The Moment Demands Something New
Lord Simon Case's Keynote Speech | Common Mission Project Annual Event
Each year we come together to celebrate the Common Mission Project charity. This year, Lord Simon Case delivered the keynote speech to graduates, government leaders, and Industry Mentors. Lord Case most recently was Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service from 2020-2024. He was Downing Street Permanent Secretary to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and served as Principle Private Secretary to the Prime Minister under David Cameron and Theresa May. Below is his speech, verbatim, shared with his permission.
"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present."
Abraham Lincoln spoke those words in December 1862 in front of Congress, in the middle of a civil war, at a moment when the United States faced existential questions about its future.
He was clear: the old ways of thinking were not enough. The moment demanded something new.
I think those words carry a striking relevance for us, right now, over 150 years later.
As we look around us, we see incontrovertible evidence that the world has changed. And it is changing fast.
The war in Ukraine continues, with no clear end in sight.
At best, an uneasy truce in Iran.
The post-World War II order – the settlement that shaped the assumptions for generations – has been shattered.
The threats to our national security are no longer distant or abstract. They are live, evolving, and in many cases closer to home than we would like to admit.
Throw in all of the other factors and I’d say that the present was feeling rather stormy.
Resilient nations and economies require strong defence and national security institutions.
But they also depend on something less visible and even harder to build: a resilient talent base…
…people who can solve problems, innovate at pace and who reject boundaries between organisations in pursuit of solutions that work for the collective good.
That is why you are here tonight. Because you are part of building that talent base.
--------
The scale of the skills problem this country faces has been laid bare for us all to see.
Right now, over young people aged 16 to 24 are not in education, employment or training.
Over one million young people.
Over thirteen per cent of an entire generation, not failing or disengaged but without a clear route in. Talent left outside at a time when our nation needs it most.
At the same time, predicting what skills we actually need as a nation is equally problematic.
The top twenty skills required for the average UK job changed by 33% between 2021 and 2025 alone.
Where we do have predictions, we see problems…
Skills England is projecting that programming and software development alone will demand an additional 87,000 workers by 2030 – against a pipeline that is already under strain.
The skills gap we are facing into rightly alarms many.
I believe the gap the country faces is not a gap of effort or ambition in younger people.
It is a gap in applied, complex problem-solving under conditions of uncertainty.
When we cannot define precisely all of the skills that we need in the stormy present, what we can be sure of is that we need people who have the ability to frame a problem, test assumptions, navigate institutions and deliver under real-world conditions.
Not textbook knowledge. Practical judgement.
And those of you who have participated in the Common Mission Project have spent months developing precisely that.
And when I look at the scale of the national need, I want you to understand: that is not a small thing.
You are investing in yourselves and in your nation’s future.
-----------
Entrepreneurship is at the heart of what you have been doing.
To the narrow-minded, entrepreneurship is about building companies.
In reality, it is something so much more than that.
It is a way of working: taking responsibility, a bias to action, talking to real users, adapting fast when your assumptions turn out to be wrong.
It is just as valuable inside Whitehall as it is in a startup. Perhaps more so.
Throughout my career, I saw the value of this approach, whether I was part of teams trying to hunt down terrorists, respond to a global pandemic or scramble together our national and international reactions to the invasion of Ukraine.
There was a time when I might have hoped that crisis response, which fundamentally relies on entrepreneurship, was the exception in national government.
But the reality has proven to be very different. And it will likely stay this way.
Such are the scale of the challenges and such is the pace of change that the mentality and modes of managing crises and entrepreneurship have become the necessary norm.
This year, you have shown what you can do:
Rapid problem analysis, real-world stress-testing, adapting, collaborating, taking ownership. You can now thrive in our new realities.
What you have learned through participating in these programmes – your new instincts – take most people years to understand.
And more than this, as you complete your time with CMP, you have something that neither a lecture hall nor a standard corporate experience can reliably produce: literacy in national-scale challenges and the confidence to act.
You now know how problems are defined at state level.
You know how decisions are made.
You have sat across the table from military officers, civil servants, and industry professionals and argued your case with evidence.
That combination is rare. And the country needs far more of it.
-----
The Common Mission Project is, at its heart, a bridge, between government, which holds the problems, universities, which hold the talent, and industry, which brings the commercial experience and mentorship to make the whole thing work at pace.
You have stood on that bridge and understood its importance.
Taking live national problems and worked on them. Not by writing essays, but by exploring the problem from everyone’s perspective, testing your assumptions against operational reality and developing evidence-based solutions.
The real problem as the curriculum. The process of solving it as the pedagogy.
Across seven years of this programme, those efforts have added up to something extraordinary: over 1,400 students, 28 universities, 360 problems, and nearly 13,000 structured stakeholder interviews – a body of primary intelligence that no procurement process, no internal review, and no consultancy could have generated at this scale, this speed, or this cost.
Ninety-one per cent of Problem Sponsors intend to implement what the student teams delivered.
Ninety-two per cent return the following year.
Not because they are obliged to. Because it works.
------------
Let me give you a specific example from this year that captures what this model produces at its best.
Team CAMO, at the University of Leicester, worked on a British Army problem focused on Command Post survivability.
