Socially Adept helps senior leaders of businesses, NGOs and public organisations engage with clarity in messy, difficult transitions. The issues you want to tackle but don’t know how to begin to think about them.
We help you unlock new ways into problems, and work alongside you, at your pace, to bring about the changes in practice you need.
We have extensive experience of working across multiple organisations, and know just how to engage with contexts that are rapidly shifting in unexpected ways.
We draw on a treasure trove of research, design and futures methods to hand-make approaches that fit your context so well it takes the pain out of change work.
Socially Adept was set up by Esmee in 2017, and now works with other senior sustainability, change and futures experts who collectively practice #generativefutures.
Socially Adept’s methods draw on:
- Futures and Anticipation – to understand our relationships with the past, present and future in navigating change and working with uncertainty; and to unlock new and imaginative ways of working across different time horizons for effective collaborative action.
- Social, Environmental and Complexity Sciences – to design sustainable changes that create new understandings of what is occurring and what is possible based on sound evidence of theory practised with experiences of citizens in their communities and and experimental and emerging evidence from many different domains.
- Dialogue and Participation – to work purposefully with diverse groups through change where past experiences, perspectives, preferences and values influence our capacity to think and act together; and the speed of change often gets in the way of opening up to transformational practices.
Esmee Wilcox: Biography
Esmee Wilcox has a wealth of interdisciplinary policy-making, operational and strategic consultancy experience. She has taught at Henley Business School, Goldsmiths and mentored with the Cambridge Judge Business School. Esmee works with a range of clients and sectors from healthcare, migration and net zero. She worked for 10 years in policy and political engagement in central government, including a stint at the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit as Deputy Chief of Staff, where she was a co-author for the 2005 Cross-government Disability Strategy and got her curiosity for helping people thrive at work.
Esmee worked on the delivery of Defra’s rural strategy, and then with Defra’s environmental science laboratory in her transition from policy-making to policy-delivery. She had a second career in local government, leading an award-winning change programme across health, education and social care, and working on a number of corporate partnership priorities including environmental sustainability.
Esmee set up her consultancy practice in 2017 to work intentionally at the leading edge of strategic change practice. Commissions include participatory research and development on organisational decision-making; co-produced futures for the ‘caring economy’; cross-sector public partnership development for people migration; community wellbeing research and strategy development for health leadership; impact evidence systems for social change in sustainability futures; and healthcare partnerships in fractured operating contexts.
In 2020 Esmee was awarded the Emerging Fellowship on Social Change by the Association of Professional Futurists for her published work on systems change. She now teaches foresight methods. Esmee has an MA in Business and Management sponsored by Defra, gained at Middlesex University. She has been a Visiting Senior Fellow in Social Policy at the University of Suffolk since 2015.
Esmee was Trustee and Chair for a participatory arts charity in the East of England from 2015 to 2019. She was a member of the Institute for Community Studies, Community Advisory Board from 2019 to 2022. Esmee was a Non-Executive Director for an arts therapy mental health social enterprise from 2022 to 2025. She is a Director of a global participatory futures co-operative.
Esmee’s futures work has been published throughout 2019 and in 2020 in a collection of work in ‘Capital Transformed’ (Designed by Accident)
Esmee was also published on innovation and risk in government in 2012 in “The Glory of Failure” (Triarchy Press).