We know everyone is always hungry for new case studies and as mentioned in the last blog we have another on the way but in the meantime John Seddon, the founder of the Vanguard Systems Thinking Method, has released his latest book with 8 new public sector case studies covering:

• Police forces in the Midlands and Cheshire,
• The Fire and Rescue Service in Staffordshire,
• Development Control at Rugby Borough Council,
• Food Safety in Great Yarmouth,
• Legal and Social Welfare Problems (Advice UK),
• Health and Social Care (NHS Somerset),
• and the care of Stroke patients at Plymouth Hospital.

We urge you to take a look. It’s available to buy now direct from the publisher or you can look for it at your local book supplier.

We are also delighted to announce that Stuart Corrigan’s new book, The Need for Change – Four Trends Endangering Every Organisation will be available to buy as a Paperback from the 15th of June.

This short and accessible book will help managers in businesses and the public sector alike to reshape and improve service and results, neatly describing the key problems facing almost every business and how to address them.

Packed with entertaining examples of issues and solutions in action we think it should be required reading for anyone thinking of embarking on:

• a round of cost-cutting
• an outsourcing programme
• making changes to call/contact centres and communications with customers
• a customer satisfaction survey/audit
• or a major reorganisation of service provision

It’s also an excellent, non-technical introduction for anyone interested in the Vanguard Systems Thinking Method and its application in the public or private sector.

You can register advance interest with the publishers, Triarchy Press, and they’ll email you notification as soon as it’s available.

We hope you’ll find benefit from both of these 2 very different books and we welcome your feedback and reviews!

Buy John Seddon’s Case Studies

Register to be notified when Stuart’s book is released

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In terms of the role of a manager I think it’s really quite simple – to optimise the business. Of course optimise could be applied in a number of different contexts: in the private sector it might be to optimise sales or return on investment and in the public sector it’s undoubtedly to optimise service delivery, costs and morale. When you nail it down it’s really quite simple, anything that contributes to better revenue, better service, lower costs and better morale means that the manager adds value. Anything else (politics, report writing, re-work, 1;1s and most quarterly and annual appraisals) is simply a waste of time, money and energy.

But what makes a great manager? Many can talk a good game, they have their MBA, can use fancy words like ‘governance’ or ‘optimisation’ or ‘sweating the assets’, but ask them exactly what they should do differently and they look as clueless as when a Scotsman is shown the inside of his wallet. So here’s my checklist of great management traits:

1. They have intimate knowledge of who they are trying to serve and never get confused between their true customers and those that masquerade as such, for example government, senior management and/or regulators.
2. They have intimate knowledge of what happens to a customer from the moment that they place a demand on the business to the point that the demand has been fulfilled. After all can anything really be more important than fulfilling customer demands?
3. They have intimate knowledge, and never stop trying to increase their knowledge, of where the processes in a business break down (be they the marketing or fulfilment systems – the two most important) and are constantly testing new and better methods to make those systems work better.
4. They have intimate knowledge of psychology and relationships, how their staff perform at work and the organisational causes of behaviour. For example they’d know that numerical targets cause people to go to sleep, cheat or cherry pick their work.
5. They are willing to challenge their own assumptions.
6. They make decisions and use data to make those decisions.
7. They spend lots of time in the work reinforcing what matters to the customer and problem solving.

I’ve attached a little score sheet you can use to give you and your management team some insight as to where you need to improve. You can download it as a PDF here.

Over the years I’ve met a few managers that scored high on some of the areas, a few who scored badly in most of the areas and a few diamonds that repeatedly hit the ball out of the park in every single category.

Sara Boothright is one such manager. Sara is a manager of a food safety department so she’s seen a few sights in her time and knows the good places to eat in her town but also works in a system that is highly regulated and very traditionally run. Sara could be forgiven then for being unwilling to change industry norms and organisational norms and her own beliefs about how to run her service.

And to tell the truth, other than that she baked brownies on the first day of the change programme, she started off as real pain in the neck. She continually went on about having a small team, who were already run off their feet and bleated on and on that she simply needed more staff. However, to her credit, she was also willing to suspend her current beliefs (see trait 5) and go out and find out how the system worked before she came to any conclusions (see trait 1).

