Description
Book Synopsis..".an extraordinary insight into why, at the end of each month, millions of us are left wondering where on earth all the money taken from us in tax has gone. The argument compellingly made by John Seddon is that the Government has designed failure into almost everything it does on our behalf." Philip Johnston, Daily Telegraph
Trade Review"Systems Thinking in the Public Sector ... is an extraordinary insight into why, at the end of each month, millions of us are left wondering where on earth all the money taken from us in tax has gone." "The argument compellingly made in this book by John Seddon is that the Government has designed failure into almost everything it does on our behalf. It has not done so deliberately; but it is culpable because it has failed to listen to people who know better how to run services on behalf of the customer rather than the producer."Philip Johnston, Daily Telegraph "It's time to face up to the unpalatable truth - Labour's public-service reforms have failed. Determined to liberate public services from producer interests, the government itself has turned into the oppressor. It is now locked into a nightmare cycle in which each round of reforms makes things worse, justifying further reforms which founder in their turn because (you've heard this before) in attempting to do the wrong things righter, they actually become wronger.;Do quotas and targets enforced by a regulatory bureaucracy remind you of anything? Yes: they're called central planning and don't work any better in UK local government offices and police stations than in Soviet tractor factories. One of the strengths of Seddon's diagnosis is that, as a consultant, he has seen almost every public service from the inside. From trading standards to planning and housing repairs, all exhibit the same dysfunction, being forced to conform to a work design that starts from the wrong end - the requirements of government rather than those of the citizen. The design fills the system with error and waste, driving quality and effective capacity down and cost up."Simon Caulkin, The Observer
