Day: 16 March 2017

Organisational change

How can we stop reinventing policies? 

Click on the image to see the full infographic published with the report

A new report from the Institute for Government on policy churn – the perennial question of why government policy seems to be replaced and reinvented with what is sometimes extraordinary rapidity. There are some sensible ideas on how to do this better, though the idea that strengthening the centre will slow down the churn, rather than accelerate it, might be seen as rather optimistic by some. But it’s essentially looking at the symptoms rather than offering ways of addressing the underlying causes, with little obvious reason to expect much to change.

Emma Norris and Robert Adam – Institute for Government

Social and economic change

Improving Opportunities for Economic Mobility: New Evidence and Policy Lessons

Interesting short paper on economic mobility, based on US data, covering both the geography of upward mobility and the factors which seem to account for that variability. The factors are not very surprising in themselves; but the strength of their association with place is very striking – every year of childhood spent in a more upwardly mobile place makes the child more likely to be upwardly mobile. So the policy solution could be to move all the children. Or it could be to address the underlying issues without moving the children at all.

Raj Chetty – Stanford

Innovation Organisational change

Towards an experimental culture in government: reflections on and from practice 

Click on the image to see it as a large pdf
Governments have not generally been places of experimentation, but there are increasing numbers of experiments across the world in how to do experimentation, many of them referred to through this post. The last and perhaps most important of the reflections is on the culture of orgainsations which allows experimentation to flourish, including the principles summarised in the graphic.

Jesper Christiansen, Bas Leurs and Giulio Quaggiotto – NESTA