The global context for States of Change’s Learning Festival could hardly be more extreme. Panthea Lee, the executive director of Reboot and a session leader, has been spending most of her recent days organizing and protesting in Brooklyn, New York, with police helicopters circling the city. Chris Eccles, a senior bureaucrat in the Victoria government in Australia, has been helping to lead the state’s efforts to fight a pandemic.

With this backdrop, the Learning Festival is sharing insights about public innovation from leading thinkers and actors around the world. This week, the major lesson shared by the sessions was that people and organizations need to work together in unconventional ways and, in doing so, embrace the fact that the ways we