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Vanguard News - January 2009
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In this issue:
More on Baby P
More of the same coming soon
Cabinet Office bullies local authorities
More evidence of failed 'reform'
Deliverology down-under
Will they listen now?
What is the right noun?
Getting leaders to change
The power of the plonker
***
More on Baby P
I was pleased that the academic research on the Children's services IT system,
and its role in sub-optimising performance (a euphemistic way of saying predictably
creating Baby Ps), got in to the media. One of the researchers was quoted as saying:
'ICS [Integrated (sic) Children's System] is a crude technological attempt to
transform social work into a bureaucratic practice to be governed by formally
defined procedures, involving sequences of tasks to be accomplished within strict
deadlines.' Because of its design ICS prevents the service from absorbing variety,
that's how you get more Baby Ps.
And I am sure I was not the only person shocked to learn from the top inspector
that 'Baby Ps' are running at about three a week in the UK. But she doesn't 'get'
the academic's observation that the phenomenon illustrates the unintended
consequences of audit. The 'tactical behaviours' criticised by the inspector
(managers making targets) are not aberrations of the audit regime but are
systemic adaptations directly produced by it.
We have seen the same in a recent study of adult care. In the period before we
were engaged, extra managers had been hired in response to a poor rating of
performance by inspectors, the new managers' jobs were to get targets met. The
consequences became apparent when we had them create capability data - the true
end-to-end time it took for someone to get help. When you do this you have to
look back in time, it would take too long to do it in real time and, in any event,
you want historic data to let the system speak. The chart showed clearly when
the managers had started - end-to-end time shot up and showed considerably more
variation; evidence of managers tampering, as Deming taught. So while 'improvements'
(on-target performance) got them a better rating from inspectors, the real
consequences were worse care and higher costs. It is of no surprise that Haringey
was rated 'good' at the time of Baby P and at the time of Victoria Climbie. If
you're meeting targets you are more likely to make people suffer.
Simon Caulkin was scathing about the Stalinist reality of social care. Read his
article at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/dec/14/social-workers-care-haringey-child-abuse
Read more on the academic research at:
http://www.ukauthority.com/NewsArticle/tabid/64/Default.aspx?id=2360
And what response do we get from the minister? More inspection and more training.
What do you get the more you inspect? More errors. What will going through the
motions of ticking the boxes for attending the training do to social workers?
Demoralise them.
ICS drives a disintegrated service design, it's the system, stupid, not the workers.
There was more evidence on Newsnight where social workers told the story of how it
works. A child is referred, you go to the house, there are other children there
and you are obliged to complete a massive standardised survey for every child in
the house. The focus of the social worker goes away from understanding the problem
and instead is 'head-down' in his or her lap-top computer, getting answers to all
the questions; that's the job. What must this look like to the family? What if
the social worker is there because the police had been to see you about an offence
and decided to refer your case to social workers because there happen to be children
living with you? You have not been charged with an offence but you are treated
like a criminal. The Stalinists are there to collect data, fill in all the forms
for all of your children.
Whatever the situation, social workers have jobs that stop them achieving their
purpose and it becomes apparent to everyone.
Except, of course, the minister.
***
More of the same coming soon
A reader writes:
'Following the publication of the NHS 'High Quality Operational Framework', a new
target of 4 months (18 weeks) from referral to treatment is being planned for
children and adolescents requiring mental health services. These are not targets
we are told but quality standards. On further investigation, services will be
'performance managed' against these standards! Not targets then? No one can provide
an explanation as to where the 18 week (4 month target) originates from. If it's a
done deal... why not 18 days?'
Indeed, why not any arbitrary number? Surely the right answer is as quickly as is
required by the demand?
