The government has spent untold billions on the National Health Service, but there seems to be little improvement in many areas. They have spent more billions on huge IT projects for the Inland Revenue, but they have not worked. The Child Support Agency was a disaster, railways are a mess, education has fallen to pieces. It seems almost all huge projects fail, almost all 'improvements' make things worse. And althought these are public sector examples, the private sector has just as many horror stories (see the banking system), but usually they are kept private.
The question then is why does all this effort to make things better do the opposite. The management guru Charles Handy describes the two error types: type 1 is getting it wrong, that is making mistakes and other types of failure, type 2 are not getting it right. Almost all of these failed projects and changes are type 2 errors, where avoiding obvious mistakes has taken precedence over achieving the intended outcome, which has dropped from sight.
This blog is a personal view of some of these type 2 errors.
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