Public Strategist

You can’t institutionalize innovation. If you could, everyone would do it. Carl Bass, quoted by Brian Bergstein

I went to two events yesterday. The first was the launch of the Government Digital Service, or rather a housewarming party for their shiny new offices. In fine agile tradition, they put on a slick show and tell with short sharp presentations about their work and achievements topped and tailed by Francis Maude, Mike Bracken [...]

Archimedes had taken baths before. Quoted by Alistair Croll

[Large companies] fear disruption far more than they do destruction. They push the decision to innovate back because things are OK today. George Buckley, chairman and chief executive, 3M

Everybody who has had much to do with the development of government web services knows that there have been failures of imagination, failures of bravery, failures of technique and failures to seize opportunities – as well as successes in the teeth of opposition and incomprehension. Few have had the opportunity to start from scratch (though [...]

This is how conversations work, or rather how one conversation played out on twitter this morning. Tricky subject, no right answer, constructive discussion.* But perhaps most important of all, those issues are being discussed in public for a government proof of concept which hasn’t yet even been launched. It is that which is more radical [...]

When I was 17, my first proper paid job was in the public library just down the road from the Elephant and Castle. It was the first time I had come across large print books. They had their own section, and there was a huge demand for them. But though it was much more intensely [...]

When it comes to innovation, the customer is rarely right. At least, they’re rarely right about what they want next. Paul Valerio (via Amanda Gore)

The oddest thing is not a gathering of almost 200 people choosing to spend a Saturday enthusiastically debating how they can use their deep collective knowledge of the workings of public services radically to improve them. That is startling enough, but it’s not the oddest thing. Considerably odder than that is that having spent a [...]

Public sector organisations have a tendency to be elephantine. I suggested a few days ago that this was at least in part as a result of their size and age, rather than necessarily because being elephantine was limited to the public sector. In a comment on that post, Rik Barker challenged that view: I’ve been [...]