Having the right culture isn’t just about ensuring we have a great working environment for our staff, it’s also crucial if we want to achieve our missions.

Here are five reflections on what makes up our culture here at Nesta:

People work at Nesta because they are driven by a deep commitment to our missions. Our guiding principle is that we do whatever it takes to achieve them. By keeping this front of mind, we challenge ourselves more robustly, prioritise the right work, accelerate progress when the opportunity arises, and shut down work more quickly when it no longer serves us.

We’ve made a strategic choice to set moonshot goals, locating them right on the edge of what’s possible. This means that we can’t be successful unless we dare to think big and refuse to settle for small wins, however tempting. So ambition is our watchword. For some, thinking big means planning for significant impact at scale from the very start of a project. For all of us it means pushing for the best possible version of a piece of work.

Nesta is full of smart people but that isn’t enough to succeed in our missions. In order to devise the best solutions we need to gain a deep understanding of the problems we are trying to solve as well as the past, current and future work being done elsewhere to address them. So we look beyond Nesta, seek out and work with the people, experiences and knowledge that can help us achieve our missions.

We hire brilliant people into Nesta, and it is on all of us to bring our best and to enable others to do the same. When you work at Nesta you will get exposure to a diverse set of skills and experiences. We believe that we can only succeed if we bring the best of these to bear on our work. But that doesn’t happen by accident. All of us are on the hook for making it work and so we collaborate with kindness and hold ourselves and those around us to a high standard.

To solve the problems we’re grappling with we need big ideas and ambitious solutions. But to think big you need to work small. This means disaggregating big challenges into the hundreds of small questions that need to be answered to get to the end product. We adopt this kind of iterative and experimental mindset because it enables us to move faster by:

• following hunches
• focusing on reducing uncertainty
• ‘junking’ things as soon as we know they’re not working
• updating our plans based on what we’re learning
• continuously breaking big problems down into simple parts.

As projects progress, the uncertainty around them reduces. It then becomes clearer which pieces of work we should commit hard to and which ones we should stop working on.

These are the things that create a common mindset and language which is shared by staff at Nesta. Having a shared vision and set of ambitions for our culture helps ensure everyone is encouraged to do whatever it takes to deliver our ambitious missions.