Systems thinking, the Audit Commission and the policing of a sector.
Housing is desperately in need of new ways of thinking which leads to the evolution of new practices not only to improve service and product for customers, but also to clear a space for new debates. This article briefly discusses systems thinking and explores what this means for the current inspection regime. I argue that systems thinking exposes areas where inspection suppresses improvement and learning, seeking to turn out Commission-shaped organisations.
In the private sector the search for the competitive edge both in efficiency and innovative new product and service development is unrelenting. The landscape is littered with the corpses of those businesses that didn't wholeheartedly embark upon this transformation journey. Public sector change has largely been driven by government policy and legislation, linked to the release of finance. Despite this central government departments tend to be highly conservative (small c) and slow to take-up examples of business improvement. These are plenty of thought-provoking new practices around, requiring organisations to become creative and innovate new solutions to problems that are relevant to them.
Lean thinking has shown that management practices created at the beginning of the last century to solve the problems for that era are still in play today. Russell Ackoff and John Seddon amongst others have written persuasively about this issue and Seddons book Freedom from Command and Control has plenty of examples of this waste within public and private sector environments. He is one of a number of systems thinkers who propose another way of approaching work, and who have achieved proven results.
Lean or systems thinking as Seddon prefers to call it (lean leads managers to think primarily of cuts and not improvements in service capability) is a way of thinking about and seeing work. It looks at organisations as a series of systems, starting with demand from a customer and ending with a product or service. By studying the system end-to-end it is possible to gain a deep understanding and insight, allowing a redesign that achieves quick and efficient flow. The results are often far-reaching and the transformation in both efficiency and staff morale can be quite dramatic. Normally it further exposes the management practices of yesteryear, created when workers were poorly qualified and seen as a moving cog of what Ackoff calls the machine age. Perhaps one of the greatest contributions systems thinking can bring to any sector is the enhanced ability to learn, how to ask searching and difficult questions about the nature of work.
Every time I glance through an inspection report now and look at the findings and the recommendations that they make, I become more convinced of the world view that the sector needs to move away from. Inspection reports often offer up opinion and point of view as fact. They recommend solutions that do not solve root causes or lead to a deeper understanding of the system. And by not indicating that there are other methods, they camouflage the fact that this entire area is now highly contested terrain with serious detractors from the standard perspective.
The Commission's stated goal in carrying out inspection (identified in each report) states that 'in order to rise to the challenge of continuous improvement, organisations need inspection reports that offer practical pointers for improvement.' So let's take for example a housing management report issued in the last couple of months: East Devon District Council.
In East Devon's inspection report the Commission identified that customer contact by phone was a particular problem.
Monitoring arrangements for the first nine months of 2007 show that 76 per cent of calls to the repairs centre were answered within 20 seconds, while 8 per cent of calls were abandoned.
The Commission identifies that the problem is:
This performance is weak and the targets being set are not challenging. A likely reason for the level of performance is the limited number of staff taking calls at the busiest times of the week.
The Commission's solution is that targets should be set higher because obviously they are not challenging staff enough, and higher targets would make them working harder. The Commission nods its head also to say that more resources should be added at the busiest times to soak up this demand.
Systems thinkers take a different perspective and ask different questions. They try to understand demand, understand variation within that demand to discover if it is predictable. They would seek to understand if the demand is caused by special or common causes. What they are looking to identify is the volume of preventable issues that arise. With this understanding they work to redesign a system that is geared towards demand from the customer's perspective. Interventions are not made upon isolated elements of the system, thereby sub-optimising other parts. The emphasis is upon continual learning and improvement, aiming for perfection. Systems thinkers don't blame staff for performance, but the system within which they operate. People rarely have understanding or control of the system that they work in and assume that everybody wants to deliver excellent service. Setting higher targets will lead not lead to improved performance, but may lead to a higher turn-over of staff and actively damage the organisation. Throwing more resources at a problem without solving the root causes and improving the system merely locks-in waste.
The problems with the world view that the inspection regime contains are numerous. For example an obsession with service level agreements (SLAs) and service standards, and yet no understanding of how these act to suppress and stifle improvement. Nor do they consider how standards frustrate the very customers that they are meant to serve. They impose a framework of assumed knowledge about the world, that doesn't relate back to a deep understanding of the systems they seek to judge. Perhaps more importantly, they do not help organisations how to see problems and reward innovative solutions.
If these comments provoke, I do not apologise. I just want to show the ways in which the inspection regime projects merely one (somewhat outmoded) perspective of business improvement activity and polices this approach rigorously through its inspection regime. For a vibrant and thriving new sector to emerge that innovates and improves, and learns how to learn, inspection needs to change its focus dramatically. The sector needs to be able to raise problems and issues in an almost academic atmosphere, without fear of censure as these are the conditions under which wide and open debate emerges. These debates should encourage involvement at all levels and from a wide range of disciplines. These democratic debates should lead to experimentation (controlled and nurtured not cynically-eyeballed and poorly supported) not just in what are now seen as cutting edge areas such resident participation and community and neighbourhood regeneration, but also the day-to-day activities of housing management and the very nature and purpose of management itself. And the results of these experiments should not only feed back into the teaching and learning of the institutions that prepare housing managers and staff for work, but should teach them how to question orthodoxy.
There are examples that this debate is starting to happen for example the Idea website, but the debates are still treated as on the margins and are nowhere near being subsumed within core conversations. The possibility of a new single regulator and a new inspection regime with a light touch must provide the opportunity for organisations to begin this major overhaul of their practice and spark a renaissance in management and the transformation of the housing sector.
Howard Clark
Consultant
Calchas Public Sector Solutions Ltd
April 2008
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