In less than two weeks we start our Discovery Sessions , where we'll be working with a range of colleagues and customers to solve problems in new ways. The sessions are themed around questions that came up in the service design phase of our transformation programme.

On Friday we held an initial preparation workshop on one of our most difficult areas - how customers find a home.

Why is it difficult?

Mainly because most housing associations operate in exactly the same way and that's led to generations of people all thinking that the formula must be the right one and can't be changed.

One of the questions we'll be asking in our sessions is:

What would Elon do?

Elon Musk popularised the idea of first principles thinking. This is basically the practice of actively questioning every assumption you think you ‘know’ about a given problem or scenario — and then creating new knowledge and solutions from scratch.

Our session on Friday asked colleagues to look back from the future.

What were the things that nearly killed their vision?
What did they have to do differently?

A lot of the things were about moving away from procedure and regulation either real or perceived. This is a necessary step in freeing people up to think differently as they go to the next stage:

Framing some tests that challenge everything we think we know

Watch out for the updates soon by following our live Trello Board