FEATURE4 March 2019

Hive mind

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Features Impact Public Sector UK

For Catherine Hunt, head of insight and evaluation at the Cabinet Office and Prime Minister’s Office, harnessing the government’s collective intelligence is essential to helping it understand its citizens. By Katie McQuater

Hive mind - 1

“If you could create a hypothetical room where all the brains working in insight and evaluation across government sat together answering questions, wouldn’t that be amazing?” muses Catherine Hunt, head of insight and evaluation at the Prime Minister’s Office and Cabinet Office, who has spent a large amount of time figuring out how to create just such a vault of collective intelligence.

Crowdsourcing knowledge from across government and its agencies isn’t simply about being efficient, however – “because these are hard problems, and there isn’t a simple answer”, adds Hunt, who has had an unconventional route into a senior government insights role.

Her journey began when she applied for the Civil Service Fast Stream, to keep a friend company – although she didn’t take the job at that point. After a law degree, a few years working in strategic planning in the ad industry, and leading insight for Harper Collins, Hunt felt that her business with government wasn’t quite ...