Learning From Governance Failures
Some of the most important and useful learning can result from looking at things that have gone wrong. If we do not learn from these events we run the serious risk of repeating them. To suggest that we can learn from failure has to start with some admission of potential weakness.
Admitting to any vulnerability is all the more difficult in a system that pounces on any perceived weakness of public servants and this in itself represents a real barrier to learning. We need to find ways to discuss and explore risks and failures in public service organizations in a way that is neither a ‘tick box exercise’ nor simply a search for scapegoats.
Because of the sheer complexity of the systems that we have created there is a significant and growing potential for problems to arise. The reality is that the rules and regulations play ‘catch up’ on a system that is ever-changing, and that there are always new sets of circumstances that arise, variations on the themes that have gone before, and these are the ones that will cause us difficulty in the future.
This is not to suggest that we should not demand individual accountability but rather that in addition we must face the fact that while it may be comforting to attribute individual blame, the more troubling reality is that we may need to look at how collectively we set things up for failure, and seek to learn from that.