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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

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27. Whitehall is systemically incapable of doing evidence

1] Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), 2005, A Systematic Approach to Service Improvement Evaluating Systems Thinking in Housing, ODPM publications.

2] Gary Hamel and Polly LaBarre, ‘Dispatches From The Front Lines Of Innovation Management’, McKinsey Quarterly, November 2010.

3] John Seddon, 2005, Adult Social Care: a systems analysis and a better way forward. View 

4] For example, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) were participants in both the government-sponsored ‘Total Place’ and DECATS initiatives, whilst Operation QUEST placed a joint KPMG/Home Office consulting team in participating police forces for six months.

5] Alex Stevens, 2011, ‘Telling policy stories: An ethnographic study of the use of evidence in policy-making in the UK’, Journal of Social Policy, 40 (2). pp.237-256.

6] Richard Bacon and Christopher Hope, 2013, Conundrum: Why every government gets things wrong and what we can do about it, Biteback.

7] Paul Buxton, 2008, The Illusion of Control. How Government Targets and Standards Damage Local Government Services. View 

8] This phrase was neatly summed up by John Kay of the Financial Times: “The British government’s admirable emphasis on evidence-based policy too often reduces, as it did in this case, to policy-based evidence: information provided supports the conclusions that those who prepare the studies believe policymakers seek.” See Financial Times, 6 September 2006, ‘How the migration estimates turned out wrong’. Byline: John Kay. View








 













 



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