Easier Seddon Done 2

#JohnSeddon has developed a simple approach to service design, which he and his followers call "systems thinking", much to the annoyance of everyone else in the systems thinking world. He has also developed a critique of what he calls The Regime, including some very pertinent observations about the failings of the target culture.

Seddon adopts a highly political language in attacking The Regime, and this hasn't always been helpful in-the-large for tackling the problems of the UK public sector. In my previous post Easier Seddon Done, I noted his complaint that when he wrote a letter to representatives of the regime explaining their errors, he got a “snotty, curt reply”. (Well, who could have predicted this?) Today I found another example of this kind of thing in a heated debate started by @leanblog, The One Where John Seddon Might Be Lying (or Has His Facts Very Very Wrong) (October 2010). In his contribution to the debate, Bill S points to the Vanguard Newsletter Feb 2010 where Seddon admits to harrassing the head of HMRC.

The great systems thinker C. West Churchman identified politics as one of the enemies of the systems approach. Seddon's campaigning approach has resulted in a considerable politicization of the "systems thinking" label. Seddon himself certainly understands the POSIWID principle (in his books he refers to "de facto purpose") so he must take some responsibility for this.

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Some additional points about lenscraft

The first point about lenscraft is the principle that no single lens is adequate to solve difficult problems. That principle applies both to the UK government's obsession with targets (which it is thankfully now backing away from) and to Seddon's simple service design alternative. It is when the claims of a given lens are overstated that politicization occurs.

The second point about lenscraft is that any lens can be useful sometimes. There may well be specific contexts where targets are valuable (although I can't think of any right now), and there are probably situations where Seddon's way of looking at the world is useful.

The third point about lenscraft is that any lens needs to be used reflectively and critically. In other words, we need to pay attention to the nature of our own intervention in the situation, and the limitations of the lenses we are using, rather than imagine we have some privileged observation platform. For my part, I am particularly wary of the claim that a given lens is "integral" or for that matter "holistic", because such words imply a kind of cognitive closure, as well as inviting arguments with proponents of rival lenses.

The question this discussion raises for me is what kind of practical systems work is viable (both politically and financially) in an ecosystem that is dominated by such claims and counter-claims.

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Related Posts

Easier Seddon Done (June 2008)
Changing How We Think (May 2010)

Demanding Change: Lenscraft

School League Tables

Is assessment in schools fit for purpose? asks the UK Teaching and Learning Research Programme. (Full report pdf, press release pdf, BBC News)

Obviously the answer depends on what you imagine the purpose to be. The report identifies a wide range of possible (and sometimes conflicting) uses, and politely pours scorn on the view expressed last year by David Bell, who as permanent secretary at the Department for Children, Schools and Families told MPs:

“While I hear the argument that is often put about multiple purposes of testing and assessment, I do not think that it is problematic to expect tests and assessments to do different things.”

As the report points out, the reason that this expectation is problematic is that assessments have two different effects: they provide information and they influence what people do. These effects generally conflict: measurement (especially targets) distorts performance.

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Using Stafford Beer's POSIWID principle to determine the real (de facto) purpose of assessment, we can identify four real purposes, one internal to the educational establishment, and three external.

For head teachers and bureaucrats, assessment is a way of competing for resources. Assessment results are used to allocate funding to schools, and to cost-justify a wide range of innovations and initiatives, and are therefore subject to strong vested interests from various stakeholders within the education system.

For politicians, assessment provides a way of claiming that education standards have improved monotonically since records began, with especially good progress during the current regime. (I don't actually know anyone outside the "system" who takes these claims very seriously.)

The schools at the top of the league tables can attract the best teachers and the best pupils, and therefore should be able to maintain their position at the top of the table in perpetuity. (A bit like professional football.)

Therefore, for ordinary people, assessment provides a way of selecting the "best" school for your child, and helps to increase and maintain property prices within the desirable catchment areas. (Obviously this effect is viewed differently by those families who can afford these property prices and by those who cannot.)

