In the late 1990s I spent the best part of two years inside the engine rooms of economic development. I interviewed chief executives, directors and managers of development agencies in Scotland, London, Belfast and Berlin for my doctorate, and I went looking for the organisational form associated with effective delivery. The right structure. The right legal status. The right boundaries. The right board.

What I found instead was a hole in the literature.

Almost nobody, in the research or in official evaluation practice, had looked inside the organisations that deliver economic development. When a programme failed, the evaluation blamed the design of the project or the state of the economy. Almost never did anyone examine the organisation that delivered it: the management vacuum at the centre, the information hoarded as personal power, the values quietly working against the mission.

Thirty years of practice since have only hardened that finding. Behind every failure and every success is an organisation and the people who created it.

Organisational failure is the most under-diagnosed cause of policy failure in this field. And reorganisation, which changes the label on the door and disperses the people who knew things, is the most over-prescribed cure.

So the next time a programme of yours underperforms, run the organisational diagnosis with the same rigour you would apply to the project design and the market conditions. Ask who decided, on what information, and whether anyone in the building could have said no.

The answer is usually in the building.

#EconomicDevelopment #LocalGovernment #Leadership #OrganisationalCulture #Devolution