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The Whitehall Effect ~ John Seddon - Online Notes

Links below take you to the chapter notes:


Introduction
1. Prelude

Part 1: The industrialisation of public services
2: Call centres
3. Back Offices
4. Shared Services
5. Outsourcing
6. Information Technology

Part 2: Delivering services that work
Introduction
7. A better philosophy
8. Effective change starts with ‘study’
9. Better thinking, better design
10. ‘Locality’ working
11. IT as pull, not push

Part 3: Things that make your head hurt
12. Targets and standards make performance worse
13. Inspection can’t improve performance
14. Regulation is a disease
15. It’s the system, not the people
16. Incentives always get you less

Part 4: ideology, fashions and fads 
17. Choice
18. Personal Budgets
19. Commissioning
20. Managing demand
21. Nudge
22. Procurement
23. Risk management
24. Lean
25. IT: features over benefits

Part 5 Change must start in Whitehall
26. Beware economists bearing plausible ideas
27. Whitehall is  incapable of doing evidence
28. Getting a focus on purpose

Picture
16. Incentives always get you less

1] Stuart Sutherland, 2007, Irrationality, Pinter and Martin.

Alfie Kohn, 1993, Punished by Rewards: the trouble with gold stars, incentive plans, A’s, Praise and other bribes, Houghton Mifflin.

Edward L. Deci, Richard Koestner and Richard Ryan, 1999, ‘A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation’, Psychological Bulletin 1999 Nov; 125 (6):627-68; discussion 692-700.

2] See here for more on the subject of ‘payment by results’ and why it will always give you worse results.

3] The famous ‘Whitehall II’ study found that a major cause of stress at work was an imbalance between the psychological demands of work on the one hand and the degree of control over work on the other. People in jobs characterised by low control had higher rates of sickness absence, of mental illness, of heart disease and pain in the lower back. See Council of Civil Service Unions/Cabinet Office, 2004, Work stress and health: the Whitehall II study. View

4] Daniel Pink, 2009, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Riverhead Books.

5] Frederick Herzberg, 1987, ‘One More Time: how do you motivate employees?’ Harvard Business Review: Sept-Oct 1987 reprint with commentary of 1968 original (vol 46: no 1: pp.53-62).