Systems thinking and why it scares Whitehall
Town & Country Planning, September 2009
There was a small kerfuffle over the summer in the pages of Local Government Chronicle when the Audit Commission finally rose to the challenge posed by one of their most trenchant critics, the systems thinker John Seddon.
Seddon runs a consultancy based in Buckingham, and is also a visiting professor at Cardiff Business School. He describes the business of applying his ideas to the public sector as a ‘hobby’. But he never misses an opportunity to demand that the Audit Commission should be wound up forthwith.
This is, of course, a fascinating sport for any of us involved in the localism debate, but it is even more fun when they rise to the challenge.
There was a fascinating, though anonymous comment, after his article, by a local government manager saying that his department had spent £100,000 to prepare for an Audit Commission inspection. They did well, but he knew the figures had been manipulated.
“When they came that didn’t go and spend time with people working on the frontline,” said the manager. “They didn't listen to calls. They sat in a room with the policies and procedures and asked staff questions against them. Seddon is right. They enforce the government line, and their decisions are based upon guesswork more than fact and knowledge.”
That is the essence of the argument. This time, though, the Commission chouse – perhaps unwisely – to respond. Their communications chief David Walker, a former local government correspondent of the Guardian, though no great admirer of localism, fired both barrels at Seddon, describing him as a maverick “with a consultancy product to sell”. The debate online debate carried on for weeks.
This is all rather important for the localism debate. Seddon claims that targets always make services worse, that they build in huge inefficiencies, which the standard-setters and auditors never see because only look at performance against targets, not against the purpose of the operation.
He says that most local authorities, and government agencies which are customer facing, have to deal with up to 6o per cent demand from people who shouldn’t be in the system at all – people calling up because they don’t understand the process or are trying to find out why they haven’t had an answer.
The private agencies running the call centres don’t complain, because they paid for this ‘failure demand’ as well, and have no incentive to remove it by improving the system.
Worse, call centre staff are measured by how quickly they can finish jobs, which in practice often means bouncing them back to the back office with a query – and round it all goes again.
It seems to me that Seddon is posing a serious challenge to the current centralisation regime. I say this partly because I’ve just finished his challenging book Systems Thinking in the Public Sector (not quite such a challenging title, that). But also because I asked a senior civil servant what he thought recently. He told he thought Seddon was ‘over-rated’, a clear sign that the Whitehall has noticed him, is nervous about him and doesn’t feel quite ready to engage.
He is also pretty vitriolic about how development control has gone the same way, thanks to the use of the 1App form through the Planning Portal, which he says – like other similar centralised standards – fails to absorb variety and leads to more confusion.
He believes the eight week target leads to more refusals, withdrawals or conditions because these are all ruses by planning officers to meet the target.
The handful of local authority planning departments he has worked with have managed to get the eight weeks down to 30 days, including the 21-day notice period. They key is to provide applicants with the expertise they need right at the start to be able to create good developments, not hiding it away in the back office.
“Unfortunately, the regime promulgates designs for planning services that put the expertise at the back of the service, making it hard for citizens (who want to know if and when the builder can start) to ‘pull value’,” he said. Electronic planning applications will simply institutionalise the waste, he says.
The trouble is that, any local authority which really goes down the systems design route will find themselves up against the Audit Commission and their equivalents for failing to tick the right boxes.
I can’t say I fully understand systems thinking. I can’t say I even seen it in practice when it comes to deciding planning applications. But I am sure that Seddon represents the most coherent critique of the centralised targets regime that it has faced so far, and that we’ll be hearing more about him.
David Boyle is a fellow of the New Economics Foundation. His new pamphlet Unravelling the Supplicant State is available at www.neweconomics.org
