“Call You and Yours: Would you miss targets? Do our public services really need formal goals and performance targets? ... Email us your thoughts ahead of our programme on Tuesday 17 March.”
Hmmm... Ok, here goes.
Formal goals, no. Defined purposes, yes. Performance targets, no. Useful measures, yes.
Goals differ from purposes. Targets differ from measures.
People who work in our public services actually want to focus on their purpose. For instance: doctors and nurses want to treat patients; police want to prevent and detect crime.
Instead of targets, people need useful measures derived from their actual work. Useful measures lead people towards practical questions of method, such as — ‘How can we do this better?’
To most managers ways of thinking, the notion of targets sounds plausible. The trouble is they don’t work. And they certainly don’t work in complex service-systems, such as public services. In fact, they create waste.
In principle, there is nothing wrong with individuals having targets that they set for themselves. For example: “lose weight”; “run further”; “get another job”; “earn more money”.
The problem with targets being set in hierarchical systems is that they are imposed by people who are detached from the work being carried out. Targets therefore get framed in arbitrary and capricious ways. For example: “We need an average of 2.4 smiles per minute”.
In hierarchical systems, targets distort the work, and are a major cause of waste. Why? To survive in target-distorted environments, people learn to 'cheat'.
In a target-driven system, waste is “designed-in” to the system, because peoples’ attention turns to being seen to meet the targets at the expense of achieving the organisation’s purpose, which results in inefficiency, poor service and low morale.
Using targets —
• deflects peoples’ attention from what they ought to be doing,
• engages peoples’ ingenuity in managing the numbers, and
• consumes peoples’ time in artificial activity,
when they could be —
• using measures that relate to purpose,
• improving their methods using feedback from useful measures
As John Seddon says “People need help with measures and means, not cajoling to focus on arbitrary activities through hierarchical power...”
It’s a question of imagination and system-design, not inspection, monitoring, and compliance.
Targets also excuse leaders from leading: presenting a vision, motivating, and problem solving. One would think after 50 years of bashing Soviet central planning and its target driven economy our governors might have learned that people who aren't interested in the ends just game the system.
Posted by: Nico Macdonald | 2009.03.17 at 02:57 PM