The conference T-shirts bore the logo “renegades” – a badge of honour for the 30 leading academics, CEOs and consultants who accepted the lab’s invitation to its “Inventing the future of management” event at Half Moon Bay, California, in May.

But this logo was also a reminder that the conference would be judged a success by the extent to which its message of innovation stops being a cult of mavericks and is absorbed into mainstream management. The event aimed to get people to tackle the giant questions mostly ignored by practitioners in the rush to make the quarter’s figures and by academics tracking down references for scholarly journals. What are the design flaws that prevent organisations from changing? What are the big challenges that must be addressed if we’re to create adaptable organisations that are as human as the people who work in them? What might the solutions look like, and are there experiments that would help to push beyond the limits of “management as usual”?