“Eliminate Targets and work standards that prescribe arbitrary numerical 
quotas and goals” W.Edwards Deming (the father of quality improvement)

“Targets are capricious. While they are assumed to provide a spur to improvement, they actually make performance worse. The next time we hear about the Government’s use of targets, we should be asking why they have not been abandoned.” John Seddon (Vanguard Consulting)

Without knowledge of what a better way of working might look like, all that anyone can do, given a ‘target’ is ‘more of the same faster’; whereas quality improvement requires finding, researching, planning, trialing, studying and implementing ‘a different method’, so much easier to distort the system or fiddle the data.I will leave you with some additional quotes taken from a John Seddon article “On Target To Achieve Nothing” in the Guardian Newspaper in 2000 (full article here http://www.systemsthinking.co.uk/6-targets.asp) And this article demonstrates to me that NOT ONE of our main Political Parties has learnt anything about improvement in the nine years since this was written! (It is my underlining in the text)

On a recent Radio 4 Today programme a Liberal Democrat spokesman was invited to criticise the Government’s use of targets for managing the public sector At last, I thought, someone is going to point out that targets don’t get us what we want.

Alas, the spokesman could only suggest that they should be used better. The fact is that targets don’t help us get to where we want to be. Worse, they actually obviate the possibility by making people focus on the wrong things. In the police, schools, health service and local authorities targets are hindering performance rather than fostering improvement.

What I had hoped the spokesman would say was that the whole idea of targets is flawed – that their use in a hierarchical system engages peoples’ ingenuity in managing the numbers instead of improving their methods. Peoples’ attention turns to being seen to meet the targets – fulfilling the bureaucratic requirements of reporting that which they have become ‘accountable’ for – at the expense of achieving the organisation’s purpose. In simple terms, all this effort constitutes and causes waste – inefficiency, poor service and, worst of all, low morale.

The notion of a target is plausible. In principle, there is nothing wrong with individuals having targets that they may set themselves – lose weight, run further, get another job, earn more money. But targets in a hierarchical system is that it is imposed with authority, by people who are generally detached from the work being carried out. Targets are therefore arbitrary. They may suit a plan, but they do not start from a knowledge of capability – what the system predictably achieves and why.

What the spokesman should have said was that instead of targets people need measures that lead to questions of method – ‘How can we do this better?’

So currently no main political party has in their manifesto “we will abolish targets so we can get on with improving not distorting services”Coming Next:   More on areas where Political Parties are the same