Freedom from Command & control - John Seddon

Freedom from command and control has been around now for a few years but as part of a project only recently, it crossed our desk and we read it.

John Seddon is a vocal critic of management fads, and has advised UK Government ministers. The book is blessed by Chief Executives and Directors from places like First Direct, Cranfield School of management and Westminster police.

Anyway the book is a tour around a number of areas of management starting with Toyota & Ford and moving to modern day phenomenon like call centres & local authority performance management.

He demolishes targets in just a few pages – sometimes he actually asks managers to explain why a business or service has targets. The conversation sometimes goes like this (apologies for quoting it almost verbatim but it did make us laugh out loud.)

Senior Manager “Here’s your target”

Team leader “But how should I go about achieving it?”

Senior Manager “That’s what you get paid for, deciding how to do things”

Team Leader  “So is that the sign of a good manager, someone who hits targets?”

Senior Manager “Of course”

Team Leader “So, what if people achieve their individual or team targets by doing things that are not good for the organisation overall or actually stop someone else achieving theirs?”

Senior Manager “I expect people to be sensible & work in the best interests of the company”

Team Leader “But quite often people cover up deficiencies in procedures & safety to meet targets”

Senior Manager “Give me their names”

Team Leader “Oh, I am just talking hypothetically. Anyway, aren’t you better off with individual capability measures instead of targets. Who know’s what & what’s going on in the business and then you get a discussion about best practices and what is best for the customer and the business as a whole”

Senior “Eh? People can discuss all they want. Just so long as they achieve the targets I set”

However, his real fire and venom is saved for contact centres and call centres

Seddon argues a plain and simple fact about call centre and contact centres.

Contact centres can generate piles and piles of statistics on; numbers of calls, calls per agent, calls on hold. But completely fail to work out why people call

Understanding that leads us to the break and fix method.

Customer has demand—–business understand problem—–Determine how to resolve ——respond/resolve in efficient manner

OK, so far so good, but when he talks about failure demand then it starts to click in to place.

Failure demand is customer demand caused by a failure to do something right for the customer.

The something may be turn up ontime, call back, do something anticipated or expected by the customer.

Most organisations (even customer focused ones) are “swimming in failure demand”

Fixing that will make any target setting seem futile by comparison.

Is this book a very interesting read- Yes

Will quoting Seddon and his views make you unpopular and make you sound like a smarty pants -  Yes

(He has no time for quality standards, UK initiatives like investors in people IIP & chartermark so if your organisation goes in for these, this book might may you sqirm a little)

In his summing up chapter he outlines that  turning off the causes of failure demand is on of the strictest economic levers available to managers.

And we thing that is something worth working for and (maybe) even being unpopular for…

Buy the book here

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