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I’ve been reading the Cabinet Office’s (first draft – open to improvement) Test, Learn and Grow playbook alongside Nick Kimber’s reflection on its first year. Nick says changing how money and accountability flow has been harder and slower than running service tests. Yep, I bet! Year two will focus on those barriers, with more of the work owned by places themselves.
The playbook is a welcome, practical contribution: it helps teams question assumptions, understand people’s experience, and test and adapt ideas, with serious attention to evidence and safeguarding. It also recognises that funding and governance shape what’s possible.
It’s stronger, though, on helping teams learn within those arrangements than on showing how their learning can change them. The next edition needs equally practical guidance on who can reopen the commissioned task, change a funding condition, or challenge a measure of success, and how disagreements between the organisations involved get resolved.
Imagine workers helping a family who would otherwise be passed between services. They persuade people to cooperate, obtain an exception, and get something useful done. If the next family needs another round of persuasion, how much of the improvement have we actually made available to them?
The pilot may have demonstrated the value of an arrangement the organisation hasn’t agreed to make generally available. It may even make the existing system look more viable, because somebody is now absorbing the work it pushes onto families.
Nick brings together relational, digital, and policy practice, with learning running through all three. He describes policy as setting the agenda. I’d like to see how that agenda can be reopened when people’s lives expose a problem with the question we commissioned a team to answer.
Some rules will need to be retained for good public reasons; others will need to change. I’d want the record to show who had authority to decide, whose experience informed them, and what they did.
And as places take on more of the work, what resources and authority go with it? Being free to adapt the playbook won’t necessarily give a team the means to change a funding condition.
Through The Public Service Transformation Academy and RedQuadrant, I want to help practitioners and the people commissioning their work examine some of these cases together, including where they disagree about what needs to change.
I’d be interested in examples where frontline learning changed a rule for everyone who came afterwards. What enabled that change to survive once the pilot’s additional attention and support ended?
