Written by Paul Taylor (Innovation Coach at Bromford Flagship Livewest)

We live in a world that now has competing, intersecting, and sometimes conflicting crises. The challenges we face span differing sectors.  

For too long, we have taken sector specific approaches to solving problems, but in a complex world, where many problems are at the system level, we can no longer work in isolation.

That’s one of the reasons we’ve created BFL Waypoint—a collaborative think-and-do space designed to understand what is changing in communities, how we define what truly matters, and most importantly, how we all shape what we do next.

The Problem with Quick Fixes and Siloed Thinking

To understand why BFL Waypoint is necessary, we must first look at why traditional problem-solving often falls short. Currently, the public and social good sectors frequently operate in a paradoxical state of ‘perpetual incompletion’. Faced with urgent challenges, organisations tend to recycle old ideas and interventions that treat the symptoms of a problem rather than the root causes.

This is largely due to structural silos and an institutional aversion to risk. Traditional management models falsely divide complex social issues into separate, linear parts, assuming that one department or organisation can focus on just one piece of the puzzle.

Furthermore, our default approach has historically relied on one size fits all solutions. While these offer consistency, they lack the personalisation and adaptability required to address the unique strengths and challenges of different communities.

Why We Need Long-Term Strategy and Cross-Sector Innovation 

Because the challenges we face do not sit neatly within a single sector, our solutions cannot either. BFL Waypoint recognises that housing is deeply connected to wider systems like health, education, and the local economy.

Waypoint provides the ‘door’ for other public sector partners and stakeholders who often struggle to understand or penetrate housing associations. A public health director or a local headteacher doesn't want to talk to a traditional landlord; they want to collaborate with people exploring the same social complexities they are. By opening our doors, we can co-create solutions.

BFL Waypoint is our commitment to this long-term strategy. It is where we step back to look at the wider landscape, bring together what we are seeing on the ground, and test new ideas with our partners. By abandoning isolated agendas in favour of cross-sector collaboration, we are moving from simply reacting to the world around us, to actively shaping it. If you are working on these same challenges, we invite you to join us—because enabling people and places to thrive is a goal we must reach together.

A Move To Place-Based Research and Development

Many of our challenges are best tackled locally, within the place itself. The people living with the problems every single day are the ones with the best ideas for fixing them. They know their streets, their neighbours, their challenges better than someone working in a remote office in another part of the country.

Through combining Bromford, Flagship and Livewest with a long-term shift to place-based working we will establish approximately 100 place-based teams, co-located with the communities they serve, by 2030.

Each location will now be considered its own innovation lab. This model fundamentally changes how we approach problem-solving and improvement. Each of the labs becomes a platform to test new ideas and different ways of working. The focus is on a continuous cycle of testing, learning, and sharing.

The results—both successes and failures—will then be shared with the entire organisation and via Waypoint. This allows us to quickly identify what works and what doesn’t, making informed decisions about which innovations should be scaled up, spread or abandoned. It’ll be an open door for local partners and innovators who are willing to help.

For the larger, “big rock” challenges that can’t be tackled at a local level, that's where we will seek the help of related sectors and stakeholders at national or international level.

What are those challenges?

The featured illustration outlines what we think are the main ones from our perspective, and we’ll be exploring these over the coming months and how they affect other sectors

Some of these challenges will be perpetual, never to be solved and only ever mitigated. However, we believe that through thinking differently, through working together, and by taking high-risk, high-reward opportunities, we could redefine the public sector landscape.