Most people are familiar with traditional policymaking: roundtables, agendas, circulated papers, discussions constrained by time and hierarchy. These processes often feel like tick-box exercises — structured, predictable, and with limited space for imagination. Rarely do they create opportunities to ask what if or explore ideas that fall outside familiar narratives. That’s why a session on creative policymaking during the Science Policy UK course in August 2025, run by Wellcome Connecting Science, felt so refreshing. Hearing from the Wellcome Policy Lab and the Nuffield Council on Bioethics highlighted approaches that break away from traditional ways of doing policy, embracing creativity and human experience as central to the process.

Speculative Creativity: Imagining Futures

Speculative policymaking invites participants to explore many possible futures. Much like science-fiction novels or movies encourage us to confront the realities of possible worlds, speculative research allows policymakers to rehearse and reflect on futures that don’t yet exist. It asks: What could happen? How might people experience it? The emphasis is not just on predicting outcomes but on inhabiting them imaginatively and emotionally.

The Wellcome Policy Lab’s Tomorrow Party embodies this approach. It combines storytelling, co-creation, and “time travel,” inviting participants to experience imagined futures in the first person. Participants explore what life feels like in these worlds, and the process is guided by three core principles: purpose-led, playful, and people-centred. The method values emotion, memory, and imagination, creating space for participants to reflect deeply while connecting with others. Policy becomes less about rules or metrics and more about human experience, empathy, and collective creativity.

During the course, morphological scenario building was also presented as a method of creative policymaking by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, a structured yet imaginative approach that maps multiple plausible futures and explores their intersections. By breaking down complex policy issues into key dimensions and systematically combining them, policymakers can visualise a wide array of outcomes and their implications. Unlike traditional forecasting, this method acknowledges uncertainty and encourages reflection on human values, trade-offs, and social impact. It demonstrates that creativity can coexist with rigour and that the “human element” is not a distraction but a source of insight.

Speculative and creative methods like these disrupt conventional assumptions about policymaking. They celebrate imagination, curiosity, and risk-taking, while also grounding participants in reflection and shared understanding. They remind us that policymaking is not just about managing problems – it’s about exploring possibilities and more importantly, valuing various forms of knowledge

Reflections

Attending this session left me thinking about the importance of acknowledging the creative process in policy. Too often, the human dimension is overlooked — our feelings, intuitions, and experiences are treated as secondary to data and procedure. Creative policymaking insists that these elements matter. It legitimises uncertainty, experimentation, and emotional engagement as part of rigorous, responsible decision-making.

It also made me think about the broader role of policy. As David Mosse and others have argued, policy is often performative —it signals intent, shapes expectations, and enacts legitimacy as much as it, if not more than it, directs action. That discussion deserves a whole other blog, but for now, I would like to note that creative and speculative approaches may offer a way to move beyond performativity: to make policy lived, felt, and co-created, rather than just articulated.

I left the session feeling energised by the potential of these approaches. They encourage us to step away from purely linear thinking and embrace the unknown. They show that policy can be playful, imaginative, and relational without sacrificing seriousness. For me, speculative and creative methods highlight that policy can emerges from co-creating futures with people, stories, and ideas at the center.

In a world of complex science, ethics, and society intersections, speculative policymaking offers a hopeful vision: one where policy is human, creative, and responsive. It is a reminder that imagination is not frivolous — it is a vital tool for shaping futures that are just, inclusive, and thoughtful.