295 – Seven Practical Stories in a Free E-Book

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Every so often, along comes a free AND useful publication.

Purpose, Public Value, and Service Design in Local Government – Seven stories from Nova Ratio Publica by Stephen Thorpe is a good example. Drawing on 30 years of leadership experience in local government in Victoria, Australia, the e-book provides seven easy to understand public service stories to help you improve your work.

Thorpe explains how he has overcome some big challenges. Inside the e-book you’ll find practical ways to think and act differently, including:

  • Managing for value to move a conversation from operational gripes to strategic leverage.
  • Aligning public value, legitimacy, and operational capability so good intentions can be delivered.
  • Designing operations for the visible signals that tell people a place is being cared for (especially when resources are tight).
  • Service blueprinting to map services end-to-end, anticipate fail points, and build recovery so services are safe-to-fail at go-live.
  • Accommodating variety by designing a menu of service options that fit different household circumstances.
  • Understanding system capability to understand what a system can actually produce, and why setting targets outside capability will damage capability.
  • Purpose-led improvement in statutory services by focussing on the applicant experience drivers so that statutory measures become a consequence, not the method.

Inspired by Mark Moore, W. Edwards Deming, John Seddon, and other systemic thinkers, Thorpe has thought deeply about the challenges that he and others experienced at work. He has then looked far and wide for theories to explain what he was observing to help him learn and improve.

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294 – If the Vendor Won’t Bet on Savings, Why are you?

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700 words (3 minutes reading time) by Tim Whistler

‘The IT Wager’ by Tim Whistler (with the assistance of ChatGPT)

Carole Parkinson has put together a compelling and well researched post on how Councils can avoid gambling on IT investments – or at least how the risks in the bet can be understood.

I asked some experienced IT managers what they thought and they said the post was useful but didn’t go far enough.

I asked them why.

Why the IT bet feels safer than a service bet

The first point made was that the post should have explored why CEOs prefer to gamble on an IT bet than a service review and improvement bet. It was suggested that perhaps they didn’t understand how to make the service review and improvement bet. Or it was simply easier to bet on an IT product from a big vendor. It is a way for the CEO to outsource risk. They pass on the responsibility for organisational service improvement to a Big 4 consultancy and the software vendor.

One suggested that CEOs don’t have a choice because they are caught up in the race to digitise simply because their councils and communities expect them to do it. It is the new service standard. Non one wants to be left behind. Whilst this may be true, I have never seen a business case with a justification of ‘they are doing it, so we should too!’.

Why business cases mislead

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293 – IT investment: Dangerous Enthusiasm or Due Diligence? Use evidence to decide.

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2200 words (20 minutes reading time) by Carole Parkinson

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Credit: ChatGPT

In a nutshell…

This post explores the risks and pitfalls associated with large-scale IT investments in local government. It argues that councils often rely on technology and automation to fix financial deficits or service inefficiencies without first optimising their underlying processes. Drawing on expert theories, the post suggests that these ambitious projects frequently over-promise and under-deliver by ignoring the complexities of human-technical systems. To avoid failure, Parkinson recommends that leaders adopt a skeptical mindset, demand evidence-based service studies, and implement incremental project stages. Ultimately, Parkinson emphasizes that improving service design from a resident’s perspective is more effective than simply digitising outdated methods.

Introduction

“I voted for the IT project because the business case promised the budget would balance by year four. But no one told us what we’d do if the savings didn’t arrive. In the end, we automated our inefficient services instead of fixing them. It has now cost us more money than we have saved!

We should have demanded a service study to improve services first, limited the project scope, put a ‘kill-switch’ in place, and made sure the CEO had an effective early warning system in place for failure.”  

Councillor

The lesson?

Big IT doesn’t fix services; it just automates them. You can make governance improvements to reduce the odds of an expensive disappointment.

Why councils are betting on IT

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292 – Check–Plan–Do or Plan–Do–Hope?

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600 words (4 minutes reading time) by Tim Whistler

When reading local government plans, you could be forgiven for thinking that The Secret (2006) was a management manual: “ask, believe, and receive”. It is hard to see how some councils think they will make a difference from the way they plan.

To be fair, I agree that councils usually aren’t intentionally stupid or reckless. They’re juggling rate caps, grant uncertainty, ageing assets, and a community that wants more of everything. They are under pressure, and when it comes to their long-term plan, the temptation is to plug the spreadsheet gaps with “efficiency dividends” and “future asset sales” and hope it all works out.

But that doesn’t make it strategic. I call it Plan–Do–Hope.

Council plans

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291 – Capability drift and the need to recognise and build sector capabilities

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1400 words (10 minutes reading time) by Carole Parkinson

In the previous piece on the capability trap, Colin Weatherby showed how councils get stuck in a cycle of “do more with less” that slowly erodes their ability to deliver safe, reliable services. This piece zooms out. It asks a broader question: what has happened to capability across the local government sector, and why have we barely noticed its drift?

We talk a lot in local government about money, policies, structures and compliance. We almost never talk about capability. Yet capability – especially the ability to implement – is critical for governments.

From the capability trap to sector drift

My argument is blunt. Victorian councils have not really understood the role of capability. Because we don’t name it, measure it or protect it, we’ve quietly allowed some of our most important capabilities to erode – including the basic ability to implement projects and services at scale and on time.

Weatherby explains what this looks like inside a single council service: years of “do more with less” that undermine preventative work, training and supervision until the capability to deliver collapses. The same pattern is visible across the sector if you look carefully.

