A few weeks into working with the GDS team, he came to Tom with his inches-thick binder of documents and plopped it down on the table. “You know,” he said, “I’ve come to the realization that what I’m holding is really six hundred pages of untested assumptions. I’m just going to set it aside for a while.” Tom, who now works with the global transformation consultancy Public Digital, has now seen that realization occur many times. “Why,” he asks, “is so much policy educated guesswork with a feedback loop measured in years?” It doesn’t have to be.
