21st Century Government Learning Community of Practice #3: Learning to Move Fast and Fix Things

In our Community of Practice co-creation thus far, one of the key themes has been how to get from point A (the current state of play in Government in the UK) to point B (variously – Mission-ready; rewiring the state, now Move Fast, Fix Things). All of these involve the core engine of learning and transformation in the civil service and public sector. Or: Learning to Transform, which was the lens for the work that in part inspired the idea of a Community of Practice, sharing what we’ve learnt in Brazil, Barbados, and in our former work in Schools of Government around the world, including the Harvard Kennedy School.

Learning and transformation in Government is hard, intensive work – but also, literally, transformational. And the good news is, there is a tonne of evidence of what works, and what definitely doesn’t work, in government, for both – stemming from programmes cited as inspiring some of the current programme of work, and beyond.

In our Curiosity Incubator | Accelerator for Good programme, we’ve been working on how to adapt the best of innovation approaches to public policy problems over the past 3 years, experimenting with how to move faster and generate solutions to fix things. We’ve learned a lot about what translates and what doesn’t from digitally-led innovation practices to the work of public policy.

This is building on more than a decade’s worth of experience in Government learning, including working on some of the core principles that inspired the speech – whether it’s looking at Sludge in the US Government or how the White House Innovation Fellowships were designed into and with existing learning and transformation strategies in Washington.

In the Learning assessment Pyramid of Needs from blog 2 of our CoP creation, a lot of the digital skills discussed in the Move Fast, Fix Things speech are at the top: at Level 3 once we have a plan of action on current ways of working and capacities and capabilities. One of the key differences between the US examples cited in the speech is how the US Government and its professional learning ecosystem approached Levels 1 and 2 of the Pyramid, providing a foundation from which the Level 3 approaches, secondments, and learning programmes and curricula could be launched.

A few key things to bear in mind in US White House to UK Cabinet Office translation

1.        US Government has over many decades had one of the most robust and layered professional learning ecosystems: both in-Government and in its relationship with Schools like the Harvard Kennedy School, whose ongoing US civil service learning provision predates the formulation of the School itself, going back 70+ years. There isn’t a central National School of Government; rather, it’s an ecosystem of continuous learning, both professional (public administration) and integrating public policy learning and thinking. This, plus a professionalised focus on incorporating evidence of what works in organisational development in government, working iteratively with researchers around the world on best practice, is the foundation on which things like Sludge audits and White House Innovation Fellowships are built on. We don’t have the same layered and robust landscape of professional government learning here in the UK (yet!)

2.        MPAs: the MBAs of Government: another key difference between the US and UK (and other countries) is that there is a focus, like on Business Administration at the business schools, on Public Administration, not just Public Policy. So the focus on delivery rather than policy papers from the Move Fast, Fix Things speech is both an academic discipline and a post-graduate training ecosystem in the US. We in the UK tend to focus on the Public Policy side of the fence in both our academic and Government approaches, knowledge and evidence generation – but understanding, incorporating and adapting evidence of what works in PA in the new curriculum and design of the School will be crucial. This would mean there is an underlying set of skills and knowledge onto which when the current and future trends of digital platforms or technology we’re currently focusing on change, these underlying skills and knowledge can form the basis of capacity and capabilities that can rapidly adapt, rather than having to re-do the curriculum from scratch with each new technology

Overall, both understanding how the US examples work and in what landscape, to be able to adapt to what we have here, and also expanding the sphere of influence and inspiration into learning from and adapting what works from other governmental learning ecosystems outside pre-2024 White House will make the formulation of the Move Fast, Fix Things and the new National School of Government far more robust. But understanding what the system is that we’re adapting some of these ideas from can help.

Top tips for (re)designing transformation and learning in Government: 

1. Avoid Zombie learning and transformation approaches: and there's a lot of them! Like Zombie leadership approaches, there are a lot of debunked approaches to learning (for example: online, static e-learning modules which have a learning loss of 93% over 2 weeks, on average) and transformation and change (leading with a mass communications or “training” campaign, rather than starting with groups or coalitions of the willing, and building out from intrinsic momentum) that we are still using. Evidence of how people learn, change, and behave should form the basis of approaches if we want them to be successful (Sludge audits did this well - if you have the Levels 1 and 2 capacity and capabilities to run them).

2. Building capacity – not viewing learning as downloading skills into people’s brains via “training” and expecting better outcomes to pop out.

3. Secondments: Air dropping people from other disciplines or environments, like the private sector, into existing structures without re-thinking or re-design of how those teams work and work happens doesn’t in itself result in “better” skills or more innovative culture rubbing off onto the government team by osmosis.

4. Learning only from UK experience (rather than other very successful and transforming schools of government across the world outside of the US) means we repeat mistakes we don’t have to, losing precious time and opportunity.

5. A successful School of Government is not a mini-academic institution or a manufacturing-era technical skills training provider: it’s a school of How To+.

More to come!

If you’re interested in finding out more evidence-based strategies for change and transformation, join the next cohort of our Curiosity Incubator | Accelerator for Good programme, starting February 24^th. More here!