In summary, despite an official Government agenda for innovation and change, the league table system helps to maintain an unsatisfactory status quo. POSIWID.

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As a champion of systems thinking, I find it encouraging that so many ordinary people (almost everyone except politicians and bureaucrats) understand the problems with target-setting. One of the effects (and therefore the POSIWID purpose) of the target-setting regime may be to encourage people to embark on real system thinking. And by "systems thinking", I don't just mean the John Seddon approach to service design but holistic joined-up thinking. I live in hope.

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See also

• What do school tests measure (New York Times, 3 August 2009)

Easier Seddon Done

John Seddon of Vanguard has written a book called Systems Thinking in the Public Sector, criticizing something he calls “The Regime” – by which I think he means the dominant forces within government based on targets. The extracts I’ve read so far indicate that Seddon has been strongly influenced by Deming. I also detect some influence from Stafford Beer’s POSIWID principle when he writes: “the de-facto purpose of the regime [is to] make services worse”.

This kind of analysis is absolutely in line with the kind of analysis we have been doing here on the POSIWID blog. I have ordered a copy of the book, and I look forward to reading it. But are the right people (by which I mean the people who might be able to change things) going to read it?

Some years ago, Seddon originated a concept called “failure demand”. This concept was taken up (and, according to Seddon, completely misunderstood) by the regime. When he wrote to representatives of the regime explaining their error, he got a “snotty, curt reply”. Well, who could have predicted this?

This raises an interesting question. Seddon and his colleagues have some pretty sound insights on the flaws in the regime. But the regime is unable to accept these insights. This is not very surprising – regimes do tend to be resistant if not immune to external criticism. So how can Seddon (or anyone else) use these insights to cause real change? Okay, I’m sure he will be happy to sell more copies of his books, but I don’t think he merely wishes to bask in the warm glow of “I told you so”.

From an insider’s perspective, uninvited “insights” from consultants might possibly seem like unwarranted meddling. I use the word “meddle” deliberately, because this is a word Deming uses for attempts to change a system without systemic understanding. Seddon understands what the regime is doing wrong, and he may well be working brilliantly behind the scenes, but his public interventions to change the regime seem to be based on the optimistic logic that telling people what they are doing wrong is going to persuade them to do things differently.

Sadly, the exact opposite is true. Telling people what they are doing wrong makes them defensive, it encourages them to construct elaborate rationalizations for why they are doing what they are doing, and makes them all the more determined to continue along the same track.

Meanwhile, some organizations have a sophisticated mechanism for resisting alien ideas, which is to introduce these ideas in a deliberately weakened form. This is like vaccination: you expose people to cowpox so they won’t succumb to smallpox. Perhaps some highly intelligent and utterly devious people within the regime deliberately exploited some vagueness in Seddon’s original formulation of “failure demand”, implemented something that conformed to the letter of the concept but not the spirit, and then sat back with smug satisfaction when Seddon protested that his original idea had been misapplied, knowing that the regime cannot now succumb to the original power of “failure demand”.

In situations like this, I believe the would-be agent of change must change weapons – relying not on rhetorical insight but on analytic rigour. Concepts must be razor sharp, evidence must be carefully assembled and meticulously deployed. I hope that’s what I’m going to find when I get hold of the book.


Related posts: Vaccination (September 2004), Notes on the Value of Culture (January 2010), Easier Seddon Done 2 (October 2010)

Common Sense Policing

I am delighted to report that four English police forces (Leicestershire, Staffordshire, Surrey and West Midlands) have decided to tear up government targets and bureaucracy, and return to common-sense policing.

• Officers 'to use own judgement' [BBC News, 31st May 2008]
• Top police boycott official paperwork [Times, 31st May 2008]

This decision will mean that the Surrey force will lose its position at the top of the league tables; but I'm sure Surrey residents won't be taking to the streets of Guildford in protest.

