When government ministers throw up their hands in horror at suggestions that GPs and Hospitals "massage" the figures, are they the only ones who are genuinely shocked and surprised?

When the BBC reported, some time ago now, that, shock-horror! Some people couldn't book a doctor's appointment more than 7 days out; government ministers - in fact the Prime Minister himself, competed to show how horrified they were that such bastions of our society might stoop to massage the figures.

Personally the news barely registered with me. Not only has my GP employed such rules for longer than I can remember... but in business the practice has been rife for years.

It used to be the case that senior managers - and here we could be talking about Matron in a hospital, or the senior physicians, were entrusted only with overall objectives and were not micro-managed. "Run this hospital for the benefit of the community" they were mandated.

Experienced professionals in these roles balanced a range of needs, requirements and constraints to deliver the best possible service to their communities.

These days it's cheaper to hire more junior, less experienced staff to fill these roles - and compensate for their lack of experience by setting them specific targets to ensure they focus on the "right" things. Problem is... by forcing a focus on one "right" thing - we forget that a whole bunch of other "right" things are being neglected. You see - you get what you measure. And if you measure the length of the queue - you'll get a shorter queue - without fail. Just what else is going by the board is anyone's guess.

We see this in organisations all too frequently. The penchant for micro-objectives continues unabated, even in the face of evidence that poorly thought out targets are the cause of many of the ills faced by both business and the public sector. Perhaps we could lobby the government to set an objective to reduce the number of targets during 2007...

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