Bang Off Target

Ah see how the mighty have fallen
Emma Harrison (CBE) http://emma-harrison.com/ (the Blog on her site doesn't seem very up to date ;)

Darling of the Coalition and of the BBC
(but I'm knocking off and going home for it's almost half-past three)
Your paperwork's all checked and signed
In different hands, but never mind
In another month it'll be forgot
another £8.6m bonus and that's my lot

It's all about targets.
Granted she missed hers (well, A4e did) but she came out pretty canny (as they say oop North)...but that's the funny thing about targets....
Targets are very trendy these days, even in places where they really don't belong.
You can go and see someone, get them signed up to whatever work experience/workfare scheme is current and the client might be:

1. Annoyed that you're wasting her time
2. Relieved as she hasn't seen anyone all week and her cat just died and she's feeling bloody awful and needs to offload
3. You might have some useful information to impart to the client and they might be improved by this meeting

But whichever it is, you get the same signature.
You hit the same target
If you're looking at this mathematically, which we should, as it's supposed to be in some way scientific, then we have to say that if plotted on a graph the values would be all over the shop.
 What would these targets indicate? What would they prove?
You may as well throw dice.
Of course Ms Harrison is only one person. As The Guardian has pointed out her sin was that she allowed herself to become a TV personality, so slinking away silently from the wreck like she was an Italian ferry captain wasn't really an option.
It's not really her fault though is it?
The coalition needed a cheesy Tony Blair type grin and Emma was there to provide it.
There are quite a lot of huge companies working on government contracts spending our money and they are all anonymous. And that's not a coincidence. You become a public face and the public may love you one minute and hate you the next, and they'll certainly be able to throw cabbages at you in the street.
Too recognisable
Can you say the same about the chairman of Group 4? Or Serco?
Targets? They do have value.
In a spiritual sense. But not in the sense that you could get someone to tick a box, leave a box unticked, or forge a tick.
A couple of months ago I was working with some "Service Users with Learning Difficulties".
I took one of them for a cookery session. He attends these sessions regularly.
If there were targets for this client group (there don't seem to be targets for this client group. The idea seems to be that you warehouse them for life in suspended animation) then we could tick that box and meet that target because he attended.
But most of the time when he attended he didn't do any cooking.
He sat still and watched while his staff "minder" did it for him.
But I didn't think Getting Me to Do Everything was such a good idea.
So, here we are: Recipe of the Day.
Your favourite: "Chicken Casserole"
I took a turnip out of the bag.
A turnip has many characteristics.
It is pretty large, after all when I was little there weren't any pumpkins and we used to hollow them out for lanterns. They are irregular and inelegant. They roll about a lot. They are also pretty solid.
We need a good solid piece of cutlery for this...
So I started looking for a knife to cut the turnip.
The knife drawer was full of cheap blunt knives with blades that were so thin the would bend when you breathed on them.
"Oh" the voice of the supervisor sounded helpfully behind me
"We don't have sharp knives. For Health and Safety reasons, you know. We don't want anyone getting hurt"
How anyone with poor motor skills, a wandering attention span and anxiety issues was supposed to carve up this cannonball of a vegetable using a knife that would struggle to cut soup wasn't explained.
But he did it. I found a blade hiding at the back of the drawer and properly supervised as he did it. And the rest.
I was told that this was the most that he has ever done.
And that wasn't surprising.
It's usually  much easier to do something for someone, that to get them to do it for themselves, but of course they learn nothing.
As this group of Service Users is not meant to learn anything nobody cares about targets anyway, but if they did, the target would be that they turned up. What they did, and the quality of what was done, would not have been considered.
Oh, and they wouldn't have been consulted much either, come audit time.
As long as we can tick the service user involvement box the job's done.
The quality of the involvement is a bit Will O The Wisp, really.
Oh and the next day I asked the Service User if he enjoyed the chicken casserole.
Without looking at me he replied "It went in the bin"
"In the bin?" I asked "Why on earth did it go in the bin?"
Still not looking at me he answered
"Well I hate chicken casserole"