The Problem-Causer as Solution-Provider — Statecraft

§ 01 · The circle that closes on the steps of the palace

In June 2009 McKinsey delivers a memorandum to State Secretary De Jager on the information chain of the Tax Administration. The advice is the start of a trajectory that today, seventeen years later, has not yet been concluded. In April 2022 McKinsey delivers a new report to that same Tax Administration, this time on the turnover-tax system, which is so outdated that 250 employees still rekey returns by hand. Replacement programme: 200 million euros, twenty-year duration.¹ Between those two reports lies the period as Minister of Finance of Wopke Hoekstra, former McKinsey consultant on that same Tax Administration file.² At the end of 2020 EY completes the report Action perspectives investigation fundamental transformation of service provision. State Secretary Vijlbrief observes in his response that the Tax Administration needs rest, and not always a new cohort of advisers.³ In the 2021 budget year the central government spends €2.29 billion on hiring external personnel. Three years later, in 2024, that figure has risen to 3.7 billion, 15.4 per cent of total personnel expenditure, well above the Roemer norm (a 10 per cent ceiling on external hiring as a share of personnel expenditure, named after the 2010 Roemer motion).⁴

Whoever reads this sequence as a series of incidents, misses the pattern. Whoever sees the pattern, understands that the party that delivers the solution sits in the same chain as the party that helped to produce the problem. Not as conspiracy, not as malicious intent, not as individual failure. As structural deformation. The chain as a whole functions as an instrument of cost-extraction, and it has a material interest in the problem not disappearing structurally.

This paper calls this deformation pattern 4 in Series III on looking into the cultural layer. It is, after pattern 1 on the congealed outcome (Nº 02), after pattern 2 on word continuity (Nº 03), after pattern 3 on the optimisation asymmetry (Nº 04), and before pattern 5 on form laundering (Nº 06), a fourth discriminating eye on a mechanism that remains soft in policy documents but becomes hard in figures, contracts and outcomes. The meta-pattern, the sincere voice that clothes the other five, has been treated in Nº 01 of this series.⁵ In publication order this paper is Nº 05; in the pattern order of the frame document it is Pattern 4.

§ 02 · What the pattern precisely is, and what it is not

The pattern requires precise formulation. Three misconceptions must be ruled out at the outset.

It is not a conspiracy. No one in the chain need know that he is participating in cost-extraction. The individual McKinsey consultant who analyses the Tax Administration delivers sincere work according to the standards of his profession. The Picnic deliverer who drives into a neighbourhood on his electric cart provides a service that consumers value. The interim manager who sets up a municipal crisis intervention has expertise that the organisation needs. The pattern operates at the system level, not at the level of intent.

It is not a lie. The claim that consumers want convenience, that government needs expertise, that care providers can deliver economies of scale, that dual earners want time back for their family, is not untrue. The claim is merely incomplete. What it omits is that the need to which the solution responds is in part generated by the same economic or institutional structure within which the solution is offered. Galbraith wrote it in 1958 in The Affluent Society as a formula that still holds: wants are increasingly produced by the process by which they are satisfied.⁶

It is not stupidity. Administrators, policymakers, entrepreneurs and citizens act rationally within the logic of their own position. The municipal director who hires a consultancy has reasons for it. The parent who orders a meal box has reasons for it. The minister who instructs the Tax Administration to start a transformation programme has reasons for it. The pattern arises precisely through the aggregation of rational acts that are defensible within their own horizon.

What the pattern in fact is can be formulated most sharply by means of a distinction from the rent-seeking literature, which will play a central role in this paper. Profit-seeking is value addition through production and innovation. Rent-seeking is value redistribution through the manipulation of rules, scarcities and complexities.⁷ Pattern 4 describes a manifestation in which friction itself, the time pressure, the market fragmentation, the administrative complexity, the demand for care, the addiction, acquires market value as soon as it is resolved by the same chain that produced it. The second analytical distinction is that between synchronous and diachronic dependence. A customer needs his supplier now, and that is an ordinary market relation. A supplier needs his customer permanently to be in a state of need, and that is something else. The pattern operates diachronically. The business model is undermined when the problem disappears structurally.

A third formulation, for those who prefer a vivid image, comes from The Big Con by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington. A therapist who keeps a client in therapy forever is clearly not a good therapist.⁸ But the entire consultancy industry is, on their analysis, built on that principle. What holds for consultancy holds, mutatis mutandis, for the chain as a whole.

§ 03 · Theoretical anchoring: rent, demand, iatrogenesis

Three veins lend the pattern its depth.

The first vein is rent-seeking. Gordon Tullock formulated in 1967, in an article that its author at first could not get published and that became canonical only a decade later, that the social loss from monopolies and politically created privilege does not consist solely in the loss of consumer surplus. It also consists in the resources that actors invest in obtaining and defending those privileges.⁹ Anne Krueger coined the term itself in 1974, in a study of import licences in India and Turkey.¹⁰ James Buchanan and Tullock together developed the Public Choice school in which the following insight is central: as soon as government distributes a scarce privilege, and actors can strategically redesign that privilege, an endogenous tendency arises to generate rules and scarcities themselves as a business model.¹¹

For pattern 4 the extension is straightforward. What classically held for state monopolies and quotas now holds for friction in the general sense. Time pressure in dual-earner households, complexity in public delivery chains, market fragmentation in care, fragmentation of administrative responsibility: these are forms of scarcity that acquire market value as soon as a supplier unlocks them. The rent shifts from the governmental domain to the interface between problem and solution in general.

The second vein is Galbraith. The Affluent Society (1958) introduced the dependence effect, and The New Industrial State (1967) added to it the revised sequence.¹² It is not the sovereign consumer that determines what is produced. The producer arranges, through advertising, product design and infrastructure, the need such that his own output is taken up. Galbraith saw the circle that runs from production capacity to advertising, to change in taste, to new consumption. He saw what classical economists did not see: that in affluent economies the supplier plays an active role in constructing the demand which he then proceeds to meet. Picnic and HelloFresh are direct descendants of that analysis, albeit in a variant which Galbraith himself did not develop: the supplier constructs not only the demand, he also fills the original gap that has been carved out by the broader economic structure, and he does so in a way that perpetuates the gap.

The third vein is iatrogenesis. Ivan Illich introduced the term in Medical Nemesis (1975), in the opening sentence: the medical establishment has become a major threat to health.¹³ Illich distinguished clinical, social and cultural iatrogenesis. The clinical form concerns direct harm through treatment. The social form concerns the medicalisation of ordinary problems of life. The cultural or structural form, for pattern 4 the most valuable, concerns the loss of autonomous capacities to deal with pain, illness and dying, and the dependence that thereby arises on an institution that simultaneously causes and treats that loss.

