""Command and Control is failing us. There is a better way to design and manage work - a better way to make work work - but it remains unknown to the vast majority of managers.""

An adherent of the Toyota Production System, John Seddon explains how traditional top-down decision making within service organizations leads to managers who are detached from employees and remote from operations. He demonstrates that decision-making based on purpose-related measures (such as putting customers first and improving services) can help managers reconnect with operations, see waste, and exploit opportunities for improvement. Through extensive case material, he differentiates between command and control and systems thinking and illustrates how the latter leads to improved service, revenues, and staff morale. He also posits that the service industry is fundamentally different from manufacturing, and shows how Toyota production principles must be transformed for application in service organizations.

In The WHITEHALL Effect, John Seddon explains how and why it is that governments repeatedly fail to deliver what our public services need and exposes the devastation that three decades of political fads, fashions and bad theory have caused. Although his examples come from the UK, he and his colleagues at Vanguard consult with government and public sector bodies in 10 countries and the problems he identifies (outsourcing, incentives, targets, standards, inspection) can be found in all Western political systems. With specific examples and new evidence, he chronicles how the Whitehall ideas machine has failed on a monumental scale - and the impact that this has had on public sector workers and those of us who use public sector services. The WHITEHALL Effect provides fresh insights into some of the most challenging issues of our time (because of their impact on health, education, policing and all public services) and reveals the unprecedented opportunity we now have to create the public services we all deserve.

Behind the doom-laden headlines, a quiet revolution is taking place in the public sector. In the police... hospitals... local government... social welfare... costs have been significantly reduced, services have improved and there is a real 'danger' of improving morale. There is now no politician or executive in any branch of local government or any area of the public sector who can say: "It won't work here." The evidence is clear: it does work here, and right across the board. It's four years since John Seddon's first assault on the regime of 'choice', targets, delivery, inspection, incentives, 'free market' reforms and back-office 'economies of scale' that was paralysing UK local authorities. Systems Thinking in the Public Sector explained how it was that so-called 'performance improvement' led to ambulances driving round in circles with ill people on board and benefits claimants having to complete the same form three times. Two years later, in 2010, and in response to calls for evidence that Seddon's Vanguard Method really did offer the kind of dramatic improvements that he claimed for it, a first collection of Case Studies showed Vanguard's Systems Thinking approach at work in (mainly) housing and housing benefits departments. This latest collection of Case Studies spells out the kind of dramatic performance improvements that have been consistently achieved in the NHS, the emergency services and a wide range of local authority departments. It's a handbook for anyone faced with the apparently impossible task of improving service levels and dramatically cutting costs. The Case Studies demonstrate again and again just how much can be achieved in a relatively short time using a Systems Thinking approach - transforming the lives of service users for the better in the process. Part 1 describes the application of the Vanguard Method to eight different systems: *Police forces in the Midlands and Cheshire, *the Fire and Rescue Service in Staffordshire, *Development Control at Rugby Borough Council, *Food Safety in Great Yarmouth, *Legal and Social Welfare Problems (Advice UK), *Health and Social Care (NHS Somerset), the care of Stroke patients at Plymouth Hospital. Part 2 has three topical briefings on the vexed question of 'demand' and why it is that increasing resources to meet increasing demand is so often the wrong answer.

In his acclaimed 2008 book Systems Thinking in the Public Sector, John Seddon blew the whistle on public sector 'reform' and the flawed gospel of quasi-markets, competition, targets and inspection. He showed how thousands of people in the UK and elsewhere had been engaged at a cost of millions of pounds, to impose and enforce targets that simply made things worse ...Those people are still there - from the Audit Commission down - and the quasi-market model is still creating waste, driving up costs, damaging services and destroying morale.Now a new book spells out the alternative. Delivering Public Services that Work brings together case studies from 6 different public sector organisations, in the UK and New Zealand, that are using Systems Thinking to bring about rapid and extraordinary change. These Case Studies show: *How they did it, step by step. *How they overcame initial resistance and hostility from staff. *How they rolled-in (rather than rolled-out) the programme across other departments/services. *The astonishing results that have been achieved. *The unexpected benefits that can accrue (a 44% drop in staff illness in one case).

The free market has become the accepted model for the public sector. Politicians on all sides compete to spread the gospel. And so, in the UK and elsewhere, there's been massive investment in public sector 'improvement', 'customer choice' has been increased and new targets have been set and refined. But our experience is that things haven't changed much. This is because governments have invested in the wrong things. Belief in targets, incentives and inspection; belief in economies of scale and shared back-office services; belief in 'deliverology... these are all wrong-headed ideas and yet they have underpinned this government's attempts to reform the public sector. John Seddon here dissects the changes that have been made in a range of services, including housing benefits, social care and policing. His descriptions beggar belief, though they would be funnier if it wasn't our money that was being wasted. In place of the current mess, he advocates a Systems Thinking approach where individuals come first, waste is reduced and responsibility replaces blame. It's an approach that is proven, successful and relatively cheap - and one that governments around the world, and their advisers, need to adopt urgently. "A refreshing deconstruction of the control freakery of the current performance regime. It could do for thinking on business improvement what An Inconvenient Truth has done for climate change." Andrew Grant, Chief Executive, Aylesbury Vale District Council "This is the must-have book. It correctly identifies why the present regime is failing our citizens and customers, but more importantly it gives the reader a proven method by which to bring about real improvement in service performance and cost." Dr Carlton Brand, Director of Resources, Wiltshire County Council "This book is uncomfortable, challenging and very direct. It offers huge learning and insight... A superb read." David McQuade, Deputy Chief Executive, Flagship Housing Group "If ministers, local authority leaders and chief executives only read one book this year this is it. A true beacon of sanity in an increasingly insane regime; ministers should read this and recognise the error of their ways." Mark Radford, Director of Corporate Services, Swale District Council