Local government doesn’t have a shared understanding of capability. We don’t recognise it or place it on risk or asset registers. We don’t report on it to councillors. We rarely ask, “What capabilities are we creating, maintaining or expending this year?” As a result, vital capabilities can be lost while performance still looks fine – until working harder no longer closes the performance gap.

There was an interesting article in the New York Times on 9 November 2025 (“Mamdani Isn’t the Future of the Democrats. This Guy Is.” by Binyamin Appelbaum) about the Democrats and the tussle between centrist and progressive candidates. Appelbaum says Governor Josh Shapiro is popular because he has shown that government can work and “get shit done”. When a highway collapsed, he reopened it in just 12 days. That is capability in action: not another plan, but a road people can drive on again.

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290 – The Capability Trap: How Budget Cuts Damage Councils Long Before Anyone Notices.

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3100 words (15 minutes reading time) by Colin Weatherby

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Credit: ChatGPT

Summary

  • Councils under rate caps are being pushed into a capability trap: cutting investment in how work is done, while demanding the same (or more) output.
  • Doing more with less works for a while, then it quietly destroys the ability to deliver safe, reliable services.
  • Escaping the trap means shifting from “work harder” to “work smarter” – investing in process capability, not just pushing people to do more.
  • This piece explains the trap in plain language and offers advice to avoid it.

Introduction

After ten years of “doing more with less”, many council roads managers describe their world like this:

“Today, I barely recognise our roads program. Every budget cycle we cop another efficiency dividend, another round of ‘temporary’ cuts to inspections, reseals, heavy patches and drainage repairs. On paper the program still looks coherent thanks to some clever rephasing and optimistic assumptions, but out on the network the cracks are literal.

We’ve gone from renewing assets at the right time to stretching them well past their use-by date. Crews that used to do planned maintenance now spend most of their time chasing potholes and complaints. We’ve sweated the plant so hard that breakdowns are normal, and cut training and supervision to the point where we’re relying on a few old hands to hold everything together.

What hurts most is knowing this was avoidable. Every ‘saving’ we booked was borrowed against the future condition of the network. We’ve lost capability in quiet ways – trainees we didn’t take on, engineers who left and weren’t replaced, inspectors who no longer have time to inspect, relationships with contractors hollowed out by always taking the lowest price.

The community still expects the same level of service, but we’re no longer set up to deliver it. We’ve traded investment in capability for short-term budget wins, and now the bill is arriving as risk, backlog and a network that’s deteriorating faster than we can look after it.”

This isn’t a story about lazy workers or bad managers. It’s what it looks like when a council slides into what Repenning and Sterman call the capability trap – without realising it.

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289 – Fire fighter or architect? It is your choice.

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580 words (6 minutes reading time) by Lancing Farrell

I recently completed a training course in the work of W. Edwards Deming. At the end of the course, one of the participants said they felt as though they now had the knowledge to become an architect in their work and cease being a fire fighter.

It made me think about how it is that leaders become fire fighters. It is a common complaint from executives in local government who are being exhausted on a treadmill of frantic and stressful activity.

I recently saw this piece on LinkedIn by Simon Dodds, a Health Care Engineer at SAASoft Ltd. I have reproduced it in full because it eloquently describes from a health care perspective, the same series of events that shifts managers and directors on the council treadmill from walking speed to sprinting. Here it is.

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288 – Want to improve performance? – ask your local footy club.

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300 words (2 minutes reading time) by Lancing Farrell

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We are just over halfway through the 2025 AFL season (the major league playing Australian rules football). The premiership contenders are starting to appear.

I figure it is a good time to recap on the AFL-themed posts that have been posted on this site.

First cab off the rank was Tim Whistler with a tongue in cheek look at what it would be like if football was run like local government (and visa versa). Sometimes humour exposes something we otherwise fail to see. The post featured a guest appearance and commentary from Captain Council, our very own council super hero.

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287 – The council goal posts

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550 words (4 minutes reading time) by Tim Whistler

Credit

Lancing has highlighted a key problem with many council services. I used to call it the ‘lowest common denominator effect’ (i.e. performance gets reduced to the lowest level tolerated) but I think the Taguchi Loss Function makes the point in a way that helps you to fix the problem.

Imagine that the diagram Lancing used to show the target value that a customer or citizen wants as fitting between two ‘goal posts’, to instead show a set of Australian Rules football goals. For those non-Australians, I have helped you imagine that with the diagram below.

If you aren’t aren’t familiar with Australian Rules football, when the ball is kicked between the two centre posts it is a goal and scores 6 points. If it is kicked between a centre post and the post either side, it is called a behind and scores 1 point. If the ball is kicked outside all the goal posts it is out of bounds on the full and there is no score and the opposition gets to kick the ball back into play.

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286 – Abundance, Regulation and Council Costs

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2000 words (18 minutes reading time) by Lancing Farrell

I might be drawing a long bow, but I think the Abundance agenda presents a fundamental challenge for those councils trying to find a way forward that is financially sustainable in a rate capped environment. It opens the door to reviewing regulatory and other service design to make savings and support economic growth.

Let me start at the beginning.

On 19 June 2025, in an article about a speech by Jim Chalmers, the Australian Treasurer, he was quoted as saying that left-leaning governments (as we currently have in Australia) are “strangling their own good intentions with bureaucracy”. He is asking regulators across the nation to identify regulations that can be axed or simplified to reduce compliance costs and increase the pace of economic growth. It is part of delivering a supply-side solution to the nation’s housing and energy problems by removing government-imposed impediments to production of goods and services.

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