Episode
Challenger Cities EP94: We Wunt Be Druv with John V Willshire
- Podcast
- Challenger Cities
- Published
- Jul 29, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3655
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://rss.com/podcasts/challengercitytoronto/3031672
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Summary
John V Willshire is the third corner of a loose triptych of British innovation-strategy types I can never quite give a single job title. He runs Smithery, carries a little yellow card called an obliquoscope for teaching himself to notice things, and has a gift for the metaphor that reframes everything. In this case, swapping the language of levers and control for gardening where you can't tell a plant what to do, you can only offer it a trellis and see what climbs. We get from there to Sussex, its improbable 2006-vintage "ancient" charter, and We Wunt Be Druv , a game about refusing the devolution you're handed and designing one that works round here instead. It's really a conversation about agency; why you only notice what you feel you could act on, why organisations don't care about things but people do, and why the smallest possible thing of a homemade game played in Thomas Paine's front room might be how the biggest possible future actually starts. And this is the piece that kicked off our conversation: https://buttondown.com/artefacts/archive/artefact-263/