Lab Legacy: From Temporary Space to Lasting Change

A decade ago, labs carried a certain energy. They felt fresh, hopeful, even a little subversive. They promised a way to work differently inside systems that had grown rigid, procedural, and disconnected from the people they were meant to serve. Today, the mood is more mixed. The enthusiasm is still there in some places, but so is the fatigue. More and more, I hear a version of the same sentiment: “people are labbed out. We need implementers!”

I understand why.

Why People Feel “Labbed Out”

Many labs have created inspiring experiences without creating lasting institutional change. Some became too inward-looking, more attached to their own methods than to the conditions required for adoption. Others were built without sufficient sponsorship, governance, or pathways into decision-making. Still others produced valuable insights and prototypes, but those insights struggled to survive contact with the routines, incentives, and power structures of the organizations they were meant to influence.

And yet, I do not think the answer is to dismiss labs. I think the answer is to understand them better.

My own journey into lab practice began before we had the language of social innovation. I came to this work through activism, through studying social movements and organization design, and through a long-standing interest in the relationship between personal change, organizational change, and societal change. 

Since 2009, I have worked in and around public institutions trying to introduce systems thinking, design, and innovation into how they operate. Along the way, I co-founded NouLAB, helped build innovation capacity in government, and learned some hard lessons about what labs can do well and where they struggle. Those lessons leave me more convinced than ever that lab practice matters and that it must evolve.

Where Innovation Labs Fall Short

What many labs have done well is create temporary, transformative spaces. At their best, they function as containers where people can step outside the default logic of the system they operate in and experience something different. They help participants recognize and unlearn habits, build new relationships, and experiment with new ways of seeing, relating, and acting. That value is real, and I suspect it has often been underappreciated because it is harder to measure than a prototype or implementation plan. Labs have often been strongest not as factories for solutions, but as spaces where people can rehearse a different future.

Labs often work best as temporary spaces set apart from the normal routines of the institution, where people can practice different ways of working, organizing, and making sense of the problems in front of them. Their temporary nature may not be a weakness. It may be part of what can make them effective.

But this is also where the challenge begins.

A temporary space can catalyze transformation, but it cannot carry transformation on its own. The hardest part of lab work has never been generating insight inside the container. It has been what happens when people leave it. Participants return to institutions shaped by inherited structures, fixed reporting lines, annual budget cycles, established incentives, and risk cultures that were not designed to absorb what the lab made possible. Without integration, even profound learning can evaporate. The insight remains with individuals, but the system rejects what they have to offer.

This is where recent writing from James Plunkett and Sophia Parker on the centre and the edge is interesting. They argue that public institutions often struggle to renew themselves and are better at sustaining and replicating their current logic than supporting and integrating alternatives. They also suggest that while the centre may be struggling, the edges are often vibrant with experiments, new relationships, and different ways of organizing. That feels very close to the lab dilemma. It is not that alternatives do not exist. It is that the institutional centre often lacks the conditions, incentives, and habits needed to recognize, protect, and absorb what emerges at the edge. 

The Real Problem Isn’t Labs Implementing

This is why I think the critique that labs “do not implement” is both fair and incomplete. It is fair because too many labs have been weak on transition, uptake, and institutional embedding. But it is incomplete because it assumes the primary purpose and responsibility of the lab is implementation. I do not think that is quite right. Firstly, the leaders and managers of the organization have an outsized influence on the success of innovation. Secondly, labs are not assembly lines for finished solutions. They are better understood as part of a broader innovation ecology, or even as an edge function within a wider system of renewal. When the links between experimentation, governance, and operational adoption are weak, labs can easily become isolated pockets of experimentation or, worse, a form of innovation theatre.

That pattern shows up repeatedly in public institutions. Governance leaders announce ambitious change but fail to create the enabling conditions for it. Operational teams run pilots that never scale because they are disconnected from power and resourcing. Frontline innovators improvise new ways of working but burn out because there is no structural support around them. In that context, labs are often asked to carry more than they possibly can. They are expected to create cultural change, prototype solutions, build trust, challenge assumptions, and somehow also force institutional adoption; all without controlling the resource flows, governance arrangements, or incentives that determine whether new practices can take root.

