One of the best critiques for the modern phenomenon of target driven system design, where outsourcing, rationalisation, target driven methods, standarisation lead not to the intended outcome of increased efficiency and lower costs, by higher costs, demoralisation and customer disatisfaction.
The main guy, John Seddon is a brilliant, thought provoking and eloquent speaker that manages to make you laugh, cry and shout in agreement.
Some choice quotes / themes from the presentation.
* Gaming the system – if you set points targets etc, people like to maximise points and will do so at the expense of finding the best solution to just finding the easiest solution to score the point
* Your workers are the system make them improve it
* Management changes from adversarial role to co-operative working on the system with the worker
* Understand where the demand is, understand differences and reasons
* You can’t to the wrong thing right
* By imposing arbitrary targets into system you create a purpose – hitting targets, you also constrain method
* Three things every manager needs to know about targets:
1. Always makes performance worse
2. No reliable method for setting a target (i.e. last year + 10%)
3. Real measures derived from the workers, workers doing to work you receive benefits you would never dream of setting as a target
* Have you ever seen a 5 year plan that says we will get worse
* We never re-visit plans to see if we were right
* The only plan is ‘get knowledge’
* The only work is what the customer wants to pull, everything else is waste
* Change is emergent
* Change starts by studying the current system » study demand until you can predict demand going forward » you take your value demands (the things you know you are going to get a lot of) » follow them (the value demands) through the flow » see where they go » keep following the demands
* One-size fits all – enormous forms – feeding the machine