‘Move fast and break things’ was once Silicon Valley’s mantra, and it still captures one of the biggest differences between this country’s ‘builders’ and most of its public servants. Willingness to fail is the flipside of daring to dream, and we need more of it in the British state.
To avoid further ossification of public services, civil servants need to embrace the instinct to move fast, test, learn and try again. There are green shoots of this approach, but the system is still driven by fear of failure.
In the private sector, failure is a data point – a moment to learn, and often a natural step in building something better. In government, it is a major event to be avoided, managed, and, if it happens, contained. The difference shapes behaviour at every level. I saw this first hand when working on the AI Safety Summit in 2023, when the tech entrepreneurs on the team were bold and fearless, while many civil servants (including me) were deeply worried about all the potential risks. The entrepreneurs had their eyes on the prize, the civil servants were focused on the pitfalls. Government departments have absorbed all the technocratic bits of the private sector (managers, markets and metrics) but none of its exciting, ambitious agency. Shooting for the stars is hard in a system built to manage risk at every step.
Fear is rational, but it cannot be the organising principle
Public servants operate in an environment where mistakes can have devastating consequences. That breeds a deep caution which, while understandable, can become paralysing.
There is the practical fear that a misstep could cause real harm. It’s an immense privilege to work on policies that change lives, but also an enormous responsibility. Public sector mistakes can be catastrophic, as seen in the Post Office Horizon and infected blood scandals. The litany of public inquiries gives good reason for care and caution: the state is too important to break.
Added to this is fear of public censure. Accountability that once sat at the top with ministers and permanent secretaries now reaches deep into the civil service. More junior officials are now named and crucified in headlines for decisions that were never fully within their control, and they are left powerless to defend them. In that climate, finding people willing to tackle the toughest issues is harder than it should be.
There is also the knowledge that being linked with failure will stall – or end – a career. The system still prizes the ‘safe pair of hands’ over the thoughtful and innovative risk-taker. Mistakes follow people for years, while successes are quickly forgotten. The ‘hard rain’ of 2020 cast a long shadow, especially over those just below permanent secretary level.
The problem is that the cost of inaction, though less visible, can be even more damaging than the cost of failure.
Creating the conditions for courage
‘Test and learn’ is a disciplined approach to progress: start small, prove impact, and scale what works. But it challenges deeply ingrained habits. Whitehall processes often demand certainty before acting, when what’s needed is the confidence to start small and adapt.
Learning from failure should be seen as a public good, not a private embarrassment. When reviewing performance, making appointments or awarding honours, we should ask: who took smart risks, who learned, and who helped others do the same?
If we want ‘test and learn’ to become habit rather than exception, cultural change must be led from the top. That means not just asking civil servants to be braver, but creating structures that make courage possible. From my own experiences, I think there are five things that would help:
1. Reward learning, real-world experience and courage: Appraisals should recognise measured risk-taking and adaptive learning as essential leadership behaviours. Promotion to the senior civil service should involve a ‘delivery test’ that incentivises leaders to gain experience in the private sector, wider public sector, impact economy or voluntary sector. The most senior ranks should be reserved for those with a proven capacity to change the state for the better – people who got into the arena and tackled a big beast, not those who managed risk by staying on the fringes.
2. Create protected spaces for experimentation: All departments should have ring-fenced budgets for testing and prevention – exploration pots exempt from traditional Green Book constraints. Every major reform should include a deliberate test-and-learn phase, with results published openly so others can build on the learning. The ‘Value of Learning’ should be embedded within Treasury processes, and we should actively incentivise policy experimentation in the non-digital space.
3. Modernise accountability mechanisms for complex work: Accounting officer responsibilities and assurance processes should flex to fit more adaptive, cross-cutting programmes. That could mean longer evaluation windows for prevention or shared accountability across departments. Parliament can help by protecting well-designed experiments from short-term criticism.
4. Spend more time in communities, especially outside London: Senior civil servants should spend time in the communities their departments serve. Whitehall-based policy officials should get outside London as much as possible, and those already outside London should develop meaningful links with their local communities outside the office. The Darlington Economic Campus does a great job of this already. The Pride in Place programme creates a wider opportunity for this – if every senior civil servant volunteered in a Pride in Place neighbourhood, it would galvanise a different way of thinking about public services.
5. Model openness and honesty from the top: Leaders set the tone for how experimentation and innovation is understood. Permanent secretaries and ministers could jointly publish lessons from major programmes, including what went wrong. Departments could publish an annual ‘state of learning’ report capturing insights from both success and failure. By giving civil servants permission and protection to experiment, and recognition when they learn, leaders can begin to reshape how the rest of government thinks and acts.
The next generation of reformers will be those who take thoughtful risks, learn in the open, and see failure as a step forward, not something to fear. If we back those people, put them in the right jobs and expose them to life outside Whitehall, we can transform our cautious state into a capable one that delivers for people and places across Britain.
Emma de Closset is chief executive of UK Community Foundations, a place-based network which invests in communities through local giving and philanthropy. She is also currently a visiting professor at the Policy Institute of King's College London. Prior to joining UKCF in January 2025, Emma was a director in the Cabinet Office.
This op-ed first appeared on the Future Governance Forum's website as part of a series ahead of a one-day conference happening on Tuesday, 2 December. The conference is bringing together politicians, civil servants, community leaders, frontline public servants and business voices to build momentum for public service reform to take hold across Whitehall.