Purposive Drift

The Italians have word for it

John Thackara has found a great Italian word for the lunancy infecting too many of our public services:

“ 'managerialita' – ... the obsession with process and targets that so mesmerise politicians and officials. I recently started working with the UK public sector for the first time in thirteen years. The application to what is basically a cultural project (Dott 07) of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), evaluation protocols, and risk assessment has been, to be frank, bizarre. The fact that everyone around me finds this stuff to be normal is almost as scary as the stuff itself."

In all a great piece about service design and what it could be and an even better diatribe about the control freak nonsense that gets in the way of providing real services.