Bluff, bluster, brilliance, and brains

Former Blairite adviser Geoff Mulgan has written an interesting post on his blog called

"Bluff, bluster, brilliance, and brains"

which compares attempts to get a wider range of ideas into the government of the country under Tony Blair and under Boris Johnson.

A couple of quotes from it:

"Without buy in from the bottom the top down changes rarely stick, even in states with authoritarian powers far beyond what UK ministers could dream of ... If there is no strategy for engaging hearts and minds the programme is almost certain to fail." 

"Government needs a constant influx of heretics to challenge the tendencies to cynical and world-weary fatalism that can overcome any bureaucracy."

"Policy cannot be separated from implementation, and no amount of cleverness can make up for lack of feel for how things really work."

"The biggest flaw that besets governments is their failure to learn. The best ones invest heavily in learning from their failures and their successes, and one key argument for a permanent civil service is that it organises a collective memory. Yet ours is surprisingly had at managing its memory, constantly reinvents wheels or forgets what worked and why."

You can read the whole thing here.

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