The libraries are definitely a good idea. A friend of mine worked for London city hall. They had an exciting new computerised mathematical model to calculate where transport links were bad and the computer produced them a proposal for a new bus route. At a glance the route made perfect sense, and they couldn’t understand how that bus route didn’t already exist, its value was so obvious at a glance. They started setting the bus route up, then a load of people wrote letters of complaint saying they didn’t want busses full of poorer people going past their posh houses, and these complaint letters killed the project. Only much later did they learn that substantially the same bus route had been shot down by the same objections on 2 or 3 previous occasions. A department historian could have told them they were repeating history, so they had a better idea to expect that obstacle.
This would seem to be such a common roadblock in any urban centre that I’m surprised nobody in your friend’s department asked if that was why the bus route didn’t exist already.
1. The libraries idea could be useful.
2. If no idea works “perfectly”, then:
the best option is not the perfect option, but the best option.
The solution isn’t in just the idea, but something else. Execution, learning and adapting...
3. Can competence be measured?
The libraries are definitely a good idea. A friend of mine worked for London city hall. They had an exciting new computerised mathematical model to calculate where transport links were bad and the computer produced them a proposal for a new bus route. At a glance the route made perfect sense, and they couldn’t understand how that bus route didn’t already exist, its value was so obvious at a glance. They started setting the bus route up, then a load of people wrote letters of complaint saying they didn’t want busses full of poorer people going past their posh houses, and these complaint letters killed the project. Only much later did they learn that substantially the same bus route had been shot down by the same objections on 2 or 3 previous occasions. A department historian could have told them they were repeating history, so they had a better idea to expect that obstacle.
This would seem to be such a common roadblock in any urban centre that I’m surprised nobody in your friend’s department asked if that was why the bus route didn’t exist already.