Illich’s term is in this paper the general concept that applies to every institution that does more harm than it heals, and that is mobilised again for that very reason. It is iatrogenesis that we encounter in youth care, mental healthcare, consultancy at the central government and commercial tutoring in extremis. The paper introduces for it the specialisation administrative iatrogenesis: the phenomenon that institutions which solve problems produce problems that require their own continuation.

Three supporting veins deserve brief mention. Karl Polanyi’s double movement, particularly his analysis of fictitious commodities, supplies the framework for understanding the commodification of care and education.¹⁴ Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty of 1970 supplies the framework for understanding why exit from the pattern is so difficult when all alternatives come from the same chain.¹⁵ And Mazzucato and Collington’s The Big Con of 2023 supplies the most recent elaboration, tailored to public organisations.¹⁶

§ 04 · Six Dutch case files

File I · Supermarkets and Picnic

In 2025 Albert Heijn holds a market share of 38.2 per cent in a Dutch supermarket market with around 51 billion euros in annual turnover. Jumbo follows with 19.9 per cent, Plus with 8.1 per cent.¹⁷ On 9 July 2021 the Authority for Consumers and Markets approved Ahold Delhaize’s acquisition of 38 outlets from Deen, on the basis of a reasoning in which the market-share effect was classified as limited. The remaining Deen stores went to Vomar (23) and DekaMarkt/DKM Holding (19).¹⁸ Against this backdrop, since the end of 2015 Picnic has been operating, an online discounter without physical shops, with electric carts, built around the concept of delivery. Market share in 2025 around 1.9 per cent, turnover 1.5 billion euros, net loss in the Netherlands over 2024 65 million euros, cumulative loss since founding around 1.2 billion euros including Germany and France.¹⁹ Picnic is financed by NPM Capital, the Hoyer and De Rijcke families, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, and since 2021 by the German supermarket giant Edeka, which in 2024 raised its stake to 32 per cent.²⁰

A direct shareholder overlap with Ahold Delhaize is, as far as is publicly known, not demonstrable, and the paper therefore leaves that specific claim aside. The pattern works even without that overlap. Edeka is a German supermarket consolidator whose core activity is scale enlargement, and this party finances the online solution to the friction which has been produced by scale enlargement in the supermarket world. That is pattern 4 in pure form.

Which friction precisely. The Dutch supermarket world in 1985 still had a dense carpet structure of independent supermarkets and neighbourhood shops, with several shop types within reach of each household. Locatus figures show how this network has been thinned over four decades to a handful of large chains with larger outlets at greater distances from the home. SCP figures do not show an unambiguous rise in time spent on grocery shopping since the 1980s, but they do show that the felt time pressure in dual-earner households with young children is real.²¹ That is an important nuance for the paper. The claim is not that grocery shopping objectively takes more time than it used to. The claim is that a subjective time pressure in a particular demographic cohort, partly through the structure of retail, makes possible the emergence of an online discounter that is financially carried by the actors active within that same retail structure.

There is, in CEO statements, a clear articulation of the pattern. Michiel Muller, co-founder and director of Picnic, repeatedly formulates that consumers want convenience and that Picnic provides for that convenience. The vocabulary is consistent and recognisable. Not “serving a new demand” but “unlocking a latent need”. Not “filling a gap that we have helped to create” but “offering an innovation that the market is asking for”. The articulation is sincere, and that is precisely what the meta-pattern of Nº 01 predicts.

File II · Meal boxes and the dual-earner regime

The Dutch meal-box market has in 2024 a turnover of around 225 million euros per year, of which 70 per cent is accounted for by HelloFresh, around 14 per cent by the Allerhande Box of Albert Heijn, and around 3 per cent by Marley Spoon.²² HelloFresh-Group reports a worldwide turnover of 7,600 million euros for 2024, an EBITDA margin of 9.8 per cent on the box segments, and a pattern in which order numbers fall slightly while the value per order rises.²³ The company selects customers on higher purchasing power.

The fabricated context. The labour participation of women between fifteen and seventy-five rose from 39 per cent in 1985 to 69 per cent in 2023.²⁴ In the same period the dual-earner model has become normative. The average working hours of working women rose from 25.3 hours per week in 2014 to 27.8 hours per week in 2024.²⁵ In households with young children the time spent on cooking has fallen, and the sense of guilt about that fall has become a monetised variable in the marketing of the meal box.

The marketing positions HelloFresh as the solution to the time pressure of the family. The marketing category, the target group, the product design, the pricing: everything is aimed at the dual-earner household with young children that experiences the evening meal as a logistical problem. The company is structurally dependent on the continued existence of the time pressure to which it responds. A reform of labour-market policy that would relax the dual-earner model, or a fiscal change that would substantially reward part-time work, would erode the demographic basis under the business model. The company has no direct policy interest in this, but the chain in which it operates implicitly does.

Food waste and plastic packaging nuance the picture. Wageningen UR research from 2019 indicates that food waste in meal boxes turns out, on average, to be comparable or sometimes slightly more favourable than in ordinary grocery shopping, because portioning is more precise. That is an unexpectedly soft outcome. But the plastic packaging and logistical footprint per meal are considerably higher, and those costs are externalised. Pattern 4 here operates on a second layer: the solution to the time pressure produces a new problem that has to be absorbed by public institutions.

File III · Energy and poverty

The Dutch energy market was liberalised in two steps. The Electricity Act 1998 and the Gas Act 2000 brought production and supply to the market; the opening for small consumers was completed on 1 July 2004. The Independent Network Management Act enforced from 2007 the unbundling of network management and supply, despite resistance from Eneco and Delta up to cassation.²⁶ Nuon was sold in 2009 to the Swedish Vattenfall, Essent in the same year to the German RWE, Eneco in 2020 to a consortium of Mitsubishi and Chubu Electric. Dutch control over the energy supply has been largely privatised and internationalised in two decades.

In 2021 six small suppliers went bankrupt. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, tariffs were driven to historic peaks. The number of energy-poor households rose in 2024 to around 510,000, around 6.1 per cent of Dutch households. Without the energy allowance of 1,300 euros per household, the number of energy-poor households in 2023 would have been not 396,000 but 885,000.²⁷

The pattern works here indirectly but really. Through liberalisation and privatisation the government has reduced its grip on the energy supply. When prices rise it cannot intervene directly on tariffs but must compensate through the energy allowance. That allowance flows back to the same sector via consumer expenditure. An important nuance: the Authority for Consumers and Markets concluded in March 2023 that the profit margins of Eneco, Essent and Vattenfall in 2022 lay between zero and five per cent, and that the high consumer prices were driven mainly by procurement costs.²⁸ The Dutch suppliers did not earn excessively from the crisis. The Vattenfall parent company, which also owns gas and coal plants, did, with a net profit of 4,400 million euros over 2021. The chain therefore runs straight through the international parent companies to the Dutch compensation payment.

