When I was young most of the electrical and mechanical equipment we used needed constant maintenance to avoid constant break-downs. Cars, lorries, washing machines, motor bikes, TV sets, gramophones, were all unreliable. Manufacturers were thought to be deliberately creating something called "Built-in obsolescence" so that we would have to buy the new models they produced each year.
Those days are past. In the world of mass-produced technologies, systems breakdowns are now a rarity, and the real costs of individual items have fallen dramatically. Delivering higher and higher performance for lower and lower prices.
Yet our social and administrative systems seem to have become less and less reliable and effective. Schools, health services, call centres, policing, prisons, politics, government
departments, all seem to be failing to deliver what is needed at ever higher cost. People are increasingly disllusioned with the managerialist babbling of Ministers and and senior officials about how they are improving "performance", when in fact the opposite is true.
As Simon Caulkin says in today's Observer
" What gets people steamed up is not electing mayors or voting in tax referendums but dealing with local officials: how they are treated in daily interactions with the GP, the police and the traffic warden, as well as bin men, housing and town hall staff."
He goes on:
"A report last week that labelled the UK police inefficient and the most expensive in the world noted that small forces caught more criminals than large ones; it called for the 43 existing
forces to be split into 95 to "properly reflect their local communities"
(01 MARCH 2009; We need local heroes, not local elections)
Detailed explanations of the roots of these failures are set out in books like JAKE CHAPMAN'S "System failure" and JOHN SEDDON'S "Systems Thinking in the Public Sector: the failure of the reform regime... and a manifesto for a better way ".
And as both authors show, the explanations for the failures in the performance of our public services apply in reverse, as it were, to the successes of the performance in the global manufacturing industries.
In manufacturing, following the example of the Japanese Industrial Miracle, systems thinking has been widely applied, In the public services, under the control of the conventional
politicians' Command and Control mind-sets, systems thinking has been shut out and replaced by the nonsenses of bonus-related Performance-Management, via target-setting and Performance-Related Pay.
If we are to survive the perils of the 21st century, we will have to "kick"the Command and Control Cultures that have made our public services perform so badly, and replace them with
leadership cultures that understand how to apply systems thinking to re-configuring the way our societies work. Unless we start to work for that fundamental change in our political
and bureaucratic cultures, our responses to the "perfect storm"of environmental, political, social and economic crises that is heading our way will be as inadequate as have the measures of pseudo-reform that have made our public services ever more costly and ever less effective.
