Working in the open is good for you

Working in the open in the public sector could really do with a renewed, optimistic case for it. By working in the open, I mean teams thinking out loud, announcing product changes they’re trialling, sharing good practice, stuff like that. We have countless examples of these on GOV.UK blogs from the last 10 years. Here are a few reasons why working in the open is good for you and your teams:

• It makes the work better. Writing about a piece of work forces you to reflect on it, which in turn improves the quality of it. It makes your logic clearer, makes you sense check all of your assumptions, and makes it easier to realise when you maybe haven’t thought about a thing hard enough yet
• It helps you bring others along. Clearly setting out the case for something and describing how you tackled the challenges is an incredibly effective and scalable way of establishing momentum and keeping it going
• It lets you set the narrative. Set out a vision for a service you’re building yourself instead of forcing the public to fill in the gaps
• It develops your staff and your communities of practice. Collaboration, discussion, reflection, is how you improve quality – whether that’s in design, or data science, or in another discipline
• It attracts great people. If you look like you know your stuff, if you let people write about things they care about, they’re going to want to come and work for you, and you’ll develop a reputation as a place to do good work
• It invites input. A lot of people have views on digital government. Some of them might be your users, others might be peers in other departments, others might be people who work in the same sector. They’re helpful to talk to
• It keeps teams motivated. Teams deflate without regular release cycles. Ability to blog about their work does the same thing. It keeps things exciting and keeps them focussed on a problem they’re solving
• It builds trust and credibility. You need to develop trust in your ability to do stuff. Talking about the work openly does that
• It reduce risk by eliminating the big-bang moment, not really that helpful when releasing new things in the public sector

It does all of this really cheaply, too! You could argue that there are downsides: exposure, maybe? People will pick up on what you’re doing, and there might be sensitivities to it, or you might end up talking about failures. I’d be interested to hear about other downsides.

The case for doing this is much clearer in the public sector than it would be in a for-profit company, too. It should be one of the main reasons to work in the public sector.

(Inspired by Martin’s question over on Bluesky.)