The Whitehall Effect

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The free market has become the accepted model for the public sector. Politicians on all sides compete to spread the gospel. And so, in the UK and elsewhere, there's been massive investment in public sector 'improvement', 'customer choice' has been increased and new targets have been set and refined. But our experience is that things haven't changed much. This is because governments have invested in the wrong things. Belief in targets, incentives and inspection; belief in economies of scale and shared back-office services; belief in 'deliverology... these are all wrong-headed ideas and yet they have underpinned this government's attempts to reform the public sector. In this much-talked-about book, John Seddon dissects the changes that have been made in a range of services, including housing benefits, social care and policing. His descriptions beggar belief, though they would be funnier if it wasn't our money that was being wasted. In place of the current mess, he advocates a Systems Thinking approach where individuals come first, waste is reduced and responsibility replaces blame. It's an approach that is proven, successful and relatively cheap - and one that governments around the world, and their advisers, need to adopt urgently.

John Seddon is visiting professor at The University of Hull Business School and Managing Director of Vanguard Consulting. Service organisations following his ideas are achieving profound improvements in service, efficiency and morale. John has been a long-term critic of the UK's public-sector 'reform programme', arguing that reforms (targets and other specifications) make performance worse. He has repeatedly attacked current management thinking where it supports economies of scale, quality standards like ISO9000, the use of targets, inspection and centralised control of local services, and areas of public sector reform including 'deliverology'. He is well known for having adapted the Toyota Production System and the work of Deming and Taiichi Ohno into 'The Vanguard Method' for improving service performance.