Howard Clark
South East
I worked for over a decade in front line & service improvement roles in social housing (LAs & RSLs) before leaving to set-up my own consultancy to explore better method. I have carried out service improvement projects, carried out work on HA mergers, and sat on RSL governance boards.
Over the years we have had improvement regimes that have not improved services to residents. There have been lots of plausible ideas which have had little impact.
Look at all of the 'Best Practice' - improvement plans, policies & procedures, process mapping, call monitoring, customer segmentation, targets, benchmarking, customer surveys. All of these have maintained the mediocrity.
Better method must begin by studying the organisation systemically. In 2009 I set-up The Systems Thinking Review, an online magazine with stories about systems thinking to help organisations.
Howard Clark
BA (Hons), MA (York), MSc (Cardiff)
Recent activity
Comments (4)
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Comment on: CIH unveils vision for the future
The document is called 'Transforming Housing's Future'.
But the content appears to be geared to how how the CIH can make money by selling its own consultancy and business services. -
Comment on: Report claims mergers do not create success
The question that this report made me ask is:
What is the point of the CiH?
It uses a highly contested methodology (benchmarking) to try and understand an organization.
A methodology I must say, that happens to benefit the CiH because it uses the for-profit company HouseMark which is owned by the CiH (and the NHF).
You cannot use benchmarking to understanding quality, but you can use it to drive mediocrity into a service.
The sector needs innovation, not more of the same shoddy service. No more repairs contractors taking 10 times to fix a leaking tap. Facts about service felt by tenants but not recorded in current performance measures. The same sort of benchmarking that make repairs contractors look cheap (unit cost) but actually cost a whole host more when you study and learn.
Come on CiH you can do better than this. It looks shabby. -
Comment on: Scaling new heights
The best way of identifying a great housing leader is an organization delivering great service to its residents.
Leaders not interested in accolades from the Audit Commission, or knighthoods, but interested in helping to design services that solve resident's problems. I still have a letter from a leaseholder who was grateful for my help in solving a particularly long-lasting and knotty problem. These things staff and service users remember. If you design your organization to help staff do more of this stuff, then you have won the cheese board and residents love it!
Who cares if they are humble or not if they keep to this clear purpose and achieve amazing results.
Howard Clark
The Systems Thinking Review -
Comment on: Scaling new heights
The best way of identifying a great housing leader is an organization delivering great service to its residents.
Leaders not interested in accolades from the Audit Commission, or knighthoods, but interested in helping to design services that solve resident's problems. I still have a letter from a leaseholder who was grateful for my help in solving a particularly long-lasting and knotty problem. These things staff and service users remember. If you design your organization to help staff do more of this stuff, then you have won the cheese board and residents love it!
Who cares if they are humble or not if they keep to this clear purpose and achieve amazing results.
Howard Clark
The Systems Thinking Review -
Comment on: Out of commission
I worked in social housing in Local Authorities and Housing Associations throughout this entire decade (leaving about 6 years ago). Can I share the reality on the ground?
The Audit Commission inspection reports advocated lots of stuff that is now being uncovered by curious leaders as contributing massively to costs and driving terrible performance.
3 Stars organisations with up to 90% failure?
Take for example the comments on financial probity. When you study calls coming into many housing systems you can find up to 90% failure demand (calls concerning a failure to deliver the service the resident asked for). Audit Commission recommendations said that good organisations set call times to pick-up phones or made crude calculations about numbers of calls and the number of staff needed to answer the call. But if up to 90% is failure, why would you spend money or more staff instead of reducing the 90% failure? Madness. But this is in organisations rated excellent by the Audit Commission. Financial probity?
Schedule of Rates and 10 visits to fix a broken tap
When you study repairs systems you discover that it can take up to 10 visits to fix a dripping tap (taking months from first call) or 8 visits to fix broken electrics (taking years). Housing Organisations were told that the Schedule of Rates was the best way of pricing repairs contracts. So each part and job had a cost. But 10 x a dripping tap repair is a rather costly reality. Financial probity?
Because markets were perceived as the best way to get efficiency, repairs contractors began to cut throats to win business. The result? Roc, Connaught’s … etc. Financial probity?
Benchmarking ... costly with poor results
The Audit Commission recommended that housing organisations should benchmark. So hundreds of thousands of residents £s were spent funding Benchmarking groups and consultants. Staff time was spent (thousands of hours) reading other organisation’s reports or sitting in meetings discussing what others were doing. They copied each other’s performance measures that told them nothing about true performance from the resident’s perspective. Every system is different and you can't just copy. Complaints never went down. Councillor’s mailbags never emptied.
So the Audit Commission told them that good organisations had complaints teams handling complaints. Yes. Instead of improving the service to remove the complaints!
Best Practice? A thousand pages of policies and procedures
The Audit Commission also argued that housing organisations should have pages of Policies and Procedures. In many organisations you could count 1,000 pages for a member of staff. Not even Phd students could follow this. There were teams of people not actually working, but writing the policies and procedures for other people to follow. Except nobody followed policies and procedures. And if they did, it meant that they weren’t listening to residents to try and understand what problems they were trying to solve.
The worse thing about this is that if organisations copied what the excellent rated organisations did, then the Audit Commission was in a bit of a bind to criticise really! They would be criticizing themselves.
I could go on. But you get the picture.
I believe that everybody had the best of intentions, but that the Audit Commission inspection regime was the wrong method to go about improvement.
On further reflection many organisations were afraid to be honest or open with the Audit Commission about this. Nobody wanted to rock the boat. Who wants to end their career or be earmarked as difficult?
Now leaders are much more willing to speak out.
Howard Clark
The Systems Thinking Review
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Posts (1)
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Posted in: use of psycometric testingin recruitment
The use of Psychometric testing is an assumption about the role that staff play in organizational performance. It suggests that by weeding out the bad people, in some way you will get the hard-working people left over. Hard working normally means compliant, able to follow instructions, work hard etc.
Organizations focused upon systems thinking understand that the majority of performance is actually down to how the system has been designed and only a small part of performance is down to the individual. The split is normally perceived to be 95% system 5% people. These organizations also know that to focus upon the 5% (instead of improving systems design) can exacerbate and make staff performance worse. In effect it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you treat workers like performance is down to them, then they begin to engage in behaviors that don’t improve performance.
In systems thinking organizations, the focus upon improving performance actually kicks-off a positive re-enforcing cycle. The system gets better at giving service users what they want (through better design). Service users get happy and this shows through to staff. Staff then give more because all human beings want to do is help people (we are intrinsically purposive creatures). Systems design effectively turns all staff into people who want to contribute. No psychometric testing needed.
Howard Clark
The Systems Thinking Review