That last point matters. Systems do not change because of good intentions alone. They change when the conditions holding existing patterns in place begin to shift. Resource flows (money, people, information, time, attention, infrastructure) are part of that. If labs generate new solutions and new ways of working but the underlying flows remain untouched, the institution will often continue reproducing the same logic. The lab becomes a brief interruption rather than a structural influence. That is why the future of lab practice cannot rest only on better facilitation or more compelling workshops. The future of lab practice has to involve stronger links to governance, operations, and delivery.

This is also why I have become increasingly interested in the idea of world-building as a lens for innovation. Public institutions often approach change as a series of isolated interventions: a lab here, a pilot there, a training program somewhere else. In their book Design Unbound, Ann Pendleton-Jullian John Seely Brown states “coherence matters more than completeness… World building is an opportunity to change everything... It is an opportunity to start anew under different premises.” Real innovation capacity emerges when there is alignment between leadership intent, operational practice, and cultural norms. In that sense, the most valuable labs may not be those that produce the most outputs, but those that help construct a more coherent environment for learning, experimentation, and adaptation.

Seen this way, the future of labs may depend less on defending the form and more on preserving the function.

The function of the lab is to create the conditions for different conversations, relationships, and practices to emerge. It is to help people encounter the possibility that institutions can work differently. It is to create a temporary space where a different logic becomes visible and, for a moment, livable. But if that is the function, then perhaps the goal is not to make every lab permanent. Perhaps the goal is to ensure that what the lab makes possible can travel.

That raises an uncomfortable but important question: should we lean into the impermanence of labs?

From Inspiration to Institutional Change

The real question, then, is not whether labs should last forever but whether they are designed to leave something behind.

Do they leave behind stronger cross-boundary relationships? Do they build the confidence of everyday innovators? Do they influence governance conversations? Do they produce changes in how decisions are made, how teams collaborate, or how resources are allocated? Do they seed habits that become part of everyday practice? Small, repeated shifts in habit and team behaviour matter because transformation rarely arrives all at once. It accumulates by degrees.

That suggests a different design challenge for the next generation of labs. Instead of asking only how to create powerful experiences, we should ask how to design for transition from the beginning. What governance structures need to be connected to the work? What leaders need to be involved not just as sponsors, but as participants in learning? What routines, rituals, and habits need to survive after the formal lab ends? What would it mean to design a lab with a sunset clause and a legacy strategy rather than pretending permanence is the default measure of success?

Seen in this light, the future of labs may have less to do with defending the lab as a permanent form and more to do with strengthening the bridge between centre and edge. Plunkett and Parker describe the task as spending less time optimizing within the system and more time working on the system so that it becomes more porous and dynamic and better able to draw vitality in. That is a useful way to think about the next chapter of lab practice. The question is not only how to create protected spaces for experimentation, but how to help institutions take in the learning, imagination, and alternatives that those spaces make visible. 

What Comes Next: From Labs to Implementation

I think this is where the future of lab practice lies.

Not in more isolated spaces of experimentation, but in more intentional bridges between experimentation and institutional life.

Not in treating labs as stand-alone units, but as part of portfolios that connect governance, operations, and culture.

Not in measuring success only by prototypes or pilot outputs, but by shifts in capability, coherence, and the system’s ability to learn.

Not in clinging to the label, but in preserving what the practice makes possible.

Because despite the fatigue, I still believe there is something worth keeping here.

The chance to create even a temporary space where people can think differently together is no small thing. In large institutions, that chance is rare. It is a privilege, and a responsibility. Labs have helped many of us glimpse what a more human, relational, experimental, and life-affirming public sector could feel like. That glimpse matters.

The task now is not simply to defend labs from their critics. It is to evolve the practice so that the value they create can move beyond the room, beyond the team, and beyond the lifespan of the lab itself.

If labs are temporary by nature, then perhaps the question is not how to make them permanent. Perhaps the question is: how do we design them so their effects are not?