Excellent, easy-to-read guide to what went wrong with UK public services in the last part of the twentieth-century and the early part of the twenty-first. This book explains the origins of these problems, the absurd political ideology behind them and the means of counteracting their worst effects.
The free market was introduced into the UK public sector with little thought as to whether this was ever appropriate. So-called Customer Choice and the setting of standards and targets dominated the command-and-control thinking of politicians obsessed with quick, election-winning results based on the flawed, deterministic view of human nature that proclaims people are naturally lazy and need to be incentivized - and even bullied - to do their work. This has resulted in more expensive and less effective public services, since target inspection is more important than service delivery. Because the problem is systemic, failure is built-in, and so only a Systems' Thinking approach can help save the day.
This would be perfect reading for any local authority manager to help them do their job better – and W Edwards Deming would be proud of the author (John Seddon). It is also salutary reading for the long-suffering rate & taxpayer and the even longer-suffering public service user.
The only - understandable - flaw of the work lies in the assumption that bad systems' design is based on ignorance rather than a cynical attempt to make money from the ignorance of others. That the folly exposed is so obvious suggests the over-weaning cynicism of politicians, in their ambitions being so much more than their actual abilities. Unless it is clearly understood that this situation is rooted in a fundamental dislike of self and of others - based on outdated, socially-snobbish cultural hierarchies - there can be no motivation to change the situation for the better. This is because of the vested interest of the Games' Theoreticians creating a stranglehold on the culture of government. It also fails to adequately detail the politicians' desire to blame public sector managers for the politicians' failure of leadership and lack of interest practical, long-term ideas; resulting from needing to secure the short-term goal of electoral success.
Its greatest failing, however, lies in the wider issue of UK culture, itself, being the very command-and-control culture the author so successfully criticizes. He does not place due weight on the difficulty of creating demand-led public institutions in a culture obsessed with arbitrary evaluations of others. This would reveal the uphill struggle always presented to such rational ideas while still offering the reader food for thought.
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