Isn't it obvious that some children will need to be helped quickly and others might
be better served by building a relationship as a pre-curser to helping the child
(or not needing to)? To do the obvious requires that you let the front-line decide
both what information should be gathered and what action should be taken. Only
people can absorb variety. But that would confront the regime's ideological
belief that these wretched people cannot be trusted. Hence they need to be put
in control. And the controls on social worker activity prevent achievement of
purpose. How dumb. How de-humanising.
And what chances do the children have?
***
Cabinet Office bullies local authorities
I have been passed a letter from the Cabinet Office to local authority chief
executives. It sets out to 'encourage' them to engage with the work on 'Best
Practice' in contact centres. I wrote about this nonsense in my latest book -
the 'Best Practice' guidance is anything but, it is full of command-and-control
thinking and thus will lead to massive amounts of waste.
The letter says that many government agencies have complied with these ideas - as
though that is a good thing. Well of course they have, the agencies are subject to
direct control by the Treasury and their departmental ministers. It is much harder
to bully local authorities as they have their own political members. And a good
thing too!
One of the 'Best Practice' indicators is 'avoidable contact' (i.e. failure demand).
The fools do not understand that failure demand is a natural consequence of
command-and-control designs. This is what public sector 'reform' has come to:
bright people with no knowledge promulgating their plausible but wrong-headed beliefs.
***
More evidence of failed 'reform'
More evidence of the folly in following these wrong-headed beliefs comes from
the Department for Transport's (DfT) shared services debacle. The Committee of
Public Accounts described what has occurred as 'stupendous incompetence'. The
plan was to spend £55m on IT-led change, building shared services, which was
supposed to create savings of £112m over ten years. But instead it has cost £121m
(so far) and is now expected to generate £40m in savings; so a net loss of £81m.
Why did the DfT embark on the programme? Because they were bullied by the
Cabinet Office, which has been claiming that central and local government
could save about £1.4bn a year through more sharing of corporate services.
No-one has been held to account. In the Cabinet Office I am sure they will
be thinking 'it would have been OK if they'd done it right'. Oh really?
***
Deliverology down-under
I was very disappointed to see that the Australian Prime Minister has hired UK
advisers from the 'deliverology' cult. It is such plausible nonsense that I gave
a whole chapter to explaining why in the public sector book. The consequences of
deliverology? Reports on targets driven up the hierarchy as services suffer and
citizens get hacked off. It is probably the best way to delude yourself into
believing things are getting better, while you are actually making things worse.
Any Australian reader who wants a copy of the deliverology chapter in order to
send it on the politicians (either to warn the buyer or provide bullets to the
opposition), please ask.
***
Will they listen now?
A reader writes:
'To an innocent bystander, this looks much like the NAO discovering what you have
been telling HMG all along. I wonder whether they will be keener to listen now?'
He is talking about the National Audit Office study showing how targets on
planning services lead to more planning applications being refused. We have
reported the same and more: targets also lead to more approvals with conditions,
which from the customers' point of view is more work to do before you get started
and more requests for you to withdraw your application (or it will be rejected).
See the article he refers to at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7786331.stm
All of this being made worse by the new computer system called 'One App' being
foisted on local authorities (see last newsletter) - another example of IT-led
change that fails to absorb variety.
As I pointed out in the last newsletter, no amount of evidence of this sort will
cause HMG to listen, for they only want to hear things that fit their moribund
narrative.
***
What is the right noun?
A reader writes:
'…but you haven't actually completed the task until you have produced a noun ......
'over knowledge' to correctly define the OFSTED inspection of our village primary
school last week.
Where: (a) the Head and her professional colleagues, (b) the parents as consumers,
(c) in a slightly different way, the children because they keep on being obstinately
happy, (d) we the governors, and, actually, to give him his due because he certainly
seemed to know a good school when he saw one, (e) the Government Inspector, all
seemed to be in happy agreement that we have a good school.
But how can you possibly tell that when you haven't got THE EVIDENCE?
