Kieran Walshe
The question more public sector organisations should be asking themselves is: “How can we learn to get better?” Knowledge is very freely shared in the sector, with lots of encouragement to learn from good practice and few proprietorial or competitive barriers, but the way public bodies take in and learn from that information isn’t always effective enough to help them be successful – and can even lead them into failure. for full story see The Guardian, Wednesday 20 May 2009
STATECRAFT - improving government 
Do we fail to learn or not learn about failure? We tend to only publish best practices, not our worst failures. And of course our worst failure may not be the idea or program itself, but the implementation or some other factor.
Worst practices wouldn’t be a best seller, but leaving them to the side and only focusing on what happened to work in one community/setting is short-sided.