BURSTCabinet Office minister will say he wants staff to adopt the ‘test and learn mindset of Silicon Valley’
Good morning. Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch have both spoken about their desire to completely “rewire” the way the British state operates. Badenoch has not said much about how this might happen (although she has spoken about wanting the state to do less, implying not so much a rewiring of the state as a complete removal of some of the wiring instead). And Starmer has not given a detailed vision of what rewiring might involve either, but this morning Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, will give a speech providing the answer, or at least one answer.
As Eleni Courea reports in her overnight story, McFadden will say the government will ask officials managing public service delivery to operate as if they are running a tech startup.
‘Crack’ teams of problem solvers will be deployed to improve public services and support delivery of the Plan for Change. Made up of a mix of people working in partnership to drive change - with data and digital skills, policy officials, and frontline workers, they will be given the freedom to experiment and adapt - adopting the ‘test and learn’ mindset of Silicon Valley.
Instead of writing more complicated policy papers and long strategy documents, the government will set the teams a challenge and empower them to experiment, innovate and try new things.
Test it. Fix the problems. Change the design. Test it again. Tweak it again. And so on, and so on, for as long as you provide the service. Suddenly, the most important question isn’t, ‘How do we get this right the first time?’. It’s ‘How do we make this better by next Friday?
That’s the test and learn mindset, and I’m keen to see where we can deploy it in government. Where we can make the state a little bit more like a start-up.
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