‘Not invented here' syndrome may be one of the biggest obstacles to change in health and social care. Everyone seems to want to make their own mark – and, sadly, mistakes.
Should public organisations, alongside their duty of candour (which seems still to be in short supply) be given a duty to review, learn then share?
What this would mean in practice is that before kicking off any new major project, they would be obliged to review lessons from other organisations who had undertaken similar work or the same work elsewhere, to extract the key lessons and to apply those to their upcoming project. Specifically, it would outlaw reinventing the wheel.
(In some organisations, particularly those with newly appointed senior leaders, there can be a tendency to deny their own past and pretend that previous endeavours never even existed never mind learn from them).
The truth is that there's little new under the sun and most of the things any senior leader is likely to do has already been done elsewhere and worked – or not. Both are valuable.
What tends to happen is that successes are trumpeted from the rooftops – whether they're partial victories or not. And failures are quietly dropped. Catastrophic failures are hidden (see NDAs).
Success can be a poor teacher. When projects succeed, leaders can play down the bits that didn't work or even suggest that they don't matter simply because they can point to and trumpet their achievement. But everything can be improved. There are always lessons to learn. But when basking in recent achievements, leaders can be blinded to their own vulnerabilities and idiosyncrasies. And more so in organisations where sycophancy is part of the leadership culture.
There should be no shame in failure. But there is. So when it becomes public, leaders often swiftly usher in spinmeisters to distance the event from the present leadership or to explain it away.
Failure is something else altogether. There is so much to be extracted from failure. Before we can mine this rich seam, much will need to be changed.
First, we'll need to accept that public servants are not infallible and should not be hung out to dry for their errors, if unintentional. That's on us as citizens. And it's a big ask. It's an even bigger ask for the tabloids to whom this is fodder.
Second, senior leaders need to assume that errors will be made; all they have to do is see them, evaluate them and then learn from them.
Third, we need to abolish mitigating spin. No disrespect to communication advisers who will do what they can to minimise reputational damage but this is a false premise. Protecting infallibility is not the same as ensuring that you have a good reputation. Strong reputations can be built on the back of human frailty and fallibility.
Fourth, we need to put a cost on unhelpful origination – every time leaders start from scratch they waste both time and money. Yes, it's wonderful to have your own version of the bleeding obvious but it's just not necessary.
Fifth, we need not to bring in consultants to come up with solutions. Likely, they'll have picked up solutions (or originated them on the back of others' problems) from other organisations like yours. Pick up the phone instead and get some of their staff to give up some time to share what they've learned and in doing so save you thousands of pounds – it's a form of insourcing rather than outsourcing.
Finally, a national body could take on the role of storing and sharing review, learn and share reports as a way of making it easy to use them. They could also carry out annual meta-analyses, pulling out the key learning points – learning from the learning, as it were.
We might read the top 10 errors senior leaders make while creating change programmes (the majority of which, according to McKinsey fail anyway). Or you might find out the 10 warning signs that say your senior leader is in the departure lounge. There may be a bit of ‘I wish I'd known that at the time' - there's always a lot to learn from failure but, unfortunately, sometimes too late.
