Attracting (?!) Customers to an MOT Garage

All MOT garages are required to have a clearly marked area where customers can, if they wish, observe the test being carried out on their vehicle. This photo was taken at a garage in England. Would you like to sit in the chair?

Catch 22 targets - moving goalposts

On the frontispiece to Joseph Heller's Catch 22:

"....Colonel Cathcart, who cares for nothing except keeping in well with his superiors. To do so, he continually increases the quota of missions his men must fly before being sent back home".

Do you know people who achieve, or nearly achieve, the targets set them by management, only to see them increased for the next month, quarter, or year "in the name of continual improvement, and to keep them motivated"?

Just when you think you've "got there"......!

Catch 22 - do people co-operate or do they compete?

I've just started reading Joseph Heller's Catch 22 again. There's an interesting paragraph on the frontispiece:

"From now on I'm thinking only of me".

Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: "But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way?"

"Then", said Yossarian, "I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?"

Irish tax on carrier bags has unintended effect

BBC's Countryfile recently featured a piece in which an interviewee claimed that the Irish Government's tax on the use of plastic carrier bags in supermarkets was actually having the opposite effect to that intended.

Meant as an environmental tax to try and reduce the amount of plastic going into landfill through one-time use of carrier bags, the claim was that previously many bags found subsequent use as liners to kitchen waste bins and the like. Apparently the new tax has made this use uneconomic, and so the sales of "pukka" bin liners has increased accordingly.

So a well-meaning intervention has had unintended consequences - a sharp reminder of the need for broad systems thinking in organisations and government.