If we look across our public services in the UK, there is evidence that we been catastrophic failures at making knowledge contagious. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/AkfAN

Four a Day Picture Diary What are we doing? Where is it happening? Who is involved? Why? Or WTAF? Today. Why did we leave India with a centralised bureaucracy? (alongside railways and milky tea) open.substack.com/pub/ptaylor/... #travel

Our approach isn’t about rigid five-year plans; it's about rapid cycles of observation, conversation, trying things out, and learning. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/AjcgQ

Pseudo-autonomy: where the vocabulary of self-management is adopted, but the centralised infrastructure of control remains, rendering new ways of working inoperable. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/Alo7L

When formal hierarchies are flattened to create decentralised teams, the organisational immune system often reconstructs them informally to preserve the status quo. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/Al8QI

Organisational Antibodies Reject Place-Based and Decentralised Approaches ▸ https://lttr.ai/Al8QG

Place-based working at the community level focuses on identifying and amplifying these existing strengths, rather than solely focusing on deficits. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/AkfAV

A necessary rule of place-based or decentralised approaches lies in recognising that, left unchecked, the system will seek to overpower any efforts to change or disrupt the natural order. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/Al8QC

Run an annual “Process Obituary Contest.” Employees submit a dead-weight process and write its mock obituary, detailing its failure and celebrating its demise. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/Alo7A

Genuine place based and decentralised approaches are not merely structural changes; they are assaults on the fundamental logic of the traditional organisation. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/Alo7J

Only when we prioritise local influence and enable citizens to be both the problem-definers and the solution-builders will we rediscover the collective momentum that has driven us this far. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/AkfAZ

"The success of any community recovery strategy, whether focused on urban regeneration, tackling Anti-Social Behaviour (ASB), or implementing localised service delivery, ultimately rests upon one fragile foundation: trust." https://lttr.ai/Al29j

"This is our classic paradox: the metrics and targets that are intended to drive improvement can create a powerful set of incentives that actually work against the very innovation and risk-taking we need to strive for." https://lttr.ai/AkfAT

What a day yesterday #avfc

Why Decentralised Place-Based Approaches Can Fail ▸ https://lttr.ai/Alo7P

The digital by default model was largely driven by a cost-saving agenda, where the high expense of in-person interactions was the primary justification for pushing services online Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/AkfAO

The operational cost of the accountability sink is measured in failure demand. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/Alnd6

We must make a deliberate choice to institutionalise constructive dissent, recognising it as a form of commitment aimed at organisational learning. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/AljtA

The barrier to collaboration is inertia, and this inertia requires coordinated, multi-level intervention that targets structural reform, cultural change, and incentive realignment simultaneously. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/AleuS

The deep inertia against collaboration is primarily embedded in the public sector’s legislative, financial, and organisational designs, which inherently reward institutional isolation Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/AkSDp

"Symptoms of Decline: Ideas and approvals crawl up and down the hierarchy, and the organisation becomes plagued by endless meetings and committees, often with unclear objectives, breeding a culture where action is secondary to discussion." https://lttr.ai/AlYBi

The belief that metrics always improve performance is one of the biggest myths of the modern workplace. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/AkA6S

Are Small Companies Really Better At Innovation? ▸ https://lttr.ai/AkA6K

The only viable path to genuine public trust is through long-term relational commitment – where we stop treating communities as passive recipients who are there to generate our satisfaction statistics. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/AkwZo

As organisations grow, bureaucracy, approval layers, and hierarchy increase. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/AlMkt

Heretical thinking,a challenge to organisational sacred cows—those fundamental assumptions, practices, or long-established revenue streams—is suppressed in traditional organisations Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/AlBOI

Why Don’t We Enable More Heretical Thinking At Work?: https://lttr.ai/AlBN1

In communities marked by years of under-investment and repeated institutional failure—those often termed ‘left behind places'—trust is not merely low; it has been actively eradicated Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/AkwZm

Understanding how long the memory of that failure persists, and how quickly trust can be regained, is critical for those of us seeking to prove their long-term commitment to place based working Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/AlBOM

Giving a mandate for constructive dissent must be moved immediately from a discouraged anomaly to a mainstream strategic imperative. Invite treason against the status quo ▸ https://lttr.ai/AlBN0

Stripping an innovation of its cultural and behavioural “why” renders the resulting learning useless to a team operating in a different place Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/Ajcld

When centralised teams try to force adoption through documentation and process, they must increase control, auditing, and reporting Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/AjebS

The pivot we need to make is from viewing the end user as a demanding customer to viewing them as an essential, contributing participant. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/Ak05V

"The centralisation of risk aversion: ️ Modern institutions—banks, local governments, and partners—are heavily incentivised to avoid all possible legal risk, making them extremely hesitant to support non-standard, grassroots projects." https://lttr.ai/Ajuw5

Concentrate on relationships and metrics will improve. Concentrate on metrics and relationships will fail. ▸ https://lttr.ai/AkwrK

Coined by John Seddon, failure demand (or avoidable contact) is defined as demand on a service organisation that is caused by the organisation’s failure to do something, or to do something right, for a customer. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/AkeqE

The Schumpeter Mark I model, often associated with small, nimble organisations, describes a creative destruction pattern driven by new market entrants and the resulting high turbulence. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/AkA6N

The accountability sink functions as the structural generator of failure demand. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/Akepy

Really interesting framing by Rachael Wardell @theadcsltd.bsky.social around whether we need to build services that last forever, or celebrate the work that we're doing right now. Chimes with this post by @paulitaylor.bsky.social on planned obsolescence paulitaylor.com/2022/01/10/b... #LeadersF25

Innovation Labs often mimicked the appearance and work style of startups, using agile development and design thinking to rapidly prototype and test new ideas. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/Ai8tC

Failures in service delivery are often attributed to individual incompetence or malicious intent, but the true culprit is often systemic design failure. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/Akepr

Innovations spread through direct observation, apprenticeship, and a strong sense of reciprocity and collective action within a defined geographic and social group Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/AkmGV

If we want to move beyond systemic stagnation and unleash the potential of grassroots ingenuity, we must radically redefine success: it's not just about what scales nationally, but what sustains locally Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/AjebQ

Small organisations thrive in the space of exploration, radical innovation and product innovation—introducing disruptive changes to the market. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/AkiOh

The traditional bureaucratic model is designed to manage compliance with separate funding and accountability streams, which directly collides with the fluid network dynamics required for complex collaboration. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/AkSDS

"There is a delegating of critical decision-making authority away from humans and into immutable rulebooks, policies, bureaucratic protocols, or automated algorithms" paulitaylor.com/2025/10/31/c... < Very good post on failure demand in the public sector from @paulitaylor.bsky.social #localgov

Complaints Rise Because Our Organisations Are Designed To Generate Complaints: https://lttr.ai/AkfRN

"Organisations must formally reward and institutionalise the role of a boundary spanner or central connector—individuals specifically empowered to translate differences between agencies, consolidate common ground, and accelerate joint leadership." https://lttr.ai/AkSDW

The imperative to demonstrate accountability through simple, public rankings appears to outweigh the empirical evidence of their problematic outcomes. Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/Ai8tQ

The Collaboration Paradox: Why We Say We Love It, But Our Systems Fight It: https://lttr.ai/AkSYT