Subsidy schemes for sustainability, ISDE and BENG, follow a comparable pattern. Energy suppliers are active as installers and providers of heat pumps and solar panels. The party that was made independent in 2008 receives in 2026 public funds to adapt the home to the transition that the old market order could not bear.

File IV · Consultancy, self-induced complexity and the Co-Med case

The central government spent in 2024 around 3.7 billion euros on external hiring, 15.4 per cent of total personnel expenditure. That is well above the Roemer norm (a 10 per cent ceiling on external hiring as a share of personnel expenditure, named after the 2010 Roemer motion), a norm that has been exceeded every year since 2015.²⁹ Some departments lie far higher. BZK 21 per cent, Logius 48 per cent, SSC-ICT 34 per cent.³⁰ At the level of individual firms: Deloitte earned in 2022 around 71 million euros from advisory work for the central government, nine times as much as in 2018. KPMG, PwC and EY each around 35 million, Berenschot more than 21 million.³¹

In this file pattern 4 is most sharply visible.

The Tax Administration and McKinsey. In 2009 McKinsey delivers a memorandum to State Secretary De Jager. In 2022 McKinsey delivers a report on the turnover tax. Between those two moments lie thirteen years in which the problems have not been solved, many consultant hours have been billed, and the composition of external hiring has expanded rather than diminished. At the end of 2020 EY produces a report on the fundamental transformation of service provision, which is read by State Secretary Vijlbrief as an implicit diagnosis that the organisation needs rest, not yet another new cohort of advisers.

The decentralisations of 2015. In the transition of youth care, the Social Support Act and the Participation Act, consultancies, Berenschot, AEF, BMC, Significant and KPMG at the front, were intensively deployed for implementation. Since 2015 youth-care expenditure has risen from 3,600 million to 8,100 million euros in 2024. The number of youngsters in youth care rose from 380,000 in 2015 to 473,000 in 2024.³² The decentralisation has not solved the problem it sought to address and has in some respects worsened it. The same consultancies that helped to design the decentralisation are now involved in the transformation agendas that must redress it. The circle closes on another ring of the same wheel.

The childcare benefits scandal. Deloitte conducted research into the face-mask affair and culture investigations at the Tax Administration. A single assignment from June 2021 to May 2022 alone cost 4.7 million euros.³³ The total expenditure on advisers in the handling of the childcare benefits scandal is difficult to trace because it runs through several budget lines, but various sources indicate that it approaches the originally budgeted compensation to victims. That is a claim the paper formulates cautiously, because the definitive figures differ depending on the defining source.

Co-Med and the GP chain. On 5 July 2024 the Limburg District Court, Maastricht location, declares Co-Med Zorg BV bankrupt. The holding company falls outside the bankruptcy. According to the appointed receivers, at the moment of the ruling the case concerns twelve practices with around 38,000 registered patients.³⁴ Co-Med was founded in 2019 as a commercial GP chain by Caro van Uden, Guy Schulpen and Guy Vroemen, one entrepreneur and two doctors with research and GP backgrounds. From 2020 the chain was operationally active through acquisitions. The company grew rapidly by acquiring existing GP practices whose owners, often above sixty, could not find a successor in a market where the number of practice-holders has been declining for years and the number of locums has been rising. The Health and Youth Care Inspectorate had since 2023 repeatedly warned about the quality of care, with complaints about telephone accessibility, high locum turnover and discontinuity of treatment. Health insurers VGZ and CZ terminated their contracts, after which bankruptcy became unavoidable. The receivers searched in the summer months of 2024 under high time pressure for takeover candidates for the twelve practices; in October 2024 the transfer to other care providers had largely been completed.

The case is pattern 4 in a specific manifestation. The friction, a shortage of practice-holders and the succession problem in primary care, has arisen structurally through the combination of tariff pressure under the Health Insurance Act, administrative burden, and quality requirements that have made starting one’s own practice financially risky. Into that gap a commercial chain has emerged that bundles practices, claims economies of scale, and cannot guarantee continuity. The bankruptcy lays the costs of recovery on the receivers, the health insurers and the patients. The entrepreneurs who founded the chain have, via the holding, been largely kept out of the loss sphere. A pressure-relieving commercial solution to a policy-produced friction ends with patients without a GP and with an intermediate layer of interim administrators, transition managers and lawyers who bill the wind-up.

In general terms, in the terms of Mazzucato and Collington: consultancy delivers at once the problem-diagnosis, the solution-strategy and the evaluation-report. In a well-functioning governance system these three functions are institutionally separated, namely politics, execution and control. When they come together in one firm, the feedback loop that should lead to recovery disappears. Organisational learning is privatised and thereby lost to the institution itself.

File V · Interim, ABD rotation, and the filled gap

The ABD (Algemene Bestuursdienst, Senior Civil Service) comprises around 1,900 management posts at scale 15 and higher. The ABD annual report 2024 reports an average tenure of 4 years and 8 months, about as long as that of a cabinet.³⁵ Minister Ollongren introduced in response the rule that ABD officials in post for less than three years are not actively approached for vacancies. The rotate-every-few-years pattern produces a chronic knowledge gap, which is filled through ABD Interim, through ABD TOPConsult, and, when that does not suffice, through external interim agencies.

In an interim assignment at a municipality of 95,000 inhabitants I saw how this chain works out in local government. The alderman confronts the council with a crisis in the implementation of the social domain. The municipal secretary advises external support. An interim manager is brought in through a specialised agency, with a daily fee that exceeds the WNT (Senior Officials Pay Cap Act) norm by a wide margin but falls within the exception category for temporary replacement. The interim manager observes that the organisation cannot carry the transformation independently. A consultancy is hired for the strategic diagnosis. A second consultancy, formally independent, for the implementation. A third consultancy, again formally independent but with overlapping personnel, for the evaluation. At the end of the cycle the organisation has not become owner of its own learning process. It has become more dependent on external delivery than it was at the outset.

This is no pathology of one municipality. It is a pattern. The WNT is formally respected, but the actual remuneration via daily rates and circumvention constructions is significantly higher. The Roemer norm is formally respected in the presentation of figures, but has been exceeded every year since 2015. The rotation rules of the ABD are formally respected, but produce the dependence they are intended to prevent.

Administrative iatrogenesis, in the specialisation that this paper proposes: the organisation loses, through the very pattern in which it finds itself, precisely the capacities it would need in order to step out of the pattern.