Early in the course, the team arranged a site visit to observe the operational environment firsthand. As one student reflected afterwards: "Without that day, the project would have gone totally differently."
That visit shaped the direction of everything that followed. The team conducted more than 75 stakeholder interviews across military, technical, and industry networks.
Then, at the end of the programme, they entered a start-up competition requiring a business case, a pitch, and a demonstration of venture viability. They drew on the methodology they had learned – the Mission Model Canvas, the Lean Startup tools they had initially treated as academic exercises.
It will not surprise you to hear that they took the competition by storm.
Or take Lt Col Benjamin McNeil, who came through H4MOD as a student officer.
His team worked on a digital prioritisation tool for MoD obsolescence management and won the Best Entrepreneur Award.
The following year – not because he was asked to, but because he had seen what the model can do – he returned as a Problem Sponsor. Asked what convinced him, his answer was unambiguous: "Quite simply, because it works."
-------
Where we work, what we work on and how we do it is changing.
The impact of AI on all is on all of our minds. Here the stakes for your generation are now the sharpest.
The Government has no shortage of AI ambition.
The AI Opportunities Action Plan sets out the goal of ten million workers upskilled in AI by 2030.
These are the right ambitions. But they rest on a flawed assumption if they are read as primarily a technology problem.
They are not. They are a human capability problem.
In this year's H4Transport cohort, ten of the eleven problems you tackled involved data, technology or AI.
You did not study that technology in a classroom.
You applied it, under pressure, to problems the Department for Transport had identified as urgent.
That is exactly the kind of applied capability the country is calling for.
Because here is the critical thing about AI: it raises the premium on precisely what you have been trained to do.
AI can generate answers. What it cannot do is decide which question is worth asking. It cannot own the outcome. It cannot sit across from a senior official and challenge the framing of a problem that has resisted every previous attempt at solution.
You can. That makes you exceptionally well-placed to use AI responsibly and effectively, not as a shortcut around judgement, but as a tool deployed by people who have already learned to interrogate assumptions and validate them against reality.
That is the discipline at the core of this programme. It is not a coincidence that it is exactly what the AI era most urgently needs.
-------
The scale of what you have been part of this year extends well beyond the United Kingdom.
In April, this programme launched for the first time in continental Europe at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich. Poland follows in October. Ukraine and Denmark in 2027.
The ambition is to build a genuinely European national security innovation talent base, built on the same model that you have just completed.
Earlier this year, student teams from Loughborough University and the College of William & Mary in Virginia were invited to NATO Headquarters in Brussels to present their findings.
Working in parallel, they had tackled the same operational challenge: maintaining continuity of medical data during high-intensity conflict, where casualty rates may exceed 1,000 personnel per day.
They mapped not only the technical failures in the system but the institutional and policy barriers preventing progress.
The presentations generated serious institutional interest, conversations with the Centre of Excellence for Military Medicine, UK defence representatives, senior military medical leadership.
One senior leader in that room, watching those students stand before the Alliance's most senior stakeholders, said simply:
"You are the future." Amen to that…
-----------
Before I close, I want to say something directly to each of you about what you have accomplished this year.
You gave up your time to engage with problems that are genuinely difficult.
You talked to people you would never otherwise have met.
You were told your ideas didn't work, and you went back and found better ones.
You have sat in rooms with senior government officials and argued your case with evidence.
That takes courage and it takes character.
But more than any specific deliverable, you have become a certain kind of person: one who looks at a national problem and thinks, I might be able to help with that.
You run towards hard problems, not away from them.
That mindset, that combination of humility and ambition, of curiosity and mission, is precious.
The country needs more of it. Urgently.
Those who have come through this programme before you are now in the Metropolitan Police, the National Crime Agency, the Serious Fraud Office, Rolls-Royce, NATO, the charity sector and more.
Two are pursuing doctoral research.
From this year's cohort alone, 58 of you are intending to apply to the Ministry of Defence; 26 to DSIT; 24 to the Home Office.
That pipeline is not the result of a recruitment campaign. It is the result of immersion, of being trusted with hard problems, and discovering that you could handle them.
Tonight we recognise the individuals and teams who have gone furthest and worked hardest.
These awards are not prizes. They are signals: this is what mission-driven thinking looks like at its best. And what all of you should aim for, in everything that comes next.
---------
Abraham Lincoln's 1862 message to Congress ended with a call that still has the power to move us: "We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth."
He was speaking about something specific to his moment. But the structure of his challenge belongs to every generation at a critical juncture.
The countries that will win in defence, in clean energy, in artificial intelligence, will not simply be those that invest the most capital. They will be those that pair that capital with people who know how to apply it – to the right problems, with the right methods, at pace, under conditions of genuine uncertainty.
You are those people.
The Common Mission Project is helping to build our talent base – in the United Kingdom and now, increasingly, across Europe.
You are all part of building it. One person at a time. One problem at a time.
Congratulations to all of you. Be proud of what you have done and who you have become.
And thank you – all of you – for the contribution you are making to the country.
Especially at this moment in time, when we need everyone to be the very best versions of themselves. Anything short of that and we will not meet the moment and secure the future that this country deserves.