Policy

The public sector's Universal Sledgehammer

Unfortunately, much that we do in the public sector is unnecessary, ineffective, or counter-productive. We have good intentions but often ineffective strategies and tactics — leading to worsening the situations we attempt to solve. The National Programme for IT, (NPfIT) or the perception of the project created by the media, is a prime example of this. But why does this keep happening and what can we do about it?

The answer is to recognise that solutions must fit the way the world is, rather than the way it ought to be. We have to create answers that can be implemented, rather than answers that make complete logical sense but are fundamentally impractical and fail to take into account the nature of the people and organisations involved in designing and implementing initiatives like NPfIT. And the acid test is whether people will respond as planned.

Enterprise, but not as we know it

What the UK needs is greater enterprise in the public sector. Something which is better than what happened before, works for the customer, and is possible. Ideas that are watertight on paper, often falter when applied to real situations influenced by personalities, cultures, histories and constantly shifting circumstance.

This issue parallels a similar problem which arises in manufacturing. In the past, product designers worked separately from the manufacturing and production engineers. Their designs may have been brilliant, but could be impossible to manufacture. A new approach was developed, called 'Design for Manufacture'. This required that the designers worked closely with engineers; that the realities of the manufacturing environment were taken into account in the design stages. Similarly, if public policy is created without proper regard to the way that it will be implemented, there is a real danger of making the situation worse.

Design for Manufacture problems arise in the public sector as a result of a pervasive intellectual orthodoxy, which I refer to as The Universal Sledgehammer.

The Universal Sledgehammer

If you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. But not every problem is a nail.

Here’s a parallel to explain what I mean. Imagine that our 'problem' is to build a copy of the Taj Mahal. But how do we know what it comprises and how it was built? One way to find out is to take a sledgehammer to the building: break it down into pieces, measure and catalogue them. At the end of the exercise, you might have a detailed model of the building. But you would have destroyed the original — the essence of the thing you were trying to honour.

There is a large number of good brains working in the public sector, and the NHS is no exception. Many, without them explicitly recognising it, have been trained in this sledgehammer thinking.

It is logical, seductively intellectual, and occasionally effective. And it is an approach which is characteristic of those working in technology, information management and project management roles — and an approach that we would expect to be taken to NPfIT.

The approach has become generally accepted across many walks of life, and the public sector is no more immune than society in general. But it is just one approach, not the approach.

The ‘Analytical Sledgehammer’ approach has the following characteristics. It is unable to see a problem as part of a wider set of issues. It addresses symptoms, not causes. It seeks to avoid risk rather than to manage it. It places the analyser outside of the problem, allowing (requiring) emotions to be stripped out of the thinking.

It assumes there is a right answer which, if only it can be revealed, can be delivered — failing to recognise that often there are often no right answers, just a variety of positive first steps. It ignores the importance of relationships (to health, education, outlook) and concentrates on transactions (qualifications, operations, houses built).

The approach sees a service user, supplier, public sector worker or voter — but it does not see someone as potentially all four: a person. As a consequence, the life goes out of the solutions generated. Employees are treated as if they were simply programmable instruction takers — that, if only there were a long enough checklist or a sufficiently detailed framework, there would be no more issues.

Customers are treated as passive, as needing support, rather than as active agents whose sense of their own involvement (and responsibility) is a major factor in their ability and willingness to move on. And, since risk is screwed out of the system, there is no room for innovation.

Finally, by treating our target people as if they were entirely defined by being members of the group in question, we are in danger of standardising services in line with a set of assumed characteristics which go with that group, even though the individual may not conform to the stereotype, and potentially reinforcing the very problem we are trying to solve.

So the fundamental solution is one of mindset. Everybody in the public sector should recognise that there are alternative ways of approaching problems.

An alternative outlook

Centralised patient databases in the NHS, as with any other organisation, are in a sense doomed for failure. They remove the need to build real relationships with patients, and conflict with the fundamental ways humans work. There is no sense of ownership; no one in particular to tend and nurture the seed; and as a result a vicious cycle can quickly develop. They increase the chances of patient records becoming rapidly outdated, as no one individual (employee or department) is charged with the responsibility of the maintenance.

The objective of a centralised database is to have up-to-date patient details, leading to improved patient care. This is great in theory but unworkable in practice. People are not robots and the use of technology in healthcare needs to be designed with this fact in mind.

There must be greater emphasis placed upon the importance of motivating staff to look at patients as people and take a proactive approach in identifying problems through building relationships, both between the patient and other healthcare professionals involved. Actual interface is essential.

This type of relationship-based approach is a realistic alternative to Sledgehammer thinking. This perspective says that it is relationships — between the health professional and patient (engagement), between individual and individual (community) — that actually deliver the sustainable results.

Applying a one-size-fits-all approach to public sector problem solving is asking for trouble. Considering a problem from a variety of angles is the first step towards developing effective solutions. The current one-dimensional, process-driven approach is a fundamentally important tool in the public sector and should not be neglected. But it has shortcomings.

Effective solutions happen when the problem has been properly understood. And there are many different forms of understanding than that of the objective, removed analytical-intellectual.

Peter Latchford, CEO and founder of Black Radley.

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