John Seddon is a British occupational psychologist, author and "management guru", specialising in the service industry. He is lead consultant of Vanguard, a consultancy company he formed in 1985 and the inventor of 'The Vanguard Method'.[1]
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Seddon has grown to prominence as a management consultant following attacks on current British management thinking including: the belief in economies of scale, quality standards such as ISO9000 [2] and much of public sector reform including 'deliverology', the use of targets, inspection and centralised control of local services. The Daily Telegraph described him as a "reluctant management guru", with a background in clinical psychology.[3]
He is known for adapting the Toyota Production System and the work of W. Edwards Deming and Taiichi Ohno into a methodology called 'The Vanguard Method' [4] for improving performance in service industries. He describes Deming's and Ohno's work as "systems thinking", as opposed to the top-down rigid "management thinking" (or Command and Control logic) that predominates most service industries today. He is particularly critical of target-based management, and of basing decisions on economies of scale, rather than "economies of flow".[5]
John Seddon discovered the concept of 'failure demand' which he defined as 'demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for the customer'. He makes the distinction between 'failure demand' - demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for the customer and 'value demand' - what the service exists to provide. Failure Demand represents a common type of waste found in service organizations.
John Seddon has published four books. In his 2008 book, Systems Thinking in the Public Sector, he provided a fundamental criticism of the UK Government reform programme and advocated its replacement by systems thinking. Over 10,000 central and local government officials, policy makers and public service leaders (in health, education, policing and housing, for example) have so far bought Seddon's 2008 book – and many more have read it.[6]
Seddon won the first Management Innovation Prize for 'Reinventing Leadership' in October 2010. As a result, he spoke on a panel at the World Innovation Forum on 7 June 2011.
The Times described Seddon as a management consultant, but unlike most "should not be dismissed as another consultant with a product to sell" due to a "high standing in the sector". It called to attention Seddon's disdain for the Audit Commission's council star ratings system; he points out that "Haringey Council was rated 4-star at the time of Victoria Climbié and Baby P's deaths".[7]
John Seddon earned a BSc (Hons) in Psychology with the University of Wales in 1974, and graduated with a MSc in occupational psychology from the University of London in 1977.[8]
He has been awarded the title of honorary visiting professor at both the Lean Enterprise Research Centre at the University of Cardiff[9] and at the University of Derby's Derbyshire Business School.[10]
Seddon said his purpose in life is to "change management thinking" at the Communities & Local Government Committee on inspection on 21 March 2011.
Seddon launched a short manifesto in June 2009 calling for the Audit Commission and the rest of what he called the 'specifications industry' to be cut.[11][12]
His call prompted a row on the Local Government Chronicle (LGC) website with David Walker, Managing Director, Communications & Reporting, at the Audit Commission,[13] who responded strongly.[14] The debate attracted a record number of comments from online readers, and broke the record for the number of visitors to an LGC article.[15]
The debate was also covered in newspapers including The Times, which featured it on 31 July 2009.[7]
Seddon wrote an open letter dated 31 January 2011 calling for the Rt. Hon Iain Duncan Smith and Lord Freud, the ministers responsible for Welfare Reform, to "halt the current programme of reorganisation associated with the Single Universal Credit and embark on a better course". In the letter, he says "This campaign is not about the concept of the Single Universal Credit as such. It is about the design and implementation of its delivery". He says the weakness in the proposals for online and call centre delivery of the new Single Universal Credit is the "continuing unquestioning faith in economies of scale". A petition was started on the Government e-petitions site as part of the campaign on 18th August 2011. The petiton calls for Iain Duncan Smith to rethink the centralised IT-dominated service design of Universal Credit.