DHCW responds to every problem by displacing rather than addressing it. Hire instead of fixing process. Outsource instead of building capability. Rebrand instead of restructuring. Each symptomatic fix relieves pressure temporarily — and weakens the structural capacity ever to address the cause. The burden is shifted from the part of the system that could have fixed it (engineering competence, programme governance) to parts that cannot (recruitment, vendor contracts, communications).
What is the ‘shifting the burden’ trap at DHCW?
In Meadows’ framework, Shifting the Burden occurs when a system applies quick fixes that address the symptom but erode the system’s own capacity to solve the underlying problem. Each quick fix makes the fundamental solution harder to implement, creating dependency on more quick fixes.
How It Manifests at DHCW
The quick fixes are the familiar ones: hire instead of fixing the processes that make people unproductive, outsource instead of building capability, rebrand a failing programme instead of asking why it failed. Each buys quiet now and costs capacity later. DHCW went further and abolished the slow fix outright: the one body whose job was to test a business case before money was committed — the Strategic Investment Panel — was, in the strategy director’s own words, “stood down” across 2024 and 2025, the very years the programmes were failing. The mechanism that might have forced a fundamental solution was removed during the emergency it was built for.
The same reflex runs through the money. The transformation fund — the one pot meant to build long-term capacity — was, the strategy director admitted, “expanded to fit things that are arguably not that transformational… maintenance… or technology refresh,” then wound down with nothing to replace it: the capacity budget spent keeping the lights on. Vacancy savings did the mirror image. Rather than fix a workforce shortfall, the finance team banked it — “we’ve assumed a high vacancy factor because we knew… those positions will not be filled until later in the year” — paying down the deficit with empty desks and handing the burden to the staff who stayed, until two-thirds of them reported burnout. The strategy director described the logic without flinching: “if you reduce the money, you reduce the headcount and you reduce the delivery… we’ve tended towards slowing the delivery. We kind of flatten the delivery curve.”
The culture rewards it. Asked about DHCW’s habit of over-promising on the very deadlines it set to clear its own audit findings, the board secretary offered the trait as a virtue: “we are very keen to please, which is a really good thing. But sometimes that doesn’t give us the buffer if something goes wrong.” In burden-shifting terms that is the diagnosis, not the defence — a culture that defaults to whatever makes the immediate problem stop, the structural inverse of the psychological safety under which hard problems actually get surfaced.
And there is a more corrosive variant: removing the person who named the problem rather than the problem itself. That is the burden-shift in its purest form: the discomfort being displaced is accountability, and the quick fix is making its source disappear.
The largest burden-shift is strategic. A Healthier Wales — the plan DHCW was created to deliver and did not — was owned at Welsh Government by the figure who is now its director of strategy; the same leadership is now writing the ten-year successor that replaces it. A failed strategy is not examined. It is superseded by its own authors — which guarantees the failure is never the strategy currently in flight.
Produced By
L1: The Hiring Trap — hire instead of fix. L4: The Rebranding Escape — rebrand instead of learn. L5: The Vendor Dependency Spiral — outsource instead of build. L7: The Competence Void — leaders who can’t diagnose the real problem reach for surface fixes. L9: The Whistleblower Suppression Loop — remove the problem-identifier instead of the problem.
How is the ‘shifting the burden’ trap broken?
Cannot come from within. The burden-shifting IS the leadership strategy — it is not a mistake they can be coached out of. External intervention is required: Welsh Government, Senedd, or legal proceedings that impose accountability from outside the system.
The blueprint’s Intervention 4: Flip the Model targets this trap directly – replacing the outsource-and-hire reflex with a structure that builds genuine internal capability.