The facts are that the critical mass of letter delivery has gone. It isn't coming back. Yes, I know your grandad likes receiving his bank statements in the post, and it's occasionally nice to receive a postcard from your mum when she's on holiday, but email and IM have comprehensively won. Sure, vinyl sales are up, but stamp collectors aren't going to sustain this industry.

Royal Mail should embrace this. The US Postal Service offers something called Informed Delivery. They email you a scan of the front of any envelopes they're due to deliver. That - hopefully - tells you if your Very Important Letter is going to arrive today.

The USPS already scans envelopes for internal tracking, so adding a customer facing service probably wasn't the hardest thing to do.

Royal Mail could do that. And possibly even go a step further. Why can't I pay RM to open my main, scan it, then email it to me? If I'm away from home, I get the information I want. If I need the hard copy I can ask for a physical delivery. If I don't, they can shred it.

There are services which do this - but they're mostly focussed on businesses and require you to change your primary address.

Speaking of changing address, why can't RM sell me a virtual address? I know they have a PO Box service (for £400 per year!) but with the rise in Internet shopping, privacy conscious citizens, and fears of identity theft wouldn't it make sense to offer a "PO Box light" option? Or sell one-time disposable addresses? Or let people post your things using only an email address?

Most people don't need deliveries every single day - although I'm old enough to remember the "second post" each day. Perhaps people want to specify when they want their postal mail? I work from home on Mondays and Fridays, so there's no point delivering to me outside those days. Why not let people opt-out of Saturday delivery? Or opt-in to only Saturday delivery?

Hell, combined with envelope scanning, I could tell my postie not to deliver certain items. Let them shred the junk for me! Or let me automatically "return to sender" anything for the people who used to live here.

Ultimately, Royal Mail is right - their only future is in parcel delivery. With, perhaps, a small legacy business for people who can't or won't use email. Any investment they make into innovation for letters is money down the drain.

The saddest thing is; this was inevitable. Even if they'd embraced innovation 20 years ago, that wouldn't have stopped or slowed the decline in their core business. They are selling a steam-powered product in a solar powered world.

Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.

As part of my MSc, I'm being challenged to think about the nature of disruption and how it might apply to my employer - the UK Civil Service.

There are some obvious difference between the state and private companies. The state does not, for the most part, have customers. And, where people do pay money, they're mostly paying for services. Where people pay for products, it is for monopoly items like passports and driving licences.

Let's imagine (and this a blog post about an imaginary future - it isn't about proposed policy) that a new government department is created. And, in the vein of Uber et al it doesn't have any... what?

What is it that traditional departments produce to be consumed? Reports? Memos? Policy? Perhaps the answer is... advice!

Consider the fictional "Ministry of Advice". Any Member of the Government or Civil Servant can post a question asking for policy advice - and any Civil Servant across the whole organisation can answer.

Think of it like StackOverflow or Quora but for government. StackOverflow doesn't employ any experts - it provides a platform where people can ask and answer questions.

The "Ministry of Advice" does not employ any advisors.

Perhaps the "Ministry of Advice" is gamified. Civil Servants who consistently post high quality answers get points. And points mean prizes.

Yes, it would need careful moderation - as all online tools do. And, yes, the incentives would have to be aligned carefully. And - almost certainly - it would put people's noses out of joint. When it turns out the spotty kid in the basement of the Ministry of Transport knows more about electoral law than the Subject Matter Experts in the Department for Constitutional Affairs, there will be uproar.

But that's the point of disruptive innovation. We don't kowtow to established hierarchies, we rip up the old ways of doing things and allow unbridled knowledge and creativity to find new solutions.

There are a thousand reasons why this thought-experiment wouldn't work. And I'm equally sure there are dozens of better ways you could improve the Civil Service. But there's a grain of an idea here.

Could the next government department be entirely virtual?

One of our missions in The Lab is to introduce the ideas of prototyping and rapid innovation into the business. That's a fairly hefty systemic change for any company - so how do we go about doing it?

Paper aeroplanes.

Yup. Sheets of paper, crudely folded and then thrown are the perfect way to get people collaborating, innovating, testing, and refining. Let me explain…

We took a conference of ~250 people and split them in to teams of 8. Each were giving loads of coloured paper, drinking straws, string, tape, and instruction cards.

They had three tasks to complete (feel free to use these images if you want to run this event for your team - each links to a full size version)

• Jumping Through Hoops - throw a plane through a hoop as many times as possible in 30 seconds.

• Taken For A Ride - how far can you throw a plane while keeping a pilot safe?

• Round The Bend - how many times can you throw and catch a plane around a pole?

We gave each team a scorecard which allowed them 3 attempts at each task - and 60 minutes to score as many points as they could.

A Simple Start

The first planes which people built were, I think it's fair to say, crude. Vaguely remembered childhood skills were dredged up to make serviceable craft.

But, with testing, iteration, and "inspiration" from other teams, new planes began to take flight.

Some of the planes were of a less orthodox nature - yet still managed to complete the task set.

Engineering Complexity

Some were beautiful and baroque piece of engineering which took ages to build - yet fell short of their intended target, veered wildly off course, and nose dived. It's almost like it's a metaphor or something….

https://youtube.com/watch?v=YKP-OThqJi0

Team Work

Even the best designed and build planes still need a competent team working in tandem to deliver results.

Bending The Rules

In each task, teams came up with clever ways around the limitations of the rules.

We saw people using zip wires, stuffing multiple small planes within bigger planes, and - in one memorable case - using trebuchets.

Evolution

Everyone got into the spirit of the event - we saw people attempt a task with one sort of plane, see it fail, then rapidly design another plane, test it privately, and bring it back for another attempt - all within a few minutes.

Some teams started by saying "we don't know how to build a plane" and then realised that the only way you learn is by trying, failing, trying again.

We had teams who were convinced that their design was perfect - only to have to radically reassess what they were doing when faced with competition.

By the end of the hour, every team had build dozens of planes and had experienced the joy of rapid design and prototyping.

What no one did was ring up a big consultancy company, pay a million pounds, and then end up with a poorly performing plane which didn't meet any of the needs of the users. Funny that…

Huge thanks to Jez and Nic for coming up with the paper plane concept, Joe and James for keeping score, and everyone else on The Lab team for helping out with the event. Special thanks to Brendan O'Rourke for letting us experiment at his conference :-)