John Seddon's book, Seddon, J. (2008) Systems Thinking in the Public Sector offers an interesting challenge to many current ideas about public service provision. The purpose of this page is to indicate the key ideas of his work. For those interested in this area, it is not intended to be a substitute for reading the book itself.

Key themes

1. Government initiatives to improve public sector provision have been unsuccessful.
2. Too much emphasis on command and control initiatives.
3. Specific targets can lead to unintended negative effects on service provision. One negative consequence is that services become organised around compliance with targets rather than innovation.
4. Removal of capacity for discretion in front line workers leads to 'waste' in the service.
5. Managerially lead programmes often convey implicit negative beliefs about the public sector workforce i.e. that they are not intrinsically motivated to provide a good service.

Key proposals

1. It is important to design services in order to respond to public demand. The key requirement for method are to understand demand, measure achievement in customer terms, design to fulfil that demand and in doing so remove all the causes of waste.
2. Services need to be designed around 'value demand'. Many services spend a lot of time dealing with 'failure demand' - the behaviour of clients making demands on the organisation because their expectations of the services have not been met.
3. Waste within the organisation is defined by the proportion of time spent in failure demand.
4. Services many benefit from having senior leadership roles positioned to be very aware and close to actual service demands that come to a service.
5. There may be an important difference between actual service demands and what the service sees itself as delivering.
6. Service demands may not tally with service targets.
7. The improvement in public experience of help increases value.
8. Increasing value reduces real costs. (see Increasing 'value': the work of Michael Porter)

Implications for AMBIT

• The central idea of 'value demand' is very consistent with a mentalizing stance. Finding out what a young person would actually find helpful to their life situation is a significant challenge but is a part of clarifying 'value demand'.
• It may be very useful to think about the amount of service time is spent on dealing with 'failure demand'. Failure demand (such as dealing with complaints) is an important part of all services and cannot be completely eliminated. However, there may be parts of the service in which a significant amount of staff resources become focussed on managing 'faliure demand' rather than addressing value. For example, management of a waiting list is an example of managing a form of failure demand. It is necessary but is not contributing to the core purpose of the service to provide responsive and timely help to a young person.
• Seddon's work emphasises the unintended consequences that occur in complex systems. This is entirely consistent with the AMBIT approach to Dis-integration and the lack of value in assigning blame around complex processes.