Ah now, what's that? Oh you mean the paperwork. Reams of it. Teacher hours spent
in compiling it… There's got to be some kind of ratio here: Teacher time spent in
compilation...divided by all the other things they could have been doing...
multiplied by the cost of the central computer system needed to collate...equals
customer satisfaction of the minister and his civil servants...or something like
that.
What's the right noun?'
He suggests 'over-knowledge'. Yet much of what is being collated does not
constitute knowledge. Ohno said that the worst form of waste is over-production.
All this stuff is over-production in the sense that it not of value to those doing
the work, and much of it bears no relation to achievement of purpose. But it also
makes the work worse. So it is a cause of waste as well as a type of waste.
Going back to adult social care, in re-designing care services we encourage people
to collect ONLY the information that is of value in making a decision. The idea
is that regulation should support good use of data and should not drive
sub-optimisation. But that puts them in danger of beatings from the regime.
Any other contributions? What is the right noun? Perhaps a noun to describe the
prevention of beatings?
***
Getting leaders to change
A systems thinker working in the private sector writes:
'Your comments about leaders needing to understand Systems Thinking rings so true.
In our organisation we have delivered some great results using the application of
knowledge gained from understanding the system. However, leadership hasn't changed.
Even though we piloted a way of working that reduced call centre failure demand from
70% to 25%, no roll out to the entire call centre has occurred. Why? Because the
leaders do not really understand why it happened. They lose themselves in attempting
to explain an outcome that confronts their extremely limiting beliefs about how things
work.
So, if Ohno himself never attempted to explain, how do you get leadership to change?
In all of the companies I have worked for, the paradigm is 'pitch and sell' ideas
and gain approval through the command and control steering committees that blight
progress. To put my question in other words, how do you break this retarding (and
retarded) decision making paradigm without leadership action? I'm guessing your
answer is 'you cannot' but I'm an optimist at heart!'
And I'm an optimist too! He is right to point to the stultifying effect of having
to use the hierarchy to get things done, 'pitching' through committees with spurious
cost/benefit analyses and the like. So we avoid it. When new clients insist we
provide a plan and cost/benefit analysis, we refuse. We tell them the only plan
is to get knowledge and the first piece of work is to take the leaders out into
the work to learn about it as a system, for if they don't understand and we
change something beneath them, they'll undo it faster than we helped others build
it. Been there, got the tee-shirt, don't need to learn the lesson twice.
Ohno didn't explain because he knew that counter-intuitive ideas are best learned
by doing. And Ohno's favourite word? Understanding.
***
The power of the plonker
A reader writes:
'In our recent housing management inspection, we were criticised for 70% of our
repairs appointments not been kept. Our response: 'Yes, but they were all
completed early - our contractors have instructions that, if they're in the
area, and they have time, they should pop by and check if it's convenient to
do the repair early. Better use of contractor time, more cost effective, very
happy tenants, blah, blah'. Inspector's reply? 'Yes, but you've still missed
your target!'
These inspector-plonkers are just doing their job. Maybe 2009 is the year for
publishing plenty of evidence on the Audit Commission's contribution to damaging
performance and morale. Your evidence welcome!
***
Happy New Year!
John Seddon
john@vanguardconsult.co.uk
Author: 'Systems Thinking in the Public Sector', available from Triarchy Press:
www.triarchypress.com and 'Freedom from command and control: a better way to make
the work work' available from Vanguard (www.systemsthinking.co.uk).. 'Freedom from
command and control' is also available in the US from:
http://www.productivitypress.com/productdetails.cfm?SKU=3276
Vanguard Consulting: Developers of the Vanguard Method, helping organisations
change from a command and control to a systems design. Beware of imitators, as
Vanguard has developed solutions for sectors others claim to be able to provide
the same service. If providers are not accredited to the Vanguard Method you
should not expect a Vanguard service.
Systems Thinking People - a service helping systems thinkers find suitable work
and helping organisations fund suitable systems thinkers. www.systemsthinkingpeople.com
***
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