Browse our research

Succession planning in the university sector

The report is based on interviews with the senior officers of twenty one universities. Taken together, the universities represent a mix of higher education institutions in the UK. The report aims to stay close to the issues as they play out in practice. But it presents these issues – and the views of the study participants – in a way that is structured and systematic and seeks to recognise their broader context.


The civil service and its values

The question we ask here is: what are values, and how does an organisation know whether it is living by the right ones? Instead of answering this in the abstract, we look at the ongoing debate about the values of the civil service. Many features of this debate are generalisable. They tell us something important about values, and organisations, across the board.


Brown and the S-word

The question of when those in authority should say sorry was very much in the news in the spring of 2009 when our piece was published in the Comment is free section of The Guardian. The issue has stayed in the news ever since. The article asks what kind of things should people say sorry for – and considers the traps of saying sorry too often.