File VI · Private equity, youth care, mental healthcare

Mentaal Beter was acquired in 2013 by NPM Capital from Interhealth, and sold in 2021 to the French Apax Partners for around 190 million euros. Apax financed the acquisition with around 100 million euros of debt that was subsequently placed at the care provider, at an interest rate of around eight per cent while the average market rate at the time was 2.9 per cent.³⁶ Mentaal Beter Cure booked a profit of nine million euros in a year in which the umbrella organisation made a loss of six million euros. Treatment professionals had to bill 95 per cent billable hours, while the sector average lies around 70 per cent.³⁷

Pluryn, provider of youth care and care for the disabled, reported over 2018 a loss of 15.6 million euros. In 2020 Pluryn sold its premises in Hoenderloo, with consequences for the village and the youngsters that have been documented by Follow the Money and Pointer.³⁸ Pluryn is in 2024 in negotiation with eight youth-care regions about higher tariffs; the Youth Authority describes the financial situation as worrying but not problematic.

In general terms: private-equity-financed providers represented in 2022 around five per cent of youth-care turnover, a tripling compared with two per cent in 2021. In care as a whole the PE volume in 2022 was around 1,430 million euros, 3.5 per cent of care expenditure. Investors are active in dental care, maternity care, paramedical care, light-touch mental healthcare, dyslexia, veterinary chains and childcare.³⁹

An important caveat. EY reported in December 2023, on commission from VWS, no significant differences in quality, accessibility or affordability between PE-financed and other care providers.⁴⁰ Other researchers, Ligterink and Baarsma, show predominantly positive effects on operational performance from PE acquisitions. The critical picture sketched by Follow the Money and related investigative journalism focuses on excesses, and those excesses are real but not representative of the sectoral average. The paper does not generalise the excesses.

What does hold is the structural argument: private capital in care leans on a market order made possible by earlier policy; and when something goes wrong, the taxpayer carries the costs. The bill Wibz (Wet integere bedrijfsvoering zorg- en jeugdhulpaanbieders), submitted to the House of Representatives on 30 January 2025, does not prohibit private equity in care, but moves the prohibition on profit distribution, tightens the conditions, and gives the NZa the power to assess opaque transactions with related parties.⁴¹ The decision-making has, given the caretaker status of the Schoof cabinet, been pushed forward to the next coalition. That postponement is itself a typical phenomenon within pattern 4: regulation follows the pattern with a delay that keeps the chain out of the current line of attack.

§ 05 · Three international parallels

Capita, Atos, Serco, G4S. The British outsourcing chain has since the 1980s been concentrated in a handful of suppliers that in the literature have come to be called the shadow state. A National Audit Office report from 2013 found that Atos, Capita, G4S and Serco delivered 6.6 billion pounds in government contracts in 2012, while Atos and G4S paid no corporation tax. The Public Accounts Committee, chaired by Margaret Hodge, heard executives in that same year about the scandal of electronic tags, in which G4S and Serco in some cases sent invoices for more than two and a half years for the monitoring of people who were in prison, no longer being monitored, or deceased.⁴² The Serious Fraud Office opened a criminal investigation. Both firms temporarily withdrew from tenders, but remained active in other government domains, including Atos’s notorious Work Capability Assessments. The Universal Credit implementation followed a comparable pattern: failure, awarding to the same or sister market players, new contracts. Margaret Hodge’s terse diagnosis: there is a culture of failure right across Whitehall.

Sackler, Purdue, McKinsey. Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain (2021) and Sam Quinones’s Dreamland (2015) reconstruct how Purdue Pharma brought OxyContin to the American market in 1996 as a less addictive painkiller, a claim that within years had been unmasked. In July 2013 McKinsey delivered an analysis to the Sacklers in order to turbocharge OxyContin sales while pharmacists and law enforcement were in fact starting to restrict access. At the same time McKinsey held an advisory contract worth 2.6 million dollars with the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.⁴³ In 2021 McKinsey reached a settlement of 573 million dollars with American states for its opioid role. The Sacklers and Purdue reached in January 2025 a settlement of 7.4 billion dollars; additionally up to around 5.5 billion dollars in fines and related claims, reference date April 2026.⁴⁴ Crucial for pattern 4: the Sacklers also sold, via Rhodes Pharma, a related company, generic opioids, and had through various interests a view on opioid addiction treatment. This is the purest case of the pattern: produce the addiction, sell the treatment.

The British railways. The privatisation of British Rail, Railways Act 1993, split the British rail system into an infrastructure manager (Railtrack), three rolling-stock companies, passenger operators and freight operators. The collapse of Railtrack in 2001 led to the establishment of Network Rail, which in 2014 was reclassified by the Office for National Statistics as a public entity, the de facto renationalisation of the infrastructure. Since 2009 the East Coast line has failed three times under private operators and each time has been taken back by the Operator of Last Resort; Northern (2020), Southeastern (2021) and TransPennine (2023) have likewise been taken back. The rolling-stock companies paid in 2022 and 2023 410 million pounds in dividends, with profit margins rising by 41 per cent. Real rail fares have risen by 20 per cent since 1995, while Network Rail receives around 5 billion pounds a year in public subsidy.⁴⁵

A brief reference for those who wish to dig further. The work of Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe in When McKinsey Comes to Town (2022) documents how McKinsey operates worldwide in Saudi Arabia (from two engagements in 2010 to 137 in 2017), Allstate, the tobacco industry, ICE and Russian oligarchs, in a repeatable pattern in which the firm advises on both sides of a market.⁴⁶

§ 06 · The cognitive structure of the pattern

Five mechanisms explain why the pattern is so tenacious.

Independent market movements as framing. Problem and solution are presented in public discourse and in economic statistics as independent. The decentralisation of youth care is analysed as a policy choice, the growth of consultancy expenditure as a market development, as if no causal link existed. The empirical analysis reads both flows precisely as one chain with one basin. Whoever continues to count the two flows separately cannot see the pattern.

The efficiency discourse. The solution-provider presents itself consistently as more efficient than the alternative. Market versus state. Private versus public. The independent administrative centre versus the overburdened department. Empirically this claim seldom holds. The British railways have not become cheaper through privatisation. The Tax Administration has not become better through thirteen years of McKinsey. Youth-care costs have risen since 2015, not fallen. But discursively the claim is convincing, because the present state reflects the dynamic of the chain itself and therefore always seems to be in crisis.

Synchronous versus diachronic dependence. A customer needs his supplier now. That is an ordinary market relation. A supplier needs the problem permanently maintained. That is rent-seeking. Pattern 4 concerns by definition diachronic dependence. The analytical test is clear: does the party deliver something that on its departure leaves institutional residual value behind, or is its contribution organised in such a way that taking leave means returning to the starting point? The second outcome makes the pattern recognisable.

