When the obsession with targets misses the point Steve Black’s analysis exposes a classic management failure: focusing on a visible symptom while losing sight of the problem causing it. Corridor care is a symptom. Long waits are the problem — whether patients are in a corridor, a waiting room or a cubicle. Focus on corridor-care targets and you risk masking the true scale of the crisis, distorting priorities and diverting precious management time into collecting more data instead of fixing the causes. Deming warned against managing by targets instead of improving systems. ‘Power to the Middle’ argues for empowering managers to solve problems, not burying them in bureaucracy. And this isn’t new. The lessons were there before 2010. The NHS already has data on long waits. Sixteen years later, we don’t need another metric to count the symptoms. We need leaders to confront the cause, use the evidence and empower people to fix it.

Edwards-Deming warned about targets: When you manage people by numbers, they learn to hit the numbers. Can get very good at it, find creative ways to hit those targets. But not necessarily to improve the system. Targets can encourage gaming, hide problems and shift attention away from quality. The danger? The dashboard looks better while the system gets worse. We should be improving the system rather than managing the numbers.