Why smart ideas need more than publication to take root

Across the public sector, a remarkable amount of creativity and expertise goes into developing new ways of working. Service standards, communication frameworks, design principles, AI playbooks, capability models and future-focused insight pieces - often the product of deep experience and careful work. Some of the most innovative thinking in government comes from the quieter corners of departments where people genuinely want to improve how the system works. When uptake ends up being low, it’s entirely understandable that the people behind these brilliant ideas feel frustrated.

Most of this material is guidance, not compliance, and in a system built on compliance - one where time is scarce, pressure is high and delivery cannot pause - anything non-mandatory naturally slides down the priority list. Not because people don’t value it, but because the structure rewards what must be done now, not what could make things better later. So even excellent guidance struggles to find oxygen.

Delivery teams work in environments that rarely let up. Caseloads, incidents, policy cycles, platform releases, peaks in demand and the pressure of serving the public create a rhythm that can’t be easily interrupted. When new guidance arrives, it enters a system already at capacity. There isn’t a natural moment to stop, absorb, discuss and apply it. Change has to be fitted into the working week while the work continues - the equivalent of refurbishing the plane midair.

This is why little change begins from a blank page. Most ways of working have evolved for reasons that make sense: constraints, responsibilities, legacy systems, practical experience. Some parts need updating, others adjusting, and some are perfectly functional. Understanding what is working now, what is under strain and why is always the first step.

And no two teams experience this in the same way. Even within the same organisation, teams differ in purpose, pressure, pace and personality. One team’s reality is not another’s. So the question is never simply “What does the guidance say?” but “What would this mean for us, here, with what we’re carrying?”

Before I started Teamshaper, I spent years running policy and best-practice events. I saw what happens when people learn from each other. A spark - someone hearing how another team solved a problem and instantly seeing possibilities. Best-practice sharing absolutely matters. It opens minds, broadens imagination and gives people permission to think differently.

But I also saw how rarely that spark turned into adoption once people returned to their desks. Not because the ideas weren’t strong, but because the bridge into practice was missing. No space to translate it, no structure to work through what it would mean in context, no one walking the team through how to begin. In a system designed around compliance, optional improvement simply struggles to compete.

What makes the difference is surprisingly consistent. Teams need:

➕Space to understand their work as it is now
The routines, assumptions and pressures shaping their week need to be surfaced so new ideas have somewhere to land.

➕Support in taking the first few steps together
The barrier is rarely understanding - it’s choosing a realistic entry point that fits within delivery and getting the team moving collectively in creating habits.

➕Integration that strengthens public service delivery
Teams don’t need to adopt whole frameworks. They need to select what improves outcomes for the public and fit it alongside existing responsibilities.

An external partner can help here - not by delivering a blueprint or imparting generic knowledge, but by offering clarity that’s hard to access from inside a pressured service, pattern-recognition from supporting many teams, a sense of where the crunch points tend to be, and the neutrality that helps people see their own habits without judgement. The work also needs emotional intelligence too: understanding the people, the history and the rhythms of the team.

This is where Teamshaper sits. We work with intact public sector teams to help them interpret and apply guidance in their own environment. We start with their real delivery pressures, and early steps happen in the context of their actual work. That’s what helps guidance shift from interesting to usable.

If you’re someone who creates this kind of guidance - the frameworks, standards, insight pieces and models intended to make work better - you know how much thinking goes into them, and you may feel frustration about how little impact they make compared to their potential to improve. Limited uptake isn’t about the work, it’s more often due to structural reasons: a system that gives people no space to adopt anything that isn’t mandated.

If you want your work to make the difference it’s capable of, implementation can’t be the afterthought. It needs designing in. The bridge is as important as the idea. That’s the space we work in: helping teams make sense of strategy, frameworks and guidance, apply them in their world and take the practical steps that allow them to settle into everyday work. If you want the creativity in your guidance to translate into real change, we can help you think through what effective implementation support looks like.