Should every public organisation be required to set up and maintain a learning bank as a way of improving their services? 

A learning bank would gather, assess and publish the organisational findings gleaned from their improvement endeavours. 

Alongside this, it could catalogue their serious case reviews and other assessments and bank the exit interviews of all staff. 

But while it would critically evaluate ‘findings', it would not cleanse or purge them to remove embarrassing details. 

In addition to increasing the level of public accountability and transparency, each organisation would be able to benefit in time from the learnings of other parts of the public sector. 

Provided each could overcome ‘not invented here syndrome', where every new leader appears to take pride in reinventing wheels, it could also significantly cut the bill for external consultants. 

That said, where external advisers have to be brought in, the intellectual property could remain with the organisation rather than be packaged up and sold on elsewhere by the relevant agency. 

Practically, it would not be difficult; the challenge would be cultural. 

While the Government could easily publish regulations to require it, public sector leaders might fight to keep all but the most positive findings under wraps. They could, of course, argue uncomfortable revelations are potentially reputationally-damaging. And though this may on the surface appear to be true, poor practice harms reputations not uncomfortable reports. 

Another potential success-risk would be the sanitisation of all activity. 

Just as the Freedom of Information Act led leaders to adopt a more terse approach to record-keeping and the use of invisible channels, such as WhatsApp, so new avoidance techniques could be adopted to prevent anything uncomfortable emerging, as it almost inevitably would. 

That said, if health and social care leaders were able to overcome their taciturn tendencies the benefits could easily and quickly outweigh the pitfalls. 

Which chief executive would not want to read the accumulated learnings of someone else's life at the top in local government? Morsels such as working with challenging members, building relationships with the media, getting partners on side, seeing risks before they eat you and knowing the best time to leave (while securing the best terms) would be guaranteed box office. 

But unlike in the private sector, public sector leaders rarely step out of the shadows, write memoirs and live off book tours. 

More's the pity. Discretion could be guaranteed: public sector senior leader sharing their warts and all assessment, looking back over their career, could anonymise them and manage the timing of their release to protect the innocent at heart. 

Organisational learnings, particularly from failure, could increase accountability. 

Lawyers would no doubt want to pick over the paragraphs prior to publication but the richness of this potential trove is not to be under-estimated. There is always plenty to learn but while leaders inevitably engage in the business of spinning the best of a bad job, there is little real value in this other than assuaging the egos of those at the top. 

Failure is a great teacher, something, aside from instances of incompetence, in which there should be no shame. 

Those who never fail rarely succeed – or even try. And there could be an immediate financial benefit – this brand of openness and accountability being in the culture might help to cut the medical negligence bill which is now not far short of the total budget of a small nation state. 

A learning bank could offer the perfect entry point to all new leaders. 

It would be the perfect, ‘this is what we know so far' guide to bedding into the organisation. At the moment, most of this vital stuff has to be gleaned from passing remarks and knowing glances. 

But the real prize is the collective body of knowledge and its potentially transformative effect. And if an uber-transparent public sector culture were to emerge, organisations could eschew the endless spin in favour of an approach that promises a continuous journey towards getting better at every turn. 

It could echo the words of one senior US commercial leader, whose name escapes: ‘I have to learn from other people's mistakes – I don't have time to learn from my own.'

If you would like to respond to this article or have a radical solution of your own, contact: l.peart@hgluk.com