The Labour Party are consulting about the future of digital government through their Digital Government Review. This post is my response to two of the topics of the review: "Skills and Culture" and "Continuous Innovation". It is mostly about how digital transformation might be handled rather than what it should do and is essentially a list of links to things I have written in the past. So...

Government has not properly grasped the implications of complexity: unaware, it has been applying industrial age thinking to digital age problems and getting things wrong, sometimes badly.

"The problem is not in plans, people or methods; it's in mindset. Trying to build things that really need to be grown just won't work; no matter how you manage them."

I wrote this in 2010 in anticipation of problems with Universal Credit...

• How to reform big things

We must approach this complexity in a fundamentally different way...

• Complex is not the same as Complicated
• Solving Wicked problems
• 162 slides of unmissable condensed wisdom on tackling the intractable

We must stimulate a change to the culture of government and adopt genuinely incremental ways of handling change...

• Creating cultures that cope with complexity
• The King's new palace - A play

We must become comfortable with non-linear problem-solving and adopt more emergent ways of working...

• On fiddling with things and getting in knots
• On jigsaw puzzles and emergent working

We must uproot mental models that are no longer serving us well, like this one...

• The rankling print presumption

We must change unhelpful misconceptions about failure...

• Risk, failure, Sir Gus and obsessive compulsive incrementalism

We must end confusion about 'Agile'...

• I worry about the word 'Agile'

We must have a simple way for everyone involved to understand how this very large scale incremental change will be managed...

• How to think about IT
• Alpha-Beta-Live is not enough

We must have a simple, commonly-held, view of what the future structure of digital government services will look like...

• The Gubbins of Government video

And, crucially, we must shift from a mindset of 'building' to one of 'growing'...

• Universal Credit and the need to think more "Grow" (and less "Build")
• Managing change: think "organism" not "mechanism"

All this lot in a soundbite... "Grow: don't build"

Afternote - see also my article in Computer Weekly - Government doesn't get complexity.