TIAL’s purpose is to highlight the role of institutions, and their underlying architecture, in creating large-scale and lasting positive change in society.
Over the past months we have run a series of workshops in three very different cities — Istanbul, Berlin, and Brasília — to explore what it takes to imagine beyond the institutional architectures that are already there.
Each session gathered a mix of public officials, civic actors, and researchers who share the same intuition: reforming our institutions is not enough without questioning the design principles that hold them together.
Here’s what we’ve learnt, or why the purpose continues to matter:
The case for redesigning public institutions
In every context we visited there was a shared sense that institutions are under growing pressure to adapt faster than they were built to. Policy tools are too slow or come too late for the speed of change. They also assume a static and reactive role for our public institutions: that their role is to contain risk and adapt to change. But what if they could unleash and lead the change?
Across domains — from climate adaptation to AI, from ageing populations to urban management — the demand for deeper transformations is visible. We hear it in different languages but with the same urgency.
- In Istanbul, the conversation revolved around how governments might organise learning and work in the age of artificial intelligence.
- In Berlin, the focus was on efficiency, ageing, and urban governance.
- In Brasília, it turned to nature — water, heat, and land — and how to coordinate across systems that have no single owner.
The commitment to reform is widespread; but reform usually starts inside the boundaries of existing organisations, when what is needed is to redesign the architecture that sits beneath them. As we often say, before implementation we need to work on the realm of possibilities. That means imagining and testing the shapes and dynamics that could make collective action possible again.
A place of practice
These workshops translate our Playbook: Designing new institutions and renewing existing ones into a practical exercise representing more a design prompt, or an attempt at reframing. Participants are asked to design a new institution from scratch, having an initial domain and problem as starting point, and using a group of references to exemplify possibilities. We then invite them to stretch their imagination inspired by a set of metaphor cards that stand for different structures and dynamics of organisation, inspired by coral reefs, mirrors, mycelium networks, forests, swarms and so on.