, meanwhile is stuck in a parallel universe where absorbing old knowledge and passing exams is assumed to be an adequate preparation for adult life.

Back in the tropical biome. Gemma Peebles of Harrison College described the work she was doing to enable 16-19 year olds to relate the things they were studying today to the work they could be doing tomorrow. This had echoes for me of the last Anthropy where Tomorrow’s Company’s own Jon Maguire had described how our ‘Can Do’ programmes in schools challenge 14/15 year olds to look at themselves and draw on their real passions and enthusiasms. This programme has more success stories to tell as students learn to develop, and convincingly present business ideas.

In a later session Claire Cookson, now CEO of Pathways Education and formerly a school principal described how she co-located a school inside the HQ of a major company, so students experienced their classroom as a pathway to a workplace and employees found themselves  facilitating classroom learning.  And Sir Anthony Seldon quantified the heavy price we are paying for our current obsession with tests and exams: one third of those  emerging from school say they cannot cope with life. And he might have added that third come out without any meaningful qualifications.

So what does all this mean for government? The answer for me was suggested in a compelling, session about the workings of the Welsh Wellbeing of Future Generations Act. This legislation, ten years old this month, links seven well-being goals as the long term priority for Wales. They cover prosperity; resilience, health; equality; cohesive communities; vibrant culture and language; and global responsibility. The Act may lack teeth but it has become a reference point and a lever for getting government to act strategically and across different government departments.

The influence is real, as proved to be the case in the decision  to prioritise natural capital over a nature-destroying extension of the M4 motorway

I wrote recently about the need for joined up government in areas like health, housing and nutrition. Sue Pritchard, CEO of the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, offered us an apt illustration. To prepare pupils to be enterprising while enhancing their wellbeing, what better move than to allow schools to grow their own food and feed it to their pupils?

Yet current procurement rules do not allow this to happen. At least in Wales those who want to defy such obviously counterproductive approaches can appeal to the country’s seven strategic objectives connected by the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act. 

So, along with the great game-changing ideas to our system of value creation that I will describe later, here is the three-part Vision for Britain that I have taken away from other people’s work at Anthropy 2025:

AI and technology at the service of society

Schooling remoulded to generate  citizens can catch the AI ship before it sails

Government departments joined up in their focus on the wellbeing of future generations.  

 Mark Goyder is Founder of Tomorrow’s Company and Senior Advisor to the Board Intelligence Think Tank.

[i] With so many sessions running in parallel there are so many individual stimuli on offer at Anthropy and so many different perspectives. I recommend Michael Solomon’s here. Or John Elkington’s here.