I’m looking forward to this one! THIS THURSDAY, 2 July, The Public Service Transformation Academy is hosting a free webinar with Phil Snelgrove from Goldratt UK: ‘A different look at systems thinking’ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_psta-special-webinar-a-different-look-at-activity-7477616924009476097-Kmbw?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAACuq-oBecVFDW6PCf3lkoG-peMeuLBeoho
I’m looking forward to this one! THIS THURSDAY, 2 July, The Public Service Transformation Academy is hosting a free webinar with Phil Snelgrove from Goldratt UK: ‘A different look at systems thinking’
I had a conversation with Phil last week and came away thinking: yes, this is worth bringing into the wider public service conversation.
Not because Theory of Constraints is new — it sure isn’t! Not because ‘flow’ is a magic word. And not because public services need another imported private-sector method, stripped of context and sprayed over councils, health, housing and care — no, they really don’t 🙂
What interested me was something more precise: Phil was very clear that many organisations confuse activity with productivity, local efficiency with whole-system performance, and cost reduction with actual financial improvement. That’s the point in public services, and is very much in tune with our thinking and our work.
So much of our current situation is shaped by the pressure to reduce spend while demand rises, complexity increases, and the human consequences of delay, queueing, triage and eligibility get pushed around the system.
In that world, a narrow ‘process improvement’ lens can become dangerous: it can make the wrong thing faster, optimise the point where the pain is visible, leaving the real constraint somewhere else entirely.
And ‘quality’, ironically, can can turn ‘saving money’ into degrading service just enough that the damage doesn’t immediately show up in the accounts.
The question I’m interested in is: what does a serious constraint-based view add to systems thinking in public services? Especially when the constraint may not be a machine, a team, a budget line, or a pathway, but something more awkward — the relationship between finance and service, between short-term savings and long-term demand, between eligibility and need, between statutory duty and human reality, and of course between local improvement and whole-system viability.
Phil and I also got into the old but still live question of accounting; cost accounting can make very bad decisions look rational. Public sector budgeting can do the same — once the measurement system teaches people that every local saving is good, every queue is someone else’s problem, and every department must look efficient in isolation, the system starts defending its own dysfunction.
That’s why I think this conversation is interesting, that’s why we’re partnering with Goldratt. It’s not a cure-all, but it’s a good dollop of rigour and a useful irritation.
A way of asking better questions about where the constraint really is, what we are really trying to improve, and whether our measures are helping us see the system or helping us avoid it.
Free online PSTA webinar: Thursday 2 July 2026, 10:30–12:30
Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/KEwpq8uRTmqvjuet7EwCiQ
chosen path 