Socially Adept helps senior leaders, communities and practitioners engage with clarity in big, messy, difficult transitions. We bring our lived experience of working in settings with multiple organisations with competing operational and strategic priorities to help you work with these complexities. We draw on a variety of research methods to develop an approach that works in your context to provide you with reliable, credible and actionable insights for your work. We create the processes and mechanisms that help you in making sense of them and applying them in your settings. We work alongside you, your teams and partners to think expansively, strategically and with joy for what is only possible together.
Socially Adept’s methods draw on:
- Futures and Anticipation – to understand our relationships with the past, present and future, in navigating change, working with uncertainty, and unlocking new and imaginative ways of thinking about collaborative action.
- Social, Environmental and Complexity Sciences – to design changes that create new understanding of our contexts and what is possible based on sound evidence of theory and lived experience.
- Dialogue and Mediation – to work purposefully with intentionally diverse groups through change where past experiences, perspectives, preferences and values influence our capacity to think and act together.
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 mentors 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 mechanisms that help 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 team and 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. Recent commissions include participatory research and development for local government decision-making structures; co-producing futures for the ‘caring economy’; strategy development for people migration; and research and strategy development for social prescribing.
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 Chair of Trustees for a participatory arts charity. She was a member of the Institute for Community Studies, Community Advisory Board from 2019 to 2022. Esmee is a Non-Executive Director for an arts therapy mental health social enterprise.
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).