Let's hope that this example is followed by other organizations in the public sector plagued by stupid targets and pointless league tables.

Literacy

It was a sad day, in my view, when politicians decided reading and writing were not good enough for our children, and started to pour huge amounts of money into something called "literacy" instead.

We now discover that (at least in the UK) this money has been almost completely wasted. Levels of "literacy" are scarcely better than fifty years ago, and the putative rise in "standards" are an illusion based on faulty methodology. This according to independent researchers at the University of Cambridge.

Source: Primary Review via BBC News November 2nd 2007.

There are several possible reactions to this story, depending on your party affiliation.

• Denial. "There are lots of other studies that demonstrate just how important and valuable these literacy initiatives have been."

• Escalation. "We obviously haven't done enough. We need more money, more initiatives, more targets, more effective initiatives."

• Relief. "Given the vast increase in television and other distractions, we should be happy that literacy levels haven't deteriorated over the past fifty years."
  

Given the vast amounts of money that governments are capable of wasting on other useless or counter-productive initiatives, or bailing out reckless financiers, a mere five hundred million pounds hardly seems worth bothering about. What does that amount to anyway - one cheap paperback per child?

Update: further commentary from Mary Bousted of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, English 'losing out' to literacy (BBC News, 9th April 2009)


See also Michael Rosen, Who Owns Literacy? (Feb 2012)

Target-Setting 2

Rob Barratt from Bodmin has kindly added a poem to my earlier post on Target-Setting.

Excessive target-setting suffers from a principle similar to POSIWID called WYMIWYG - what you measure is what you get.

In the UK, the Conservative government under John Major introduced a target-setting culture, and this was enthusiastically continued by the Labour government under Tony Blair. So I am very happy to report that the Labour government under Gordon Brown is moving away from reliance on targets.

• Whitehall targets to be slashed BBC News, July 18th 2007
• Public sector targets to be scrapped Guardian, July 18th 2007
• Thinking out of the tickbox Guardian, July 18th 2007

Lost Profits

What is the point of selling Harry Potter cheap? What is the point of giving away free copies of Prince's latest album?

• Potter magic fails to rub off on retailers (June 20th 2007)
• Cheap Harry Potters hit Ottakar's (June 21st 2007)
• Anger at Prince free CD giveaway (June 30th 2007)

The traditional economic structure of the media industry - including books, films and recorded music - is that the risk of supporting unknown and struggling creative talent is compensated by huge profits from a small number of blockbusters. A similar equation applies to the viability of specialist retailers (such as independent booksellers). It is hard to avoid the conclusion that massive discounting of selected items represents a deliberate price war by the larger retailers against the smaller independent ones, with the intent of driving them out of business.

But why do the publishers go along with these tactics? Why do they succumb to discounting pressure from general-purpose retailers? Surely J.K. Rowling and her publishers would make just as much money, perhaps more, by selling a smaller number of volumes at the full price? There are certainly large numbers of Harry Potter fans who would prefer to pay the full price rather than wait for a cheaper edition, if that was the choice available. Perhaps it's because everyone is focused on achieving impressive sales volumes, rather than thinking more intelligently about objectives and targets.

WYMIWYG - what you measure is what you get.

Hospital Superbugs

According to the Independent, citing a study by Professor Mark Wilcox (Leeds University, and a member of the Hospital Infection Society), hundreds of hospital wards are being closed, and the UK National Health Service is losing £160m a year because of the lethal bug Clostridium Difficile. 

Clostridium Difficile benefits from two interacting forces:

Overuse of antibiotics This produces stronger bacteria and weaker patients. 

Complex targets Government targets on hospital infections have focused on MRSA, which has led to other hospital infections being neglected. Furthermore, patients are shuffled around the hospital to satisfy healthcare productivity targets, which increases the rate of infection. Meanwhile, hospital cleaning is driven by cost targets.

