We have tens of thousands of schools, hospitals, police services, care homes, businesses and communities. Why do we do the same thing in all of them all over the Western world? ‘Best practice,’ protocols, centralised policy and ‘evidence-based’ strategies have their place, but don’t let them become a straitjacket that stifles innovation. Imagine how much faster we could evolve the effectiveness of everything we do if we truly harnessed the potential of our people with wise science and sensible regulation. Sincerely embrace diversity and devolution. Encourage different schools to test different teaching methods. Allow different police forces to experiment with different approaches to deterring crime. Enable local councils to experiment with different ways of nurturing local business. Use the huge size of our civilization, the availability of instant global communication and modern scientific methods to experiment, innovate and continuously improve the quality and effectiveness of what we do. That necessarily must include giving people the freedom to fail, to make mistakes, to make judgements and be creative.