2nd opinion: Eyes on the ball

the average professional baseball player in the USA can perform sporting feats with a 28% success rate. Top players get it right 32% of the time and that 4% difference is what marks out the ultra-rich superstars from the rest.

I read these statistics recently and they've been in the back of my mind during a series of meetings with supported housing providers because they show small differences can be vastly important.

If we could spend a little more time on evaluating progress and implementing change and innovation, what a huge help that could be for the sector.

Unfortunately the providers I meet are, without exception, drowning in an ocean of paperwork.

Supporting People was supposed to simplify things. There would be a single pot to bid from rather than complex, multisourced packages to assemble. But in many organisations all management capacity is – still – being absorbed in sustaining the basics.

The care and support sector needs to constantly adapt to the changing needs of service users in a society where people live longer, do so further away from their relatives and can survive more independently, although significantly more frail, for longer than was possible in previous generations.

Meanwhile the government rightly places on us requirements both to provide greater user choice and to move towards recognising a much greater role for residents' aspirations.

All very healthy, but how can we achieve that while we are being swamped by the routine tasks? And if anyone wants to make the case that it doesn't matter because commissioning bodies are well placed to take over the role of future thinking from actual hands-on service providers, they've got an awful lot of history to explain away before most of us will be convinced.

Nor do I believe that what I am observing is a simple transitional blip while the new regime settles down. The bureaucracy appears to be both endemic and pervasive. And I reckon I've been around long enough to distinguish between the traditional "provider moan" for money and/or less accountability, and what is a convincing description of reduced capacity. The fact is that without more headroom, we will be less able to meet service-user expectations and the imperatives behind the In Business agenda.

The old obsessions with inputs and outputs, and the scrutinising of processes, might please the bean counters but they offer remarkably little to the task of evaluating the effectiveness of actual work with real people in localities. The narrowness of the traditional monitoring tools gives no scope to measure the wider difference that a particular piece of work is making, either in the lives of those who are its direct service users or of the wider community.

In the last few years a lot of us, including many in government, have begun getting our heads round the fact that what we actually need to focus on are the outcomes we achieve and the impact we have on the people and places with which we work.

Moreover, outcome and impact monitoring – while it requires more careful thinking by commissioners – can reduce bureaucracy without depleting accountability. This way vital management time is released back into providing that headroom that, whether your task is to hit a baseball or to reduce drug dependency, makes all the difference.