As with many complex ecosystems, there are some winners and losers. Does that mean the purpose of this complex system is to promote the interests of Clostridium Difficile? What does POSIWID tell us about the possibility of effective interventions into this complex system? 

 

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Update. My original post cited a news item from the Independent (June 8th, 2005), but this has now disappeared. Here is a later story from the same source. 

Jeremy Laurance, Hospital superbug threatening to spread through community (Independent, 21 December 2005)

My post also included a picture How Clostridium Difficile wins by default, but this has got lost.

Previous post on Innovation and MRSA: When Knowledge is Free (September 2004)

Target-Setting

WYMIWYG - What You Measure Is What You Get

This is another very important system principle. Systems are distorted by the presence of targets, which increasingly fail to measure what they were supposed to measure. 

Here is a well-known example. If you test, measure and analyse the ability of school-children, this may tell you all sorts of useful things about the socio-geographic distribution of ability, about the success of different teaching methods, and so on. But if you set targets for the scores achieved on these tests, this will motivate some changes in behaviour among teachers, parents and children. Teachers will "teach to the test", while many middle-class parents will send their children for special coaching. (Indeed, for many schools, the excellent results achieved in the school league tables are in large part due to the huge amounts of extra tuition received by children outside school, and bears little relationship to the amount of added-value provided by the school itself.) While this may indeed improve the scores, it seriously undermines your ability to learn anything useful about the ability of school-children, or to make any systematic changes. 

Another interesting example came up in the UK election. Given a reasonable-sounding goal that health clinics should try to see patients within 48 hours, the government had imposed a target. It emerged (on live television, to the surprise and embarassment of the Prime Minister) that in order to reliably achieve this target, some clinics had changed their appointment policy and were now refusing to book appointments more than 48 hours in advance.

Jenni Russell When you can't see a GP (Guardian, April 30th, 2005)

The present Labour government is often criticized for its obsession with targets, but it should be remembered that this obsession was shared by the Conservative government under John Major. The desire to set measurable targets often comes from quite sincere motives, but these targets have dysfunctional effects. This is especially true when targets are set by politicians under political pressure without proper systems analysis.

• Setting isolated targets for improving the things you are unhappy about, while failing to set targets for maintaining the things you are happy about.
• Setting sample targets as illustrations of the things you could improve, which then receive disproportionate amounts of attention and resource. ("We will cut waiting times for breast cancer" ... hang on, what about other forms of cancer such as prostate?)

And of course target-setting is not just a disease of politicians. It is also an occupational hazard of managers within organizations. We cannot reasonably demand an end to targets, but we need to work on developing wiser targets. 

 

POSIWID - Purpose of System Is What It Does

At one level, POSIWID shows us how complex systems resist simplistic attempts to change them, or sometimes even to monitor them. The education system contains a testing subsystem whose purpose is to achieve high scores. Tracing how the testing subsystem actually achieves high scores reveals some important dependencies: the test results are dependent on the coaching subsystem, which in turn is dependent on the social system of the parents. 

If we want to make meaningful changes in the education system, it is very useful to carry out this kind of dependency analysis, because it helps us to predict several things:

1. How successful a given initiative will be.
2. How quickly this success will become visible.
3. How unequally this success may be distributed in different areas.
4. How quickly this success may be eroded or undermined by other system effects.

At another level, we can ask about the POSIWID of the target-setting system itself. The avowed purpose of target-setting is usually something to do with accountability or performance or both. The actual effect is often to make things more complicated and more bureaucratic, achieving local accountability or performance only at the expense of accountability and performance elsewhere in the larger system.

It is possible to intervene into this system too, but it needs an intervention at the right logical level. Perhaps incredibly, the quality standard ISO 9000 (dismissed by many people as hopelessly bureaucratic) contains a defined point where you can plug in a control loop that will limit or even reverse the growth of bureaucracy. I really enjoy that kind of intervention - it's like one of those martial arts where you simply redirect the energy of your opponent. 

 

See also On the performativity of data (August 2021). More posts on target-setting.