are inconsistent and uneven from place to place. It seems neater and fairer to provide a consistent standard for everything,”

“We want all of our public services to be like Coca-Cola: all identical, all good. And they can’t be.

If we are to take the ‘variation’ part of ‘variation and selection’ seriously, uniformly high standards are not only impossible but undesirable.”

“It seems to be equally hard for traditional organisations to deliver the selection component of variation and selection. The difficulty is in selecting what is really working on the ground… This is partly because politicians are in a hurry: they expect to hold on to a role for two to four years, not long enough for most experiments to deliver meaningful results. Even more politically inconvenient is the fact that half of the pilot schemes will fail – many things do in a complex world – so the pilot will simply produce stark evidence of that failure.”

“If formal experiments hold few joys for traditional leaders, informal feedback will often fail to reach them, too… There is a limit to how much honest feedback most leaders really want to hear; and because we know this, most of us sugar-coat our opinions whenever we speak to a powerful person. In a deep hierarchy, that process is repeated many times, until the truth is utterly concealed inside a thick layer of sweet-talk”