The Whitehall Effect: How Whitehall Became the Enemy of Great Public Services - and What We Can Do About it - Hardcover

Seddon, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1909470457 ISBN 13: 9781909470453

Publisher: Triarchy Press, 2014

Synopsis

John Seddon is back. This time with an uncompromising account of Whitehall's effect on our public services. And it's a damning read. 'The Whitehall Effect' chronicles how the Whitehall ideas machine has failed to deliver on a monumental scale - and what we can do about it. We have a breathtaking opportunity to create public services that truly serve. But only if Whitehall changes. --- Why don't public services work very well? One key reason is that they have been 'industrialised'. Part 1 explains why call centres, back offices, shared services, outsourcing and IT-led change almost always lead to service failure. It explains, in particular, why 'economies of scale' are a myth. Part 2 proposes a better (and tried-and-tested) alternative to the alienating and unresponsive experience of industrialised public services. Good services are attuned and sensitive to peoples' needs. Where the 'industrialised' approach tries to drive down costs but invariably drives them up, the better approach - managing value - drives costs down significantly. Part 3 challenges conventional thinking and received wisdom about public services. Targets, inspection and regulation have to be part of the solution, don't they? Seddon explains why they're actually part of the problem and shows that the most effective lever of change and improvement is to stop 'managing' the people (public sector staff and managers) and start managing the system they work in. Part 4 discusses some of the current fads in public-sector reform: 'choice', 'managing demand', 'nudge' and 'lean'. Politicians pursue them because they are plausible and fit their narrative, the story they like to tell about reform. But these fads only make public services worse or, at best, detract from the opportunity at hand. The opportunity John Seddon describes is breathtaking. We can undo the costly debacle of public sector 'reform', but only if we first change Whitehall. In Part 5 he describes how Whitehall is systemica

About this title

About the Author:

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. He describes the Vanguard Method as a form of systems thinking. John Seddon makes an important distinction between 'failure demand' - demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for the customer and 'value demand' - what the service exists to provide.

About this edition

• Publisher: Triarchy Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1909470457
• ISBN 13: 9781909470453
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 216