After establishing the purpose of the service (protecting public health) Sara soon found out that the current system design and regulatory regime actually worked against doing the very thing she was getting paid to do. And as my eldest son often remarks ‘that sort of thing will ruin your day right there’. She learnt for example that businesses like Marks and Spencer (that have their own inspectors and very high standards) got the same level and frequency of inspections as a two man business that, let’s say, had less exacting standards. This was because the process was not designed to deal with variability. And after a few weeks of studying the nature of customer demand and her core business processes I’d bet Sara knows more than most in her industry about how the system really works (see trait 2 & 3).

She also soon saw that her team were working their little bums off due to the way that the work was distributed – too many open cases – a common problem in this sort of environment. And when you layer on top of that the student syndrome behaviour (leave everything to the last minute, see trait 4) being driven by the arbitrary service standards, plus the rework and wasteful activity in the processes she realised that around 40-50% of her team’s time was taken up doing junk (see trait 3).

However, getting this information could have turned out badly for Sara. Managers faced with such information, in my experience, react in one of three ways:

1. Deny, deny, deny, take a week off and pretend that everything you’ve just seen is a bad dream.
2. Accept what you’ve seen but put it in the too difficult drawer, after-all you’re doing what all your peers are doing and anyway ‘doesn’t that consultant get paid to find bad stuff?’
3. Accept what you’ve seen, get depressed for about 2 seconds then remind yourself that like the Karate Kid you now have true enlightenment and you’re bloody well going to tackle the problems head on! That’s what Sara did (see trait 6).

And it’s fair to say that she changed the lot. She changed the way the work was scheduled, how inspections were done, how many open cases were allocated, how the cases were managed, what the business measured, she re-wrote the job roles, changed the processes and re-wrote (she really did this) the food safety manual for the council. And once she’d made the changes she then spent hours every day following up to make sure that the new way of working was… working and that the staff were sticking to the rules (that’s trait 7 btw).

But the question of course, and sorry for the pun, is did the new method bake bread? You bet it did. Amongst other great results, the time taken from inspection to getting an unsafe food business to clean up their act improved from an average of 65 days to just 7. That’s 89% faster and therefore 89% better for the food buying public in Lincoln.

And speaking of the public, the time taken to respond to customer complaints about businesses with poor food practices, inspect and make them safe has speeded up by 53% too.

I’m sure the local health services will be cheering in the background.

So Sara gets a tick in every box, which means she enters the Vanguard Scotland management hall of fame.

And she’s still a pain in the arse, she bugs me every day with questions about this and that and regularly drives me nuts. But all great managers are all the same, so I’ll add trait number 8 ‘An unrelenting, constantly challenging, slightly nutty, pain in the butt’. But hey you can’t have everything, and what would you rather have on your gravestone, that, or ‘Sara never really cared and accepted mediocrity wherever she saw it?’ Also the late Steve Jobs seems to think that being passionate and maybe just a bit cuckoo is a good thing. Here are his thoughts on the subject:

‘Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do’
Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Which leaves us with the big question, how would you do if faced with Sara’s situation, and what will they write about you after you’ve gone? Why not take the test… it’s not too late.

Finally if you’d like to see the full case study of what Sara found and what she did to make it better it’s in development and if you reply to this email expressing interest we’ll make up a list of people to send it out to as soon as it’s ready.

Stuart

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At the age of ten I was not a bad football player, not as good as Wallis Gracie or Brian Taylor or Alan Baird, but I was good enough to play for a few football teams including the school first team. Then we got a new football coach – Mr Simpson, who was also a maths teacher (no correlation I’m sure). The coach – who had long black greasy hair just like Severus Snape from the Harry Potter books – was an evil incompetent; maybe you know a manager of the same ilk.

During the match he would stand on the side lines and shout abuse at the players, and for most of the match I was frozen with fear – not good if your job is to run up and down the left wing crossing balls into the centre. It was many years however before I realised that it was not just his manner that caused my rigor mortis (and failure to play for Scotland and win a world cup) but that I was also confused about what he wanted me to do differently. The problem was that was mixing up his formative and summative feedback.

Let me explain with a story borrowed from John Seddon. ‘Rene taught gymnastics. She knew the difference between summative and formative feedback. When a child got over the box she’d find something positive to say about the overall performance (summative): ‘good jump’ etc. And when the child was about to do the next attempt she’d give advice on how to improve (formative): like, ‘now this time push off harder’. But Rene was dropped in favour of a trainer who had more qualifications. The new trainer didn’t understand the importance of giving formative feedback before the attempt and gave both forms of feedback after the jump: ‘OK but not high enough’, which the child received as negative. The class size went down until there was only one child left, and she cried a lot.’