Hirschman’s exit paradox. In Exit, Voice, and Loyalty of 1970 Hirschman showed that exit and voice can weaken each other: when the most critical customers walk away, the most effective voice also disappears, and an organisation can comfortably continue to muddle on. For pattern 4 Hirschman is indispensable. In a chain in which all alternatives come from the same portfolio or the same rationality, exit is an illusion and voice becomes unknowable. The municipality that wishes to replace its youth-care provider often finds a provider from the same private-equity portfolio. The parent dissatisfied with the tutoring of Lyceo can choose between Lyceo, Studiekring, IvET, PIOS, all within Lyceo Onderwijsgroep with its 44 trade names. The citizen dissatisfied with his supermarket can choose between Albert Heijn and bol.com, both Ahold Delhaize.

Bauman’s dependence and rationalisation. In Liquid Modernity of 2000 and Consuming Life of 2007 Zygmunt Bauman described how in late-modern consumption societies the dependent self actively asks for what sustains him.⁴⁷ The municipality that has worked with external consultancies for years experiences the hiring of advisers no longer as administrative failure but as professional conduct. The institutional logic is internally coherent. That is precisely why stepping out is so difficult.

§ 07 · Diagnostic questions

Six questions through which a reader can recognise the pattern in himself and in his surroundings.

Material. Which party remains, after the close of my assignment or my programme, materially better off, and which materially worse off? Who has a lasting presence in the chain, and who has a temporary cost item? When an assignment does not end but transitions into a follow-on assignment without the original problem having been solved, the pattern is at work.

Linguistic. In what terms does my client formulate the need? Does he speak of convenience, expertise, transformation, quality improvement? Do these terms align with what he could himself produce, or do they require, by definition, external delivery? The word choice that presents the problem as unsolvable-without-supplier is a symptom.

Temporal. How often has this problem or a variant of it been addressed by external parties in the past ten years? By which parties? What is the cumulative expenditure of my organisation on this category? What demonstrable institutional residue has that expenditure left behind? When the expenditure is high and the residue low, the pattern is at work.

Social. Who sits at the table when the solution is designed, and who is missing? Are the parties that contributed to the origin of the problem also at the table to design the solution? Does the evaluation of the solution come from an independent body or from a party that operates in the same chain?

Structural. Does my organisation possess internal capacity to diagnose this problem, develop a strategy and evaluate the implementation? Or has one of these three functions in fact been outsourced? When the three governance functions, politics, execution and control, are no longer institutionally separated, the pattern is at work.

Reflexive. What personal interest do I have in the continuation of the pattern? How much of my salary, my assignment portfolio, my network, my professional identity is dependent on the continued existence of the friction I claim to be solving? The pattern is in its most tenacious form a pattern in which the sincere voice of the solution-provider coincides with his diachronic interest.

§ 08 · What breaks the pattern

Structural separation of problem-owner and solution-provider. The first intervention: regulation that addresses conflicts of interest. The British Cabinet Office Outsourcing Playbook of 2018, revised in 2020, prescribes shadow bid teams in government in order to be able to test suppliers against knowledge that government itself must possess. The French anti-corruption law Sapin II of 2016 follows a comparable logic. In the Netherlands a weaker equivalent is visible in the central government procurement conditions and in WNT enforcement. What is missing is mandatory documentation of what the hiring organisation should itself be able to do, independently of the supplier.

Public delivery versus outsourcing. Not all outsourcing produces pattern 4. The question is what the organisation should itself be able to do, and what it can outsource without losing its own learning process. The position of Mazzucato and Collington is nuanced: they do not plead for the abolition of consultancy, but for the re-internalisation of strategy, learning process and evaluation. That which the organisation should itself be able to do remains in-house.

Examples of successful re-internalisation. Network Rail in 2014, and the Operator of Last Resort since 2018 for various British rail lines, show that re-internalisation is institutionally possible when political will is present. In the Netherlands: municipalities that have kept their neighbourhood teams in permanent employment rather than outsourcing them showed in 2022 to 2024 lower cost increases than municipalities that had outsourced fully.⁴⁸ The Catalan renationalisation of water services in Barcelona and surroundings (2018 to 2022) is internationally the best-documented example.

Anti-trust and concentration oversight. The ACM has been given a broader scope in supermarket, energy and care markets, but actual concentration has in all three cases mainly increased, not decreased. The European Parliament adopted in 2023 a resolution calling on the European Commission to apply sharper oversight to Big Four conflicts of interest. That oversight is a necessary but not sufficient intervention.

Regulation of private equity in care. The Wibz, in its current form, does not prohibit private equity but regulates profit distribution and transparency. Comparable legislation in France, in particular in dental care, and the German Krankenhaustransparenzgesetz of 2024, show that regulation of care capital is legally tenable. A prohibition on private equity in care is, according to Minister-Helder/Agema, not tenable on account of the free movement of capital in the European Union. Behavioural regulation is.

Transparency of hiring and WNT enforcement. Reports of the Court of Audit in 2024 and 2025 press for consistent registration and publication of hiring amounts at the level of function. The hiring-desk construction of BZK from May 2024 is a first step, but what is still missing is a government-wide system that demonstrates per assignment which knowledge remains behind upon the supplier’s departure.

An institutional logic of embedding (in Dutch: borging). This is the public-administration core, and it forms the connection point with De Richting van de Beweging. In chapter 9 of the Handbook I work out embedding as the primary KPI of interim work, with the proposition that success is measured by what remains standing after departure. For pattern 4 this means: every outsourcing decision must be able to demonstrate that the organisation, on the supplier’s departure, stands better, not worse. The touchstone is hard. Do not pose the question is there a market for this function, but will we ever leave this chain, or are we continuously expanding it. Whoever answers that question honestly recognises pattern 4 and can begin to break it.

Concrete instruments for that embedding exist. Internal consult capacity, in the form of an expanded ABD TOPConsult, that does not have to outsource the strategic diagnosis. Mandatory knowledge embedding in every hiring contract, in which the hiring organisation demonstrates that the executor leaves behind, on departure, a working product and embedded knowledge. Term limits on successive hiring, no rolling contracts without external review. Rotation rules that genuinely set terms, not only on persons but also on advisory relationships.

§ 09 · Connection with the corpus

Pattern 4 does not stand on its own. It connects with the earlier Statecraft publications in four ways.

With Series I, Dissociated organisations, it shares the diagnosis of an institutional architecture in which substance evaporates in a chain of procedurally correct links.⁴⁹ Series I calls the mechanism institutional dissociation. Pattern 4 is a specific manifestation of it: dissociation is commercially unlocked, and cost-extraction follows the dissociation as a stream of water follows a gully.

