The report How To Be Wrong is published today.
It is the product of 50 or so people working in funding organisations, public sector and civil society organisations.
Over the last two years we read, met, reflected and wrote down ideas around how we can make change happen.
The ideas in the report feel useful to those of us in the network. But the real test is whether anybody outside our group is interested. We want to see if the ideas travel and develop.
It started with conversations between a few of us about place and scale.
We talked about what the words ‘place’ and ‘scale’ meant, and how we would translate them into meaningful change in communities – we recognised there was a lot to learn.
Others shared our appetite for knowledge and, before too long, our group coalesced into a formal network.
At the beginning, a bond was formed around a shared dislike of the standard approach to outcome evaluation and to the new public management model that frames the work of those that fund, commission and agree on local services.
But these complaints are not new, and largely ignore the benefits that came with this way of thinking.