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David Wastell 2011.
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Published as an ePub in 2011.
ISBN: 9781908009395
CHAPTER 1
DESIGN MATTERS FOR PUBLIC MANAGERS
On November 11th 2008, the British media carried harrowing reports of the brutal death of a 17 month old boy, subsequently referred to as Baby Peter, in the London Borough of Haringey. Baby Peters plight had come to public attention at the conclusion of the trial of his mother, her boyfriend and a family lodger, all convicted of causing his death. The case was seen as a catastrophic failure of the child protection system and Government reaction to public outrage was swift and dramatic. The sense of systemic failure (rather than isolated incident) was reinforced by two disquieting features. First, Baby Peter was not an unknown child, dying outwith the protective bourn of the State; far from it, he had been seen by numerous professionals during his short life and was indeed on Haringeys Child Protection Register. Secondly, Haringeys Childrens Services department had, within weeks of the childs actual death, been given a glowing report by a government inspection, with praise heaped egregiously upon the departments Director. Within days, Ed Balls (Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families) ordered an emergency inspection of Haringey, arranged for the Director to be summarily sacked, and instigated a national review of child protection, to be led by Lord Laming. The latter had chaired a prior enquiry into another tragic child death, that of Victoria Climbi, which had ushered in a slew of structural reforms, all designed to keep children safer (Laming, 2003). How, therefore, could it have happened again? A further development was the setting up (January 2009) of the Social Work Task Force to conduct a nuts and bolts review of the social work profession and to devise a comprehensive reform programme.
A system in crisis indeed. At this point, I will focus on the part played by a national computer system in these seismic events, the Integrated Childrens System (ICS). Calling the ICS a computer system is something of a misnomer; it was much more than that. It represented an attempt to redesign the entire statutory child welfare system in the UK, using and there were also press reports at the time highlighting the mayhem it was causing:
UNISON wishes to draw attention to the seriousness of the problems with the Integrated Childrens System. The problems appear to be fundamental, widespread and consistent enough to call into question whether the ICS is fit for purpose. we have reports of a number of industrial disputes or collective grievances brewing and in many more cases staff are voting with their feet and not using the system when they can get away with it (Unison, 2008, pp.8-9).
The miscarriage of the ICS was symptomatic of the failure of the wider system of which it was an essential and integral component. Ultimately the Social Work Task Force called for fundamental review of its design in its final report in 2009 (Gibb, 2009). In this opening chapter, I shall analyse the vicissitudes of the ICS at some length, drawing out key lessons which bear on the central argument of this book, namely that systems design needs to be (re)instated as the primary task of the manager. The ICS debacle provides a cautionary tale of design at its worst, both in terms of product and process, and of the dire consequences which ensue when managers abdicate their role as designers. Linked with design is another important trend in contemporary management education, that of evidence-based practice, which I shall weave into the fabric of my argument. The gap between management research and practice is much lamented, at least by those who are aware of it. The goal of management research, like research in any applied discipline, is surely to produce useful theory. But useful for what? For design, of course.
Paradise lost: tales from the trenches
Systems thinking is very much in vogue, in the public services especially (Seddon, 2008). The term embraces a gallimaufry of specific meanings, methods and affiliated sects, as we shall see. Striving for a holistic understanding of the complex causal dynamics of social organisations is its primary goal. When a specific accident or a malfunction arises, it is natural for the systems thinker to see this as a dysfunction of the system as a whole, rather than seeking to blame individuals. Child deaths, such as that of Baby Peter, are therefore construed as symptoms of defective systems design. And if the design is defective, the systems thinker will naturally ask how that system took the form it did, in other words, how was it designed? A maxim is in order: When a system fails or malfunctions, critically interrogate how it was designed!
In this and the following section, I will attempt to show, from a systemic point of view, just how the ICS had produced the opposite outcome from the one its originators had looked for. My account is based on the findings of a 2 year research study, which exposed the pernicious impact of the ICS on front-line practice. Let us begin by noting that the ICS does not refer to a particular computer system or software package. Rather it is a national specification, comprising a workflow model, which rigidly defines the social work business process in terms of a branching sequence of tasks and timescales, and a reference set of electronic forms, called the exemplars. Against this specification, software suppliers had been invited to develop compliant software implementations (Cleaver et al., 2008), and a number of ICS software products had been produced by several vendors. Although, there were inevitably some variations in quality and usability, the centrally prescribed strictures meant that the ICS had, in effect, been implemented as a national system.
The workflow model of the ICS is shown in decision here is whether to accept the contact as a referral, in which case a full initial assessment must be performed, or that advice/information alone will suffice. Each of the tasks in the model have to be carried out according the sequence given, and there can be no short cuts, no improvisation. For important phases, time-scales are prescribed, which are linked to key performance indicators. All referrals must be responded to within 24 hours and initial assessments must be completed within 7 working days, including a home visit, irrespective of contingencies. When an in-depth, core assessment is needed, this must be completed within 35 days.
Despite its lofty ambitions, evidence that the ICSs actual impact on practice had been highly disruptive was all too readily found in our research. A universal complaint related to the time taken to record cases electronically: social workers reported spending between 60% and 80% of their available time at the screen, filling in the exemplars. Anything but exemplary, these were described as unwieldy, repetitive and difficult to complete and to read. Their lack of practical utility was even more apparent with respect to service users. The following two quotations from social workers illustrate these points:
