The Art of Exit

The biggest challenge facing public service innovation is not the creation and development of new ideas. Actually the public sector is rich in new ideas and practices, especially at the grass roots. The biggest challenges are in growing the most promising new approaches to scale. And even if they are promising, they often face another challenge: how can we dislodge ingrained and incumbent forms of provision which may be inefficient or outmoded?

The Art of Exit, written with Laura Bunt, looks at a small and rare set of case examples where public sector leaders have managed to decommission an existing service in order to transfer resources to a new, more promising approach.

Public services will need to become more adept at creative decommissioning – taking resources out of less effective approaches in order to reinvest elsewhere.

Download the full report here.

A related essay, Eight Ways to do More with Less, can be downloaded here.