With Series II, Doorwerking (Reverberations), it shares the attention to what arrives at the citizen and at the individual implementing organisation. The paper De stille onteigening (The Silent Expropriation, Doorwerking Nº 02) shows how asymmetric policy measures shift capital from private to institutional owners.⁵⁰ The paper Achter op de snelheid (Lagging Lagging Behind the Speed, Doorwerking Nº 07) shows how the administrative apparatus lags exogenous accelerations and thereby ends up in dependency relations where it initially had the lead.⁵¹ Pattern 4 specifies the mechanism at work in both papers: the solution market that feeds on the administrative arrears.

With the other patterns of Series III it shares the discriminating eye. Pattern 1 (The congealed outcome, Nº 02) taught us to read the congealed outcome as manifested preference. Pattern 4 adds: that preference is not only presented as given, it is also made commercially serviceable by the same chain that generates it. Pattern 2 (Word continuity, Nº 03) taught us to read the word continuity that masks the material rupture. Pattern 4 adds: that continuity is the basis of the offer, for without the words convenience, expertise, transformation and quality the solution would not be recognisable as solution. Pattern 3 (The optimisation asymmetry, Nº 04) taught us to read the optimisation asymmetry. Pattern 4 adds: the asymmetric optimisation produces the friction that in pattern 4 is unlocked as a market. And pattern 5 (Form laundering, Nº 06) is prepared by this paper: the chain that commercially unlocks the friction subsequently develops forms, certifications, audits and declarations that legitimise the pattern itself.

With the pamphlet The Discriminating Eye it shares the methodological ambition: learning to look in the cultural layer by starting from the matter.⁵² The pamphlet offers instruments whose application to pattern 4 has remained only implicit in this paper; the five-phase trajectory of brands, from workshop via reputation and scale to conglomerate and hieroglyph, describes a kindred cycle from value production to value extraction that may be made explicit in future Statecraft publications.

With De Richting van de Beweging (manuscript in preparation) it shares the four core models. The Strategic Triangle points this paper to a specific corner-weakening: the operational capacity of the hiring organisation is hollowed out by the very pattern, while political legitimacy and public value remain on the side of the organisation. The Change Colours point to the monochromism of the pattern: blue-rational-planned action is maximised, while white-self-organisation within the hiring organisation is dismantled.⁵³ The Aiki method has already been linked, in The sincere voice (Nº 01), to this type of pattern work: without an ethical foundation, moving with becomes pattern-work.⁵⁴ In the practice of interim management this is the difference between an assignment that leaves the organisation with more capacity of its own, and an assignment that leaves the organisation with more dependence on the firm. The Interim cycle, with its emphasis on transfer and reflection, is precisely the instrument that can break the pattern, provided it is taken seriously as a KPI rather than as ritual.

§ 10 · Closing

Karl Polanyi wrote in 1944 that the self-regulating market is never truly self-regulating. It produces social dislocation, which is followed by a counter-movement. He called that the double movement. For pattern 4 this offers a hopeful element. The commodification of care, education, administrative implementation and even of everyday logistics produces its own counter-movement. The Wibz, the strengthened ACM powers in supermarket and energy market, the growing parliamentary pressure on consultancy expenditure, the attention to private equity in care in the run-up to the elections of late 2025: these are signals that the counter-movement is under way in the Netherlands.

But the counter-movement will not break the pattern as long as it walks the same chains that have shaped the pattern. A law written by a consultancy world that itself sits in the chain does not regulate the chain. Oversight that depends on what the controlled chain delivers does not control the chain. An evaluation conducted by a firm that also did the implementation does not evaluate the implementation.

What remains is a touchstone. Not the question is there a market for this function, but will we ever leave this chain, or are we continuously expanding it. Whoever answers that question honestly recognises pattern 4. And can begin, not by abolishing it, for that cannot be done, but by breaking it at the place where it touches his organisation.

At that place the work is concrete. An interim manager who refuses his own follow-on assignment when the organisation does not become stronger from it. A municipal secretary who says no to the third advisory engagement in two years on the same problem. A minister who demands rest for an implementing organisation. A council that puts a question to its alderman: which knowledge remains here when this firm departs. A citizen who chooses the neighbourhood shop over delivery, and knows that with that choice he buys not only a product but also maintains a social arrangement.

The pattern is not a fate. It is an outcome. And outcomes can, with more restraint than haste and with more design care than rhetoric, be repaired.

Jacob Huibers is an interim manager with more than twenty years of experience in the Dutch public sector. He has worked as cluster manager, cluster director and quartermaster at municipalities ranging from fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand inhabitants, and at inter-municipal collaborative bodies across the social and physical domains. Statecraft is his platform for strategic reflection on public-sector execution, pillar IV of House of Viridian.

Responses and counter-arguments via Statecraft.nl.

Footnotes

Colophon

About the author Jacob Huibers is interim manager, author and adviser in the Dutch public sector, with assignments in the social domain, the physical domain, regional collaborations and administrative recovery tasks at municipalities of 50,000 to 250,000 inhabitants. He is the author of De Richting van de Beweging: Interim-Management in de Publieke Sector (manuscript in preparation) and of the corpus Limbic Literacy, Allemaal Ontheemd and Decline and Revival, all published under House of Viridian.

About the series Series III is the third Statecraft series of House of Viridian. It treats five form-patterns of cognitive deformation that remain invisible in soft policy layers but become legible in hard materiality, carried by one meta-pattern and closed by a synthesis. The series follows on from Series I (Dissociated organisations), in which the mechanism of institutional dissociation is named, and Series II (Doorwerking, Reverberations), in which the consequences for citizens are worked out in five forms and two signatures. Series III teaches how to look. The pamphlet The Discriminating Eye (April 2026, nourishment.houseofviridian.org) is a parallel source.

Place in the series Series III Nº 01: De oprechte stem (The Sincere Voice) — meta-pattern. Series III Nº 02: De gestolde uitkomst als gemanifesteerde voorkeur (The Congealed Outcome as Manifested Preference) — Pattern 1. Series III Nº 03: De woordcontinuïteit die de materiële breuk maskeert (Word Continuity that Masks the Material Rupture) — Pattern 2. Series III Nº 04: De optimalisatie-asymmetrie (The Optimisation Asymmetry) — Pattern 3. Series III Nº 05: De probleemveroorzaker als oplossingsleverancier (The Problem-Causer as Solution-Provider) — Pattern 4. Series III Nº 06: De vorm-laundering (Form-Laundering) — Pattern 5. Series III Nº 07: Synthese (Synthesis).

