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The purpose of this paper is to consider a challenge to an occupational jurisdiction in the British police. Historically, street cops have defended the importance of operational credibility as a way of sustaining the value of experience, and inhibiting attempts to introduce external leaders. This has generated a particular form of policing and leadership that is deemed by the British Government as inadequate to face the problems of the next decade.

The project used the High Potential Development Scheme of the British police to assess the value of operational credibility and the possibilities of radical cultural change. Data are drawn from participants on the program, from those who failed to get onto the program, and from officers who have risen through the ranks without access to a fast-track scheme.

Most organizational changes fail in their own terms, often because of cultural resistance. However, if we change our metaphors of culture from natural to human constructions it may be possible to focus on the key point of the culture: the lodestone that glues it together. Operational credibility may be such a cultural lodestone and undermining it offers the opportunity for rapid and radical change.

The scheme itself has had limited numbers and the research was limited to a small proportion of the different categories outlined above.

If we change our metaphors for culture and cultural change – from natural to constructed metaphors – (icebergs and webs to buildings), it may be possible to consider a much more radical approach to organizational change.

Most assessments of cultural change focus on those charged with enacting the change and explain failure through recourse to natural metaphors of change. This paper challenges the convention that cultural change can only ever be achieved, if at all, through years of effort.

In the collective or distributed leadership models that are now increasingly dominant in the literature about leadership in public services, the role of the “practitioner as leader” takes on powerful significance. The purpose of this paper is to address a gap in this corpus of research, which is a critical analysis of what constitutes the role of the practitioner leader, and the strengths and limitations of these informal leaders as agents of organisational change.

The paper develops a critical comparative analysis of the role of ordinary teachers and doctors as leaders, as a way of gaining purchase on what comprises and shapes the role of practitioner leader and the potential of this form of leadership to be a driver for quality improvements in the public sectors of education and health.

Traversing traditional academic divides and comparing medical and teacher leadership provides a clearer picture of how professional and organisational culture strongly influences the roles that practitioner leaders can take up and the influence they can wield. This comparison also shows that building capacity of practitioner leadership in the public services should be approached as an expansion of professional identity, rather than an “added extra” for keen few.

Importantly, this critical comparative review indicates that practitioner leadership is best understood and fostered as a particular ethical stance, rather than a special form of power or knowledge and that it occupies an interstitial space in between formal leadership structures and ordinary practitioners. This is both its strength and its weakness as a form of leadership.

This article argues that the default preference for interpreting situations as critical and the associated decision‐style of command often undermines our attempts to address wicked problems adequately. As a result, ‘leadership’, defined as persuading the collective to take responsibility for collective problems, is often regarded not just as difficult and dangerous, but as ‘the enemy of the people’. Not only are we likely to be addicted to command but we are also likely to be allergic to leadership.

This paper introduces the findings of an unusual international endeavour that combines action research with leadership development for 40 senior officials from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. The four nation Leadership Across Borders programme, co‐delivered by the governments' business schools of each country, set out to explore and understand some of the most significant facets of public service ranging from citizen engagement to whole‐of‐government complexity, and from the economic downturn to crisis management. Over the 10 months of the programme, the senior group engaged with heads of the public service, leading academics, delivery experts, leaders of civic society and scores of street level service users. This paper highlights the critical importance of understanding complexity and the role of ‘systems thinking’ in dealing with modern problems. But it also points to a new order of innovation required of leaders if they are to bring value to problems such as deprivation and global financial crises, and if they are to successfully bring about citizen‐centred services in increasingly complex societies.

Suggests that the progress made towards the acquisition of quality through TQM, ISO 9000, BPR, BSCs (balanced score cards) and all the other related TLAs (three letter acronyms) and techniques is in danger of consuming itself through a process in which the goal is displaced by the means: quality by measurement. This form of development, defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, failure constructed from precisely those features that generated success in the first place, has a long and distinguished career whose theoretical origins we can trace at least as far back as Hegel.

A considerable amount of research supports the contention that between two thirds and three quarters of all change programmes fail in their own terms. In this paper I suggest that our inability to determine the future runs contrary to many assumptions about change management and that an amalgam of three particular theories of indeterminacy (constructivism, indeterminacy and complexity theory) ‐ which I call subjunctivism ‐ may help understand the problem.

The purpose of this article is to delve into the precise leadership and governance roles required of general practitioners (GPs) in England as they are propelled into clinical commissioning groups (CCGs).

A conceptual framework which captures the complementary essences of both leadership and governance is developed and then used to assess the extent to which GPs will be undertaking leadership and/or governance roles under the reformed National Health Service (NHS) plan.

It is found that there are some key particular aspects of both leadership and governance which are likely to be required of GPs as they form clinical commissioning groups. These elements are identified and discussed.

Using this analysis, general practitioners, health service managers and policy makers will be able to make a more informed assessment of the roles that they will have to adopt in the future and those roles which they may find it difficult to play. GPs in future will need to expand their roles in line with new responsibilities. The ways in which, and the success with which, they discharge their new roles will depend crucially on how they, and significant others (NHS managers), understand the nature of leadership and governance.

Most analyses of the new GP commissioning consortia have focused on issues concerning size and structure of commissioning consortia, the risks involved, the population size required, and risk. This article is original in its clear focus on the teasing‐out of the distinct leadership and governance elements required under the GP commissioning arrangements.