Total Place: Lessons Learnt report

The “Lessons Learnt” report was commissioned from OPM as part of the learning strand of Total Place. It brings together learning from evaluations of previous Government initiatives with interviews with key policymakers and commentators.

The Leadership Centre, together with Communities and Local Government and the Total Place High Level Officials’ Group, have been using the report to try and avoid the pitfalls encountered by previous initiatives and to make the most of opportunities to share the learning to benefit others. We will continue to use the report to support our whole-systems work throughout Total Place.

Key messages from the report include:

National programmes are helpful in focussing attention and accelerating progress but not sufficient. Change requires local leadership, accurate data, a local incentive to improve and access to ways to rethink and redesign services.
Good process design is an important element in success. Relationships are crucial – and successful initiatives are designed to bring localities together with each other and with key players in Whitehall to explore difficult issues – able to “hold” tension and discomfort.
Over time, processes tend to harden – good dialogue is replaced by process monitoring. Localities need continuing permission to develop local solutions.
Civil servants find it difficult to ‘buy into’ initiatives from other departments which cut across the national programmes for which they feel accountable. Without a sense of what they gain, other departments will find it hard to engage.
The model of ‘pilot and roll out’ itself can be problematic, since the situation for pilots cannot be replicated in roll-out. Early high level sponsorship in Whitehall creates relationships and a quality of shared thinking that is hard to reproduce everywhere.
Underlying mind-sets are predominantly based on ‘programme delivery’ – monitoring progress using red, green and amber lights – which may not work well in tackling difficult social problems. Systems thinking offers scope to deal with high levels of complexity, but we should recognise we are working with ‘open’ not ‘closed’ systems.
Political change is an important part of the equation – solutions cannot always be delivered through ‘managerial action’ – and political backing is essential.
Leadership in these circumstances involves making space for dialogue between centre and localities – creating ‘real time’ data sharing, paying attention to the pressures and assumptions that underlie behaviours – and sustaining senior political and Whitehall backing to ensure that innovation can be courageous.

Download the full Lessons Learnt report.