What the Institute for Government’s The Case for Total Place 2.0 gets right

What the Institute for Government’s The Case for Total Place 2.0 gets right. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_the-institure-for-government-the-case-for-activity-7335565622593937409-eIg2 And why it might not help.

What the Institute for Government’s The Case for Total Place 2.0 gets right.

And why it might not help.

This is great — a serious, thoughtful effort. It diagnoses the problem: misaligned incentives, disconnected governance, and siloed services with precision. And it name-checks place, learning and #evaluation, data, and local insight. Links to ‘Test, Learn and Grow’ are well made, and I like the stuff about secondments from central-local and vice versa. Overall, it doesn’t shy away from saying the system is broken and needs rethinking.

It reads as if written for the Treasury — and in a #publicsector world where spending review logic still rules, that’s not a bad starting point. I await Spending Review outcomes… with some resignation.

But if we want to move beyond clever pilots and promising reports, we need to go deeper.

This is still mostly structural reform — boards, metrics, dashboards. There’s little attention to the emotional, cultural, or psychological dynamics that so often determine whether anything actually sticks. What makes or breaks system change isn’t the design — it’s whether people feel safe enough to take the risk of working differently. #leadership, yes — but also identity, power, and trust.

So this doesn’t take seriously why relational service collapse. There’s no mention of the institutional ‘immune system’ — the ways organisations defend themselves against change. The threats to identity, the challenge to vertical accountability, or the psychological defence mechanisms that make managers cling to control. And it’s quiet on politics and ideology — we need to name the default worldview of legibility and control.

That’s what keeps the system from changing — not lack of insight or good pilots.

No account of how systems actually learn — feedback loops, sensemaking, adaptive capacity. Without these, we’re left trying to scale what works without understanding why it worked — or why it might not work somewhere else.

Think about these questions and how they impact organisations — and #publicservices — you have experienced:

- What’s the one invisible dynamic in your system that no report ever seems to name — but that determines whether anything changes?

- What’s the smallest relational shift you’ve seen that made the biggest difference in system behaviour?

We don’t need more structural solutions. We need a systemic approach to #learning, #culture, and purpose.