Lately I have been hearing much talk about government needing to take more risk and learn from failure (and so on); not least from Sir Gus O’Donnell in an article in the Telegraph yesterday. But I can’t help feeling that this thinking is more than a bit wobbly: government should be taking less risk…
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Risk, failure, Sir Gus and obsessive compulsive incrementalism
Creating cultures in government that cope with complexity
Following on from thinking in a few recent posts about the emerging nature of change in government (and after inspiration and help from Noah Raford) I have put together a white paper available as a PDF or here…
Governments are facing new, game-changing complexity. They are dealing with increasingly pressing and diverse problems: from improving public services, to ensuring national security, to dealing with the global financial crisis. Each problem has its own specific set of issues; but now, in a world of mounting complexity, these issues interact and it is near-impossible to manage them separately. A focus on applying […]
There is not “No chance for G-Cloud”
I was stirred by an article in the Guardian’s government computing section: No Minister: No chance for the G Cloud which questions the viability of the Government’s approach to cloud computing. Whilst doing anything transformative in government IT is going to be hard, I see much to recommend in the approach being taken. I wrote this comment in response (copied here)…
When things aren’t working
Nuff said.
Noses for hire: a new kind of help?
This post is about how I think government organisations need to change, and how to get the right people to do the right things to make this change happen. In particular, I will talk about hired help. And about noses.
“I object to this social… stuff”
I talk with people quite a lot about using social software in organisations. This post is about the objections I hear and how I respond.
If you come to this fresh, what follows may lack context. Take a look at my earlier post ‘Creating cultures that cope with complexity’, which explains why I think we need to work differently and how social software can help us do it.
“Storing private data online is too risky”
We are quite happy to store our money online: why not our data? The banking system we have today originated in Renaissance Italy; and I often […]
The Crazy Ones
If you work in an organisation that you think is weighed down by its ways then there is something you can do. Take a close look at the icon for Apple’s TextEdit software…
‘Collaboration’ is too good a word to waste
I have just been reading the recent Home Affairs Committee report: New Landscape of Policing. There is an interesting chapter on Collaboration and in particular I was struck by the use of the word collaboration itself.
A view on the PASC Report on Change in Government and why just “doing stuff” will come into its own
I have just finished reading the Public Administration Select Committee’s (PASC) recent report on Change in Government (pdf). Undoubtedly much effort has gone into it, with contributions from many wise people; but I can’t help feeling that it misses something very important, which makes the thrust of its conclusions …er …wrong.
This thing is Complexity…
Everywhere things are getting more complex. I believe that (probably some time ago) we have crossed a sort of Rubicon to a place where the conventional wisdom of government is a lot less reliable. It’s as though the laws of physics have changed. […]
