Things Done Well finds out how Britain actually builds, runs and fixes things, from the people who make it happen.
It’s for you if you want:
To hear leaders explain how they have made lasting improvements to public services
To understand how British institutions work and how they can be improved
A playbook of ideas to get more done in your work
What’s working?
The bins haven’t been collected, you can’t get a doctor’s appointment, HS2 is delayed, curtailed and over-budget. How do we change this? Improving large organisations and complex systems is hard. A lack of money and momentum makes it seem harder right now. Yet there is amazing work being done.
What sort of stories does Things Done Well tell? In the first three interviews:
Natasha Porter, founder of Unlocked Graduates, will explain how wings at HMP Wandsworth and HMP Pentonville have cut assaults, self-harm, and staff illness in half - with randomly-selected prisoners.
Professor Jonathan Shepherd, from the Cardiff Violence Reduction Partnership, will describe how assaults leading to injury in England and Wales have fallen by 60% over fifteen years.
Mark Lehain, founder of Bedford Free School, will describe how schoolchildren in England now achieve better results than in any other Western country.
It’s a chance to find out how things really get done, from the people who have made them happen.
What makes Things Done Well different?
We identify successes which deserve greater attention. Invited to speak, one interviewee answered that while he has lectured, taught, and advised international governments, he has never done a public interview. Each interview offers a glimpse inside a professional world and a success worth understanding better.
We share a detailed account of how these successes were actually achieved. A newspaper may offer a few brief quotations. Gary Klein notes how easily an account can lapse into platitudes like:
“‘Keep the lines of communication open’ and ‘Don’t wait too long when problems are building up.’ Presumably these bits of wisdom are going to help those who keep trying to close lines of communication and who insist on waiting too long whenever a problem is detected.”
Far more useful, he argues, are stories, “such as the one showing how they had kept the lines of communication open during a difficult incident.” We get beyond the headlines to find out exactly who did what to get stuff done.
We focus on interviewing those who have made a lasting impact. We’ll aim to look at how an approach has worked when the evaluation is in and we’re confident it has worked.
Alongside the podcast, we share an edited transcript.
Things Done Well builds on Chalk & Change - an interview series investigating how English schools have got better over the last twenty years - and it reflects my experience editing Statecraft for the last two years, which tells similar stories in an American context.
What next?
The written transcript and podcast interview will be published on Tuesdays fortnightly. To start with a bang, we’ll be publishing weekly for the first month.
Give us feedback, share what you like, and let us know who we should interview in your field, and why. We’re looking for people who’ve made a lasting impact in public service.
I’m grateful to the UK Dynamism Fund for support for this project.