Decision-Making

King County faces a familiar cycle: deficits, targeted cuts, new taxes, repeat. A Theory of Constraints lens on their own public data suggests the measuring stick itself may be the problem.

Distorted cost accounting in public institutions does not just produce bad budget decisions. It produces learned helplessness in the people who manage those budgets. The system, not the people, is the cause.

A question for CFOs at Washington State critical access hospitals: could standard cost allocation be distorting your service line decisions at exactly the wrong time?

Most dashboards measure local efficiency at the expense of global throughput. Here is how to define the minimum dataset that actually drives system performance.