Everyone in government wants to learn. Nobody wants to remember

Learning or remembering — join the conversation on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_everyone-in-government-wants-to-learn-nobody-activity-7490655290577690625-cQl3?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAACuq-oBecVFDW6PCf3lkoG-peMeuLBeoho

Everyone in government wants to learn. Nobody wants to remember.

It’s a strategic move to deliver the answer first, and have the ‘machinery of government’ then set about making it happen.

‘Rewiring the state’. Yet more NHS reorganisation. LGR. Huge changes, designed and launched without discovery, listening, evidence, or inquiry — sometimes driven by conviction and direct experience, a powerful starting point.

Let’s say success depends on two things: the depth of insight available, and the space people have to act.

Little power + thin insight = ritual compliance, helplessness, local busyness. A poor framing that’s untouchable. You lose drive and capability where it counts.

Strong insight + little room to act = frustrated analysts: warnings without traction, intelligence without intervention. We all become — ahem — thinkpiece writers.

The most dangerous combination is significant room to act + *incomplete* insight.
Confident error. Premature solutions. Unmanaged consequences. Large-scale changes by people — who may be brilliant, and have *some* brilliant knowledge and information — who have authority to act, but not enough understanding of the domain they’re acting upon.

Strong insight combined + room to act gives us something rarer: responsible agency. Inquiry, influence, experimentation, correction and learning.

And there’s memory.
Not the same as the difference between thin and deep insight.

Insight concerns how well you understand what is happening here, now.
Memory concerns what has happened to knowledge over time.

Some old knowledge is stale, answers preserved after the conditions which made them useful have gone. A whizzy reform dragged from storage, stripped of context, sold back as innovation.

Other knowledge has matured — revised by failure, contradiction, changed circumstances and other people’s experience — decades of learning not because it’s remained the same for decades, but because it hasn’t.

The question is whether government can tell the difference.
When undertaking momentous reforms, can it ask people who really *know* shit about this stuff?
Not people who’ve grabbed a few ideas, built a brand, learned which rooms matter. Not only the people whose faces fit.
Not just the people closest to ministers, who may know… less. Or maybe loads BUT not some critical stuff.

Can it find people who remember what was tried, failed, what nearly worked, what was suppressed, what was abandoned, what has changed?

Moving beyond standard consultation could help.
But only if engagement begins before the frame has been fixed, asking ‘who understands this system, who remembers what happened before, and who are we least likely to ask?’

Not just Eric-Weinstein-posting here; I am omeone with something to add. Butit’s all around digital, social value, procurement, transformation, where these reorgs always go wrong — and so on…

What real knowledge do you see government needing right now, but not acknowledging?