Summative and formative feedback is best known for its application in an academic setting and is separated in its definition simply as summary and instructional. It also applies in a work setting. Here are some guidelines on how to deliver feedback as recommended by Stephen W. Draper of the University of Glasgow’s Psychology Dept.

• By all means give summative feedback (this is where you say the overall performance is good or bad) but to gain any future improvements in performance you need to follow it up with specifics on what to differently and why (formative feedback).
• Put your feedback in writing so that your staff can look back at the information and take time to reflect before attempting the task again in the future. (This does not have to be formal, just a helpful email.)
• Focus on strengths as well as weaknesses.
• Keep it constructive and positive.

However, beware of using feedback when the problem lies in the system

Before you jump in and start feeding back to the 500, are you sure that it’s the performance of the staff member that’s the problem? (Hang on a sec whilst I mount my high-horse).

For example in a call centre, managers will spend hours coaching staff on how they should be handling complaint calls rather than working to turn off the source which is often a failure elsewhere in the system. Remember the cricket analogy so deftly used by Geoffrey Howe at the end of the Thatcher administration? He said ‘It is as if our bats had been broken before the game by the team captain”. In other words organisations fail not because of poor feedback or bad staff but by managers who amongst other things fail to understand customer’s needs, create the right policies, use the wrong measures and can’t make decisions – then blame others for their wrong doing.

So before you start administering feedback ask these questions.

• Are we clear on what matters to our customers and know what we need to do to be better than our competitors?
• Does the organisational system allow staff to handle and respond to, all demands placed on them by customers?
• Do our policies, processes and measures manipulate the behaviour of staff into doing the wrong thing for the customer and in turn the business?
• Does the job design allow staff to influence others in the business both up and downstream?
• Are staff and managers absolutely clear on what’s expected of them?
• Do our managers understand the work well enough to know what stops staff from serving the customers in the way the customer would like?
• Do our managers have a framework for solving problems and knowing which problems are of the highest priority?

So assuming you can answer yes to all of the above go right ahead and start brushing up on your feedback skills, but remember the two rules:

1. Summarising performance after the event is fine but only really affects morale.
2. Suggesting specific areas for improvement and ways of addressing them before the next attempt helps staff develop and improve.

Maybe if Mr Simpson had known the difference between the two different types of feedback I’d be managing Barcelona right now having had a glittering football career with the pinnacle being scoring the winning goal in the world cup as the winger for Scotland… or maybe I’m now just taking the whole feedback thing a bit too far.

Stuart

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Jack Jennings walks through dense rain forest in Burma. All around him the earth explodes as rifle fire and grenades hit the ground. Jack is enraged, he clenches his fist in a gesture of defiance; he’s ready to fight back. But Jack can’t fight back because he is 93 years old and his weapon is a walking stick. And his face now crumpled with sadness turns towards the graves of his fallen comrades, their resting place an overseas military graveyard. But now he’s not reliving a nightmare, he’s really there.

Jack Jennings is real, as was his journey to Burma as a young soldier and his subsequent return to pay tribute to friends killed in action. But the story is not told through a major motion picture; instead it’s a short advertisement. When I first saw it I expected a request for a donation to a military charity, one to which I would gladly have given, so powerful is the story. But rather than a request to donate it was really a near subliminal message to buy a lottery ticket. Of course there is no overt suggestion to buy, merely a reminder that some of the profits from the lottery go to help those that need help to live their dreams or achieve lifelong ambitions.

This form of advertising is a departure for Camelot. Previous advertisements have focused on their larger donations – the funding of an art project or provision of a community centre for a small village short on local authority cash. So why the change of tactic? It’s because the bods at their advertising firm clearly know a thing or two about how we make decisions, and you can use the same tactics if you’re trying to get change within your business, sell your idea or get your project funded.

Sign up for any course on selling, presenting or business writing and you’ll be told that big numbers matter. Tell your audience that millions of people in Billericay are affected by impetigo and that they need money now…this is the common logic for getting people to decide to dig deep and give generously.

But according to research into behavioral economics, the use of statistics can actually depress charitable giving and decision making by making us go into an analytical state of mind rather than an empathic one.

A study at Carnegie Mellon University examined the impact different types of appeals had on charitable giving to a hunger relief organisation.

• The first appeal told the story of Rokia, a young girl from Mali who was very poor and faced starvation and asked donors to help her.
• The second appeal presented facts and statistics about the millions of hungry children facing starvation in African countries.
• The third appeal included both the personal story and the facts about widespread starvation.

