I’ve come to a simple conclusion. We and our organisations will no longer be rewarded for mediocrity – duh! But wait – if it’s so simple why do so many of our leaders assume they can get away with it? Another simple conclusion – they don’t know their organisations are mediocre. They listen to the rhetoric (most are only fed good news, sad but true) and see the KPIs and assume that they are brilliant; they don’t know the truth. The truth, ladies and gentlemen, is where the work is done. That is where all the policies and planning must come to fruition. As Peter Drucker, the late management guru, exclaimed, “eventually everything must degenerate into work”.

I’ve spent much of my time over the past 14 years listening to managers. They say (every one of them) “my job is to do strategy”. So I subsequently spent much of the past five years getting a deep understanding of strategy. And I’m afraid those ‘strategy’ managers have been conned or are deluded. Read more »

When we started out as a consulting firm we used to get lots of ‘little’ projects. The fact is they weren’t little at all, it’s just clients would say “we have about £2.75 in our budget, could you help us transform our whole business?”

This was a very frustrating place to be because they needed major surgery but only had the price of a corn plaster. In trying to do something that would really help them in the tiny amount of time they could afford we formulated some really important questions to enable us to quickly discover what to change to get a very fast result for a client. Read more »

Over dinner with John Seddon the other night we lamented that, even with experience, change is hard. Most people, we reflected, focus on learning tools and models and forget that the real challenge is to fundamentally help others to challenge and change their beliefs – especially as that’s what we’re being paid to do! We concluded that organisational intervention is a journey of life-long learning and it often feels like that journey is being taken on an old tractor that constantly needs to stop for re-fuelling and repair.

I’ve thought a lot about our conversation and realised that, having long ago got the tools bit down pat, in the past years of consulting most of my energies have gone into developing frameworks for management intervention.

In Vanguard all consultants know that changing another’s perspective requires that you get them into the work. They must see for themselves that the world is round not flat. But most often the biggest problem is getting them there. A litany of meetings and reports always seem to allow deflection from the real role of the manager – ‘improve the work today and support the long term strategy for tomorrow’. And many conversations about the subject just seem to end in empty promises like, “I can give you an hour on Tuesday” which is later cancelled by email via a PA. So how do you address the conflict and have a better conversation when two people see the world very differently? Read more »

Camden Council has been kind enough to let us share some of the great results coming out of their Council-wide Systems Thinking improvement programme. This case study focuses on the good results achieved when Human Resources decided to take a look at their own processes… See how they managed to identify ineffective practices, gain control of their working culture and reduce wasted capacity by 50%.

View the case study PDF here.

Our thanks to consultants Vicky Harston and Hendrik Ascheberg who have been working to help guide this department through the learning process.

Stuart

It’s 8.30pm. I’m sitting in my hotel room looking for inspiration for this blog. And then the phone rings.

It’s BBC Radio Scotland wondering if I’d do an interview on customer service because they’ve just been handed a report saying people are more likely to complain now than ever before. The actual number of problems consumers face when buying goods and services had fallen significantly over the last 5 years, but is now creeping back up. But more and more complaints are focusing on staff attitude and competence. Read more »

A few years ago whilst on holiday in Jasper in Canada, Denise informed that as a special surprise she’d booked us a trip in a helicopter. I was as you can imagine (unless you’re like my uncle Eddie who blacks out if he has to stand on a stool to reach for a tin of beans) very excited at the prospect of seeing the Canadian Wilderness from a few thousand feet on the air.

I stood in the freezing cold (in the middle of August) and waited for my flight. The aircraft came into land and, as we’ve seen in the movies, I bent down to avoid losing an ear from the rotors; I got into my seat, put on my headphones (no music btw, what a con) and generally felt like Barrack Obama flying off to Camp David. We soared up into the air and climbed to the top of a mountain, where the helicopter landed (only three mins had passed).

We landed and I thought, ‘Nice, I guess this is where the pilot gets out makes us a breakfast of pancakes and maple syrup and serves us a glass of champagne finished off with maybe shot of Drambuie.’ I got out and before I could even say Black Hawk Down I turned to watch my transport flying off into the distance. I waited a moment, expecting a camera crew to jump out from behind a tree and Jeremy Beadle (he was alive then) or Ashton Kutcher (if you’re reading this in the US) to shout ‘you’ve been framed’ and how we’d all laugh, before the pilot would return with my breakfast and a large jug of maple syrup. Jeremy never appeared, but Denise did turn to me and say ‘right, I’m told there’s a cabin at the bottom that serves coffee, it’s a 24k walk, if we get going now we’ll get there for lunch.

