Good Ideas Are Not Enough. We Need to Know How to Make Reform Work By Chioma Bright-Uhara

Editorial note: The op-ed draws parallels between the creative industry and public sector reform, arguing that good ideas alone cannot guarantee success. It highlights the importance of documenting reformers' practical experiences and lessons to help institutions sustain change and avoid repeating past mistakes.

Before I moved into the development sector, I spent a long time in the creative industry, working in agencies where ideas were the currency. A brief would land, the team would gather, and for a few days the room would hum with possibility. We filled walls with concepts, argued passionately about favourites, and eventually settled on the one that made everyone lean forward. It would look good, sound good and feel fresh. We would take it to the client, certain we had something special.

And then, quite often, it would be turned down.

You go back to the drawing board and start again from nothing, because the idea you loved was built on the excitement of the moment and not on a real understanding of the client's business. We had thought about how it would look, and not enough about how it would live. We had not followed it through the whole journey, from the first conversation with a customer to the last small detail of delivery. The creative rush had done our thinking for us.

Other times, the experience was more painful. The client would buy the idea, everyone would be thrilled, and we would celebrate. Then execution would begin, and the cracks would show. Something we had assumed would be simple turned out to depend on a department nobody had consulted. A detail we had overlooked changed the cost, or the timing, or the way customers would actually respond. The idea had survived the pitch but struggled in the real world, because nobody had properly thought it through.

What I remember most, though, are the ideas that worked. When I look back at them, they had one thing in common. Everybody who mattered had been in the room. The people who would build it, sell it, approve it and use it had all shaped it before it was finalised. Before we committed to anything, we would take the concept to real consumers in a focus group and listen to what they made of it. Sometimes they confirmed our instincts; often they told us something we could never have worked out ourselves. By the time we launched, the idea had already met reality and been strengthened by it.

I have thought about those experiences a great deal since joining the Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation, because I see the same pattern in public sector reform.

A reform idea can be wonderful on paper. It can be well researched, carefully argued and endorsed by people whose judgement we respect. Paper, however, is a forgiving place; the real test comes when the idea enters an institution, with its habits, its competing priorities, its limited resources and its people. Like a campaign that meets the client's actual business, a policy meets the realities of the institution it is meant to change, and it is there that its strength is truly measured.

Our work at the Foundation is focused on developing public sector leaders to strengthen institutions across Africa, and it has given me the privilege of hearing from people who have tried to turn ideas into practical change. What strikes me in these conversations is how rarely they begin with the idea itself. They begin with the people: the colleague who was sceptical and had to be won over, the department that had to be brought on board, the moment the original plan had to be set aside because it simply was not working. They talk about how long it took, how much they had to adapt, and what they would do differently if they began again.

This is the part of reform that determines success, and it is the part we rarely write down. Policy documents tell us what was decided. They seldom tell us how someone secured buy-in from a reluctant partner, what happened when resources fell short, or which early warning signs were ignored. That knowledge lives in the memories of the individuals who did the work, and memories, however rich, are fragile.

I think this is where our conversation about reform often falls short. We spend a great deal of energy debating whether an idea is good, and far less asking what it takes to make it work. Yet the most useful knowledge for the next reformer is rarely a better argument; it is a practical understanding of the road ahead, from someone who has already walked it.

Public institutions are designed to outlast the people who lead them. Leaders are appointed and rotated, administrations change, and officials move on to new roles, which is how it should be. But the lessons each of them learned along the way do not stay behind automatically. They go wherever that person goes. The institution carries on, yet it carries on without the memory of what its own people worked out, and so the next reformer arrives, meets the same obstacles and begins solving problems that were already solved. In my old industry, this was the equivalent of going back to the drawing board every single time. In government, the cost is far higher, because what is at stake is the quality of public services and the trust people place in institutions.

This is why at the Foundation, we are committed to capturing these experiences, and why we created the Public Sector Reform Playbook. It is our attempt to document the experiences and lessons of public sector reformers so that others can learn from them. It records what helped people bring colleagues along, what obstacles they met, what they had to change midway and what they would advise others to do. It treats success and struggle as equally valuable, because a reformer preparing for the road ahead needs to hear about both.

We are clear about what a playbook cannot do. No two institutions are alike, and a reform that worked in one setting will not transfer neatly to another. The aim is not to copy what someone else did. It is to understand the principles behind why it worked, and to adapt them thoughtfully to a new context. A good account of someone else's experience will not tell you exactly what to do, but it will help you ask better questions, anticipate resistance and avoid mistakes that others have already paid for.

I would like to see this become part of how we think about reform more broadly. A reform should be judged by its results, of course, but it should also be judged by what it leaves behind. When a reform is complete, has the institution become better at reforming itself? Is there a record of what worked, what did not and why? Could someone new, arriving next year, pick up where the last person left off instead of starting again?

Governments and institutions across the continent are well placed to build this habit. It does not require elaborate systems. It begins with a willingness to ask the people who have done the work to tell their story honestly, and to treat their answers as institutional assets worth keeping. Done consistently, it changes the character of reform from a series of isolated efforts into a growing body of shared knowledge.

The best campaigns I worked on were never the ones with the cleverest idea. They were the ones where reality had been invited into the room early, and where the people who would carry the idea were part of shaping it. I believe the same is true of reform. Good ideas matter, and we will always need them. However, good ideas alone will not carry us; what will is the patient, practical knowledge of how to make them work, and the humility to learn it from those who have already tried.

Chioma Bright-Uhara is the Deputy Director of Communications at the Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Legit.ng.