In 2025 my collaborator Lachlan Hunter and I created The Good Global Citizen Sprint, a volunteer “design thinking” sprint drawing on the global Agile community.
As one participant put it: “We weren’t a task force. We weren’t convened by any institution.”
A Good Global Citizen Sprint brings together 7–10 globally minded professionals to self-organise around a shared problem space. Guided by Good Global Citizen values, Agile-inspired roles and the Double Diamond framework, the group spends three months exploring, diverging and converging around the challenge, ultimately identifying a tangible next step they can take together.
In the 2025 Good Global Citizen Sprint we ran, the problem space identified was education for Afghan women.
We met one hour a fortnight to take on a single challenge: education for Afghan women and girls.
Over six sessions we mapped the barriers to girls’ education, mapped existing NGOs and mentorship pathways, explored offline “edge AI” for low-connectivity learning, and tested our ideas with Afghan perspectives. The result of the Citizen Sprint next step was three G7 agenda pitches:
- The Digital Door Needs Unlocking: internet access as the foundation for education
- Invest In Her Future, Secure Ours: a G7 Education Investment Compact linking investment, aid and trade to measurable gains in girls’ education
- The World Holds Its Breath Until She Speaks: direct representation for the communities affected
As the Citizen Sprint closed and we facilitated the group in forming its pitch, I was left with an important question: how can an ordinary group of citizens—outside think tanks and the established G7 ecosystem—meaningfully honour and advance an issue they believe deserves a place on the agenda?
More about Citizen Sprint:
- Values-led: Uses Good Global Citizen values as organising principles, creating a shared foundation for people who want to contribute positively to global challenges.
- Self-organising: Brings together 7–10 globally minded professionals who self-organise around a problem space they care about and want to meaningfully influence.
- Problem-focused: The group selects one defined problem space and works on it intensively over approximately three months, rather than beginning with a predetermined solution.
- Structured for discovery: Uses the Double Diamond framework and facilitated workshops to move through cycles of diverging, exploring, ideating and converging, supported by adapted Agile roles such as Problem Owner and Problem Manager.
- Action-oriented: The goal is not necessarily to “solve” a complex global problem, but to arrive at a credible, tangible next step—an initiative, experiment, recommendation, prototype or pathway that the group can put into the world.