Publisher HOUSE OF VIRIDIAN OÜ Tallinn · Lisbon

Contact jacob@statecraft.nl statecraft.nl

Series: STATECRAFT SERIES · SERIES III Nº 05

Footnotes

¹ McKinsey & Company, Memorandum aan staatssecretaris De Jager, May 2009, contract value €464,100 for around two months’ work. For the 2022 report on the turnover tax see Consultancy.nl, McKinsey: IT-systeem Belastingdienst voor innen btw piept en kraakt, 2022; Nextens, McKinsey: het omzetbelastingsysteem staat op instorten, 2022.

² Wopke Hoekstra worked between 2006 and 2017 as consultant and partner at McKinsey & Company, with involvement in, among others, government files including the Tax Administration. He was Minister of Finance between 2017 and 2022. For the overlap see Volkskrant, dossier-Hoekstra, and NRC, De McKinsey-mentaliteit van Wopke Hoekstra, 2018.

³ Ernst & Young, Handelingsperspectieven onderzoek fundamentele transformatie dienstverlening Belastingdienst, final report December 2020. Response of State Secretary Vijlbrief: letter to the House of Representatives, parliamentary paper 31066, no. 781.

⁴ Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, Jaarrapportage Bedrijfsvoering Rijk 2024, published on Accountability Day, May 2025. Total expenditure on external hiring amounted to €3.7 billion in 2024, 15.4 per cent of total personnel expenditure. The Roemer norm (House of Representatives, Roemer motion 2010) sets a limit of 10 per cent.

⁵ Statecraft Series, Series III Nº 01, The Sincere Voice, May 2026. The meta-pattern of the sincere voice is elaborated there as the cognitive carrier formula by which the other five patterns can institutionally persist without their bearers needing to be aware of it.

⁶ J.K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society, Houghton Mifflin, 1958, chapter 11, “The Dependence Effect”. The cited formulation: “wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied”.

⁷ For the distinction profit-seeking versus rent-seeking, see James M. Buchanan, Robert D. Tollison and Gordon Tullock (eds.), Toward a Theory of the Rent-Seeking Society, Texas A&M University Press, 1980.

⁸ M. Mazzucato and R. Collington, The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments and Warps Our Economies, Penguin Allen Lane, 2023. The therapist metaphor was reprised by Mazzucato in an interview for VPRO Tegenlicht (2025).

⁹ Gordon Tullock, “The Welfare Costs of Tariffs, Monopolies, and Theft”, Western Economic Journal 5, June 1967, pp. 224–232. For the place of the article in the canon, see also Tullock, “The Transitional Gains Trap”, Bell Journal of Economics 6, autumn 1975.

¹⁰ Anne O. Krueger, “The Political Economy of the Rent-Seeking Society”, American Economic Review 64, no. 3, June 1974, pp. 291–303.

¹¹ James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, University of Michigan Press, 1962.

¹² J.K. Galbraith, The New Industrial State, Houghton Mifflin, 1967, in particular chapter 18 on the revised sequence.

¹³ Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health, Calder & Boyars, London, 1975. Revised edition Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis, 1976. For the contemporary elaboration see British Journal of General Practice, Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis at 50, vol. 75, no. 750, 2025.

¹⁴ Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Farrar & Rinehart, 1944. For the Dutch reception see the volume of translations by De Bezige Bij.

¹⁵ A.O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, Harvard University Press, 1970, in particular chapter 5 on how monopolies are reassured by competition.

¹⁶ Mazzucato and Collington, The Big Con, 2023, op.cit. For the Dutch reception see Consultancy.nl, The Big Con: Beschadigen consultants het lerende vermogen van organisaties?, 2023, and VPRO Tegenlicht, Toekomstverkenners: Mariana Mazzucato, 2025.

¹⁷ NielsenIQ, market share figures published January 2026. For 2024 figures see also FoodPersonality, Marktaandelen NielsenIQ: AH stijgt naar 38,2%, Jumbo daalt naar 19,9%. For sales via Circana see Levensmiddelenkrant, AH, Picnic en Dirk winnen meeste marktaandeel.

¹⁸ Authority for Consumers and Markets, concentration decision Ahold Delhaize Nederland mag 38 supermarkten en een deel van de centrale activa van Deen Supermarkten overnemen, decision of 9 July 2021, ACM/21/050672. The original intention concerned 39 supermarkets; on 30 June 2021 this was amended when Ahold Delhaize withdrew the Deen supermarket in Tuitjenhorn. The remaining Deen stores went, via parallel ACM concentration decisions of 9 July 2021, to Vomar (23) and DKM Holding/DekaMarkt (19).

¹⁹ For market share see AGF, Marktaandeel bij Picnic groeit langzaam, winst nog ver weg, 2025. For the loss in the Netherlands see RetailTrends, €65 miljoen nettoverlies voor Picnic in Nederland, 2025. For the cumulative loss and the operating loss see AGF, Picnic schrijft flinke rode cijfers, ook operationeel verlieslatend, 2024.

²⁰ For the financing structure see MarketingTribune, Picnic haalt €600 miljoen op bij stichting Bill Gates, 2021. For the Edeka expansion see FoodHolland, Edeka heeft belang in Picnic vergroot tot 32%, 2024.

²¹ SCP, Een week in kaart: Editie 2, digitally available via scp.nl. CBS, Tijdsbestedingsonderzoek (TBO 2011, follow-up 2016 and 2017). For the structural decline of household labour see J. Tijdens, Een wereld van verschil: arbeidsparticipatie van vrouwen 1945-2005, Rotterdam, 2006.

²² RetailTrends, Marktaandeel Allerhande Box al veertien procent, 2024; Emerce, Marktaandeel HelloFresh 70 procent, AH snelle volger, 2024. For total market size see Retail Intelligence Lab.

²³ AGF, Omzetgroei van 1,9% voor HelloFresh in derde kwartaal van 2024, 2024; AGF, HelloFresh sluit 2024 af met hogere omzet, maar lagere winst, 2025.

²⁴ CBS, Arbeidsparticipatie van vrouwen, lange tijdreeks 1985–2023. Tijdens 2006, op.cit.

²⁵ CBS, Man-vrouwverschil arbeidsparticipatie laatste jaren niet verder afgenomen, press release 21 May 2024.

²⁶ Wet onafhankelijk netbeheer (Splitsingswet), Stb. 2006, 614, entered into force in phases from 2007. For the constitutional resistance see SP, Hoe we de zeggenschap over onze energie kwijtraakten, 2020.

²⁷ TNO, Energiearmoede in 2024 gestegen naar 6,1 procent, press release July 2025. For the 2023 figures and the impact of the energy allowance see TNO and the summary in Metropoolregio Amsterdam, 21 procent meer energiearme huishoudens in Nederland, 2024.

