Andrew Adonis on reforming public services
EDIT: I meant to add some comment to this but published in error! Anyway, here it is…
Andrew Adonis (I’m from the colonies, I just can’t do the lords thing) arguing for an incremental approach to public service innovation.
He points out 6 key strategies for successful reforms.
1. follow failed attempts at reform, and learn from their mistakes
2. are incremental and do not try to achieve ‘whole-system’ transformation
3. are based on existing best-practice, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel
4. require huge political drive
5. require considerable support from stakeholders, even if this support is not made public
6. create a new consensus in the general public.
The last point is especially interesting - how do you move the culture of what is expected forward so that success governments are less partial to partisan destruction of successful policies. It seems to me from this speech that he thinks the coalition has not rejected as much as they’d like us to think.
The other point that this approach raises is that if innovation consists of small cultural changes that then take their time to propagate, how do they argue their case in a 24-hour news-cycle/press release political mechanism.