Governing by looking back : Learning from successes and failures

Abstract

Governing by Looking Back examines how governments investigate and learn in a more ad-hoc fashion, from parts of their past that already have become labelled as a ‘success’ or a ‘failure’ in professional, public and political arenas. The imperative in learning from a problematic past (‘failure’) is to avoid its repetition, and to examine carefully whether a failure is due to implementation problems or inherent in an erroneous theory of change that underpins the design of the policy. Conversely, the rationale for looking back at successes is to learn positive lessons about designs and practices that can be emulated, reinforced and transplanted, whilst not ignoring the role played by incidental highly conducive circumstances which are impossible to replicate. The main argument of the paper is that there is a structural imbalance in how the political system and the APS are tuned to detect and attend to government ‘failures’ (intensely so, and mostly in terms of accountability and blame) as opposed to ‘successes’ (much more sporadically, and when it occurs mostly in the form of unreflective desires to ‘copy’ and ‘roll out’). This imbalance manifests itself both at the ‘supply side’ (the provision of performance information and the operation of accountability mechanisms) and at the ‘reception side’ (APS attitudes and practices in anticipating and responding to such feedback). The first section of the paper conceptualizes ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in public policy and describes the distinctive opportunities and challenges that each presents for institutional learning. Inevitably reputational and political considerations, power relations and ingrained organizational cultures and routines shape the ways in which public agencies interrogate their pasts and those of other agencies at home and abroad as well as their appetite for and styles of learning from this engagement with past practices. In the second section we focus specifically on the feedback systems in and around the APS, and how they construe, diagnose and draw lessons from successes and failures. Reviewing both regular and ad-hoc forms of review – for example, royal commissions, senate inquiries, commissioned reviews – we call attention to the structural imbalance that exists between ‘success-finding’ and ‘failure-finding’ practices, as well as practices that are driven with an accountability focus as opposed to an institutional learning focus. Here, we find the deck is stacked towards episodic practices which tend focus on failure and treat it in terms of accountability and (risk of) blame. We consider the implications that this has for building and sustaining institutional learning cultures. The final section offers a range of strategies, gleaned both from promising practices at home and abroad, to strengthen the APS’s capacity to learn from its own successes and failures as well as those of others. On the supply side, there is a need to strengthen mechanisms and practices of ‘success finding’ (e.g. the use of ‘positive evaluation’ methodologies, awards and competitions). On the reception side the APS needs to institutionalise and safeguard learning-enhancing values of openness, curiosity, risk absorption, self-reflection and experimentation – going self-consciously against the Zeitgeist of failure finding, blame avoidance, reputation management and thus predominantly defensive responses to negative feedback. The final pages of the paper offer a smorgasbord of strategies for doing so, gleaned from reviews and research both at home and abroadTra