²⁸ Authority for Consumers and Markets, Resultaten onderzoek tarieven Eneco, Essent en Vattenfall, published March 2023.

²⁹ Ministry of the Interior, Jaarrapportage Bedrijfsvoering Rijk 2024, op.cit. NOS Nieuwsuur, Overheid betaalde recordbedrag voor extern personeel, waar ze juist op wil bezuinigen, 2024.

³⁰ Court of Audit, Sturing op inhuur bij Logius en SSC-ICT, May 2025.

³¹ Volkskrant, dossier consultancy expenditure central government, on the basis of Open Government Act documents, 2024. Accountant.nl, Consultants verdienen steeds meer aan Nederlandse overheid, 2024.

³² ESB, Gemeenten en Rijk moeten decentralisatie jeugdzorg samen op de rails krijgen, 2024. CBS, Jeugdzorg cohorten 2015-2024, ongoing publications.

³³ For the central-government figure of €3.7 billion in 2024 see note 4 (BZK Jaarrapportage Bedrijfsvoering Rijk 2024). The broader aggregate of €8.5 billion in external hire across all government layers, reported in ManagementSite, €8,5 miljard voor inhuur externen, 2024 (W. Scheepers), also includes municipalities, provinces and water authorities.

³⁴ Judgment Limburg District Court, Maastricht location, 5 July 2024, declaration of bankruptcy of Co-Med Zorg BV. For the figures of twelve practices and 38,000 registered patients the public reporting of the appointed receivers has been used as source, included in the bankruptcy reports on the Central Insolvency Register. In public reporting by NOS, NH Nieuws and AT5 (July and August 2024) divergent figures circulate of ten or thirteen practices and around 50,000 patients. The difference arises from differing counting moments, whether or not already transferred or closed practices are included, and different sources for patient numbers (registrations versus actively treated volume). The receivers’ figures are taken in this paper as primary because they are recorded in a formal, judicially verifiable procedure.

³⁵ Algemene Bestuursdienst, Jaarverslag ABD 2024, published 2025, for the figures on size (around 1,900 management posts at scale 15 and higher) and average tenure (4 years and 8 months). For the earlier academic analysis see Utrecht University (M. Noordegraaf et al.), De ABD: rotatie en zittingstijd, 2018, commissioned by the Ministry of the Interior; Binnenlands Bestuur, Topambtenaren wisselen te snel van functie, 2018; Elsevier Weekblad, Hoe flitsende ambtenaren de ministeries verzieken, 2020.

³⁶ Follow the Money, dossier-Mentaal Beter, Lucy Hammelburg and Daan Appels, 2021–2023. See also FD, Mentaal Beter doet grote overname in ggz, 2024.

³⁷ Follow the Money, op.cit. For the billable hours norm see also NRC, De financiële druk in de GGZ, 2022.

³⁸ For the Pluryn file see Skipr, Zorgelijke financiële situatie bij Pluryn, maar ‘continuïteit niet in gevaar’, 2024. For the Hoenderloo file see Follow the Money and KRO-NCRV/Pointer.

³⁹ For the PE share in youth care see EY, Onderzoek private equity in zorg, commissioned by the Ministry of Health, December 2023. For the NVP figures see Nederlandse Vereniging van Participatiemaatschappijen, annual report 2024.

⁴⁰ EY, op.cit. For the academic nuancing see B. Ligterink et al., Effecten van private equity op operationele prestaties, 2017, and B. Baarsma in ESB, Private equity in Nederland verdient gericht beleid, geen wantrouwen, 2024.

⁴¹ For the Wibz see Houthoff, Wetsvoorstel integere bedrijfsvoering zorg, 2025; Dirkzwager, Wetsvoorstel Wibz: winstuitkeringen, 2025; BG Legal, Hoe gaat het nu met het wetsvoorstel Wibz?, 2025. The bill was submitted to the House of Representatives on 30 January 2025.

⁴² For the British outsourcing chain see National Audit Office, The role of major contractors in the delivery of public services, 2013. For the electronic tags scandal see openDemocracy, G4S and Serco overcharging scandal just got worse, 2014. For the fiscal dimension see Benefits and Work, NAO: Atos & G4S paid no corporation tax last year despite £2 billion public-funded work, 2013. For the MP report on Capita and Atos see Disability News Service, Atos and Capita could soon become part of ‘shadow state’, warn MPs.

⁴³ Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, Doubleday, 2021. For the McKinsey-Sackler file see Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe, When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm, Doubleday, 2022.

⁴⁴ New York State Attorney General James, press release Attorney General James Secures $7.4 Billion from Purdue Pharma and the Sackler Family for Fueling the Opioid Crisis, January 2025. For the criminal handling thereafter see CNBC and NBC News, April 2026. The figure of additionally up to around 5.5 billion dollars in fines and related claims, reference date April 2026, is a consolidated estimate based on multiple sources; a primary source for one consolidated amount is, at the reference moment, not one-to-one findable.

⁴⁵ For the privatisation and partial renationalisation see Wikipedia, Privatisation of British Rail, with the referenced primary sources, and Red Pepper, Getting back on track: The case for railway nationalisation, 2024. For the financial figures see Economics Help, Rail Privatisation: Success or Failure?, and New Economics Foundation, Our railways have failed - what next?.

⁴⁶ Bogdanich and Forsythe, When McKinsey Comes to Town, op.cit.

⁴⁷ Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Polity Press, 2000; Consuming Life, Polity Press, 2007.

⁴⁸ Improven, Jeugdzorg in cijfers 2024, and local audit-office investigations in Nijmegen, Eindhoven and Tilburg on neighbourhood teams in permanent employment versus outsourced teams.

⁴⁹ J. Huibers, Gedissocieerde organisaties, Statecraft Series, Series I, January 2026.

⁵⁰ J. Huibers, De stille onteigening, Statecraft Series, Series II Nº 02, April 2026.

⁵¹ J. Huibers, Achter op de snelheid, Statecraft Series, Series II Nº 07, April 2026.

⁵² J. Huibers, The Discriminating Eye, pamphlet, April 2026, available at nourishment.houseofviridian.org.

⁵³ L. de Caluwé and H. Vermaak, Leren Veranderen: Een handboek voor de veranderkundige, first edition Samsom, 1999; third, wholly revised edition, Vakmedianet, 2019. For the application to pattern 4 see De Richting van de Beweging, chapter 7.

⁵⁴ The Aiki method is elaborated in J. Huibers, De Richting van de Beweging: Interim-Management in de Publieke Sector, manuscript in preparation, chapter 11. For the specific connection with pattern work see De oprechte stem, Series III Nº 01.