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...
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 the right technical solution for each problem in isolation is unlikely to work. The real challenge is to develop cultures that will …
