My name is Jake Love Soper. I’m a global governance adviser living in Singapore, where I split my time between my government advisory start-up, Curio, and academic research on science in policymaking during Covid-19. The two are closely linked. My research digs into theoretical stuff (where does the Strategy-Policy-Delivery model come from?), while my day job tests what survives contact with Monday morning. 
 
I started out in the UK Civil Service Fast Stream, working across policy and delivery-learning early on that managing complex briefs often means trimming out a lot of human context. A key lesson from my time with Ministerial teams – especially working on Universal Credit at DWP and designing the UK’s National Leadership Centre – was that the best data is not always conveniently packaged into quantitative metrics. Fieldwork and co-creation outside Whitehall have always been my favourite activities: listening, more than talking, to the tacit signals and system beliefs that deeply enrich policies, processes and targets, but often miss the formal submission. 
 
For the last eight years, I’ve advised governments across Australia, Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East on the same core puzzle: how do you turn strategy into real-world impact? 
 
Outside of work, I side-hustle as a scuba diving instructor – it’s very quiet down there, and managing new underwater divers is almost as much fun as a multi-departmental policy workshop! 
 
As an associate trainer to the UK policy profession for 15 years, I believe mindset matters far more than curriculum. What excites me most about our new offerings, like Place-Based Policy and Sustainable Policy Design, is collaborating with delegates to try out new approaches to the ways we work. Developing new skills and practices matters: a civil service that handles each Monday morning differently will, over time, become a different civil service. 

Jake is now delivering our new Place-Based Policymaking Masterclass – A three-hour, fully online workshop in place-based policy design and the question of whose voice counts at what, he also our Designing Policy for Sustainability course.