Francis Maude: Redesigning the future of communities

Another packed Horsham Friday last week. After a rural visit to constituents concerned about a potentially serious local environmental issue, I had a useful session with the senior managers and directors at Horsham District Council.

I meet regularly with councillors, but this was my first meeting with officers for some time. We shared plenty of experiences of how we actually get government done at local and national level.

One of my points was that we should not be afraid to try new ways of doing things in delivering public services. The best organisations learn more from the things that are tried that don’t work than they do from the things that do work. No one likes failure - but there’s a lot in the Silicon Valley mantra: “fail small, fail fast”. The most important thing is to stop doing the new thing quickly if it doesn’t work and ensure that we learn from it.