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When I was in my early twenties I worked briefly for a brewery, the appeal of free beer when you’re young is a strong motivator. I was managing a small team to develop sales in a few of the company’s sites and one day we had a meeting with the big boss to discuss progress. The boss opened the meeting with the immortal words – ‘give me one good reason why I should keep this (particular) site open.’ Unfortunately I answered, ‘because, if you close this place, I may not have a job…’ Corporate guy’s big bushy eyebrows came together in a tight frown when he replied with some sage advice. ‘Son’ he replied ‘no matter what happens to you in your career from this point never give personal gain as a reason for making a decision. And of course, he was right. It took me a long time to learn but there are a couple of strategies that can be useful in difficult decision making situations (like you’ll face in change management) and if used correctly you should always come out looking good.

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Fear is one of the biggest reasons change programmes fail. Most people will resist being dragged out of their comfortable familiar routines, feel insecure in their new role or environment and try to run back to their old ways the moment an opportunity arises. Helping them through that period of fear requires constant vigilance and support from managers if you want your changes to stick.

Before the days when my children engaged on their seemingly endless campaign to bankrupt me, my wife Denise and I used to have some particularly scary holidays. Well she wasn’t scared, but I was, and it stopped me participating fully or contributing anything positive to the experience; until one holiday I learned a method of overcoming my fears. I’ve been successfully applying it to helping people cope with change in business environments ever since.

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On the 22nd of December 2003 I thought I’d finally made it. I surveyed the boardroom on the top floor of the swanky mirrored building in the City of London; the mahogany table in front of me was so deeply polished I could see my fillings in it and I immediately resolved to get them replaced with white ones. The carpet was deep and soft, when I walked across it I remembered a guy that was at my high school, he used to walk like he had little pistons in the heels of his shoes. Every time he took a step it was like a little spring shot him up in the air. Each wall had a huge plasma screen TV, all of them showing pictures of MY PowerPoint presentation, and in each of the pillars in the room there was a mini TV also showing my presentation – I always wanted one of these in my bathroom – but I’m not allowed. I felt like I was in the land of the corporate cliché, and I was loving it!

As the morning progressed I was getting more and more confident and, as I realised that the audience had actually started to care about my opinion, I started to turn around, face them and deviate from the thirty lines of text on each of my slides. I was interacting with the directors and it was going well. Then it happened, the big mistake you should never make as a consultant, I started to relax and actually enjoy myself. I let my guard down.

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An old manager of mine at Standard Life, Ian Ross – all round nice guy, used to tell us that assumptions make an ASS out of U and ME. At the time all of us workers used to go ‘yeah, yeah whatever.’ However good old Ian was right on the money, though he didn’t go far enough, because choosing the wrong assumptions about how to run an organisation won’t only make you look like an ass, they’re the key to whether you’ll really change the performance of an organisation.

Here’s an example:

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I was listening to my friend tell me last week how exasperated she is with her husband.  She explained that despite putting all sorts of punishment and reward schemes in place (which we men never do btw) she still can’t get him to move his socks from the side of the bed to the laundry basket.  She suggested a shock tactic of emptying all the laundry out on his side of the bed as a way of letting him see how she felt.

Whilst this would definitely be an intervention it would be a bit like holding his feet to the fire, albeit with no socks on.  In the name of male solidarity (and because I didn’t want to get the blame from her husband for suggesting new ways of torturing him until he changed his bad habits) I claimed I had no idea how to help, but that my good friend Ron Skea is currently in the process of trying to establish a thesis on how best to help people change. So I suggested that she take advice from him and then hid.

According to Ron the published theories of change, especially in organisations, are wrong Read more »

In case you aren’t aware, John Seddon is the founder of the Vanguard Method for Systems Thinking. He has a reputation for being controversial and challenging, but informed.

He’s just been interviewed by Outsource Magazine where he explains how he came to develop his successful method for applying systems thinking in service organisations, as well as his opinions on IT, shared services and more.

I particularly enjoyed reading the conversation and wanted to share it with you. You can read the full article here:

Outsource Magazine’s Q&A with John Seddon

Stuart