Learning governments: who learns, what is learned, and how

Many organisations strive to become learning organisations. Governments aim to do the same.

Instead of embarking immediately on large-scale projects, a lot can be learned from pilot projects first.

An example is the effort of the Dutch government to make households less dependent on natural gas. The national climate agreement set the goal to replace gas for 1.5 million households by other sources of energy within ten years. The Dutch Ministry of Interior therefore wanted to start a pilot project in 2018 with 2000 households to find out how this could best be done. An amount of € 126 million was made available, and the Ministry selected 27 neighbourhoods out of 74 applications for the pilot. Two years later, only a few of these households had become independent of natural gas.

The pilots were intended to inform a much more comprehensive programme. But it never was made explicit which ideas exactly would be tested in the pilot. The National Audit Office therefore rightly stated that this approach was not concrete enough. It remained open who would learn, what should be learned, and how the learning would take place. (NRC 23/24 May 2020, E9)

It is good to try out ideas in pilots, before embarking on large programmes based on untested assumptions. But to become a learning organisation, government units as all other organisations have to organise the pilots much better to learn more systematically.