A widow with mounting debts and two daughters who needed him saw more than 20 social workers, each following procedure perfectly-each concluding he must sell his car to qualify for relief, even though keeping it would save the government thousands in taxi costs and spare his children psychological harm. The car was worth $2,400; the family's stability, it turned out, was worth far more once someone dared to calculate the full cost of rigidity. In the Netherlands, the Breakthrough Method now helps civil servants in 100 municipalities find legal room to ask a revolutionary question: "What solves the problem?" By reframing bureaucracy as a tool rather than a barrier, the approach has generated measurable savings -- an average of $25,000 per participant annually -- while restoring something harder to quantify: the radical act of believing people when they say what they need.
