WIREDGOV

When schools, hospitals and councils fail, it is the people who rely on those services who are the worst affected. With pressure on budgets, continuing reform and increasing demand for services, further failures may be unavoidable.

Failing Well, a new report from the Institute for Government, gets to the heart of why organisations fail and how to minimise the impact when things go wrong. Before services fail, warning signs are often missed – and after failure, politicians tend to reach for stock responses rather than address the underlying causes. The first step to dealing with failure more effectively is to recognise and learn from the successful recoveries right under their noses.

Researchers looked at four different organisations that endured serious failures and managed to successfully turnaround: Eltham Foundation School (now Harris Academy Greenwich), Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council, Basildon and Thurrock NHS Foundation Trust and West Sussex Children’s Services.

In all four cases, rather than resorting only to restructuring or laying blame, turnarounds were based on honest reporting cultures (even if that means things get worse on paper), strong peer involvement, reinvigorated leadership and a shared ownership of failure.

For instance, in the case of Eltham Foundation School, academy status alone did not dramatically improve the school – it was better connections to high-performing schools, reinvigorated leadership and resources that really helped. In Basildon, the hospital had an unusually high mortality rate, but was able to achieve a dramatic turnaround by instituting an open reporting culture, where everyone from cleaners to senior clinical staff felt able to report incidents.

Emma Norris, Programme Director, said:

“Failure is an ever present threat in our public services – and the risks are increasing. Yet there are good and bad ways of responding to failure. Politicians too often use a superficial set of tools – restructuring a service or parcelling out blame. But this won’t solve the problem: leadership, collaboration and transparency will. Those overseeing turnarounds also need to hold their nerve and accept that performance can dip further as recovery begins.”

Notes to editors

1. The Institute for Government is an independent think tank that works to make government more effective.
2. For more information, please contact nicole@instituteforgovernment.org.uk / 07850313791

Associated documents: 

Failing Well