So which one generated the most cash? You’re probably thinking that I’m leading you towards option 3. But not so:

• The facts appeal raised the least
• A combined facts and story appeal raised 25.4% more
• But the story only appeal raised 39.9% more than the combined appeal and a whopping 118% more than the facts only appeal.

The researchers attribute this nearly 40 percent fall-off to what they call the ‘drop in the bucket’ effect. When people read about Rokia, their emotions were engaged and they were inclined to give. But when people read about the millions who were in distress the data sent a bad feeling that counteracted the warm glow from helping Rokia. People would still give, but they gave less.

Which raises the question – how do I apply the same logic in business? Let’s say that your customers think your service is poor and it’s driving costs up. You’ve woken up to the fact that the more your managers focus on productivity and activity the more your business will suffer but you – need data – proof that the thinking behind the way things are done is the problem, what do you do?

Common logic is to present…well, more logic, a rational argument for change. But the more you present a rational argument the more your managers dig their heels in. It’s like when you’re 11 years old and your pals all jump off the high board at the commonwealth pool in Edinburgh, you watch them jump into the pool and miraculously, survive. Rationally you know that you’ll be fine but taking that leap into fresh air – no chance! (I had a – ‘friend’ with this problem).

So you have to throw rationale out the window, it’s not enough to move people to act. You have to engage emotion, let the manager feel something and where possible create the emotion for themselves. You have to help your managers challenge their assumptions and tactically there’s no better way to do this than showing data about an individual rather than always focusing on the global statistics. You see we can relate to the individual. Though I’ve never been to Burma, I was transported there through the power of a story and suddenly I cared and wanted to act to help.

Hence at Vanguard we’re trained to ask the question ‘how can I design tactics that will help this individual change their thinking?’ rather than just get involved in a rational argument. I’d encourage you to do the same.

I’ve never bought a lottery ticket before but since seeing that advertisement I’ve changed my assumptions about how the profits are spent. After all I thought, ‘my pound won’t help everyone but might help someone’ and hey, if I get a few million into the bargain I guess that’s not too bad either.

If you’re looking for some more information that may help your managers change their thinking then why not get a copy of my new book. The royalties from any copies sold between now and the 30th of March 2012 will be paid to Erskine, a charity which helps care for 1300 old soldiers every year across Scotland.

Stuart

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Stuart has covered this topic already in his latest book. If you haven’t seen it yet it’s in the Amazon Kindle store but today I’d like to add a little more by asking you to try Bailey’s job stress score. It’s not long, a single side of paper with just 20 quick questions that you tick yes or no to. Try it out on your staff (please make it anonymous; employees will not be so honest if they fear retribution).  You can download it as a PDF here.

Why bother? Because in 5 minutes you can determine if your work set up is likely to be a large contributing factor to your employee sickness levels, staff turnover and poor performance levels.

Stressed miserable unhappy people get sick more easily and more often and tend to be ill for longer; which means you lose productivity and money.  They are also more likely to jump ship which means you need to spend more time and money on recruiting, interviewing and training staff and that you’ve wasted the investment made in the staff that left. And even if they are at their desks and not perusing the wanted ads they are demotivated, often turn on one another and are not giving customers that great ‘extra mile’ service that only proud and enthusiastic staff can.

The fact is that the majority of United Kingdom’s 27 million employees – who work the longest hours in Western Europe – are uninspired at work. Gallup estimates that actively disengaged workers cost the British economy between £37.2 billion and £38.9 billion per year due to low employee retention, high absentee levels and low productivity.

This is not a new problem but the solutions I’ve personally experienced over the years and seen others try have in my opinion been fairly useless. Be honest, when has any ‘team building’ exercise you’ve ever been on made a real positive and lasting difference to how you behaved when you got back to your desk?

Mostly we end up treating the symptoms of unhappy stressed employees rather than the causes.

Poor attendance and high sick levels? Have HR harass and threaten the culprits.

Poor performance? Offer a performance incentive carrot and quietly imply there’s also a stick.

Poor morale? Let’s all go off to the woods and bond as a team.

So now not only are you suffering the costs of the symptoms, you are also expending more time and money trying to treat them.

Or you could try addressing the source of the problem.

The source is often fundamental. It’s the work design. Redesigning the way your business approaches everything you do seems like a big ask to cheer up your staff. But it’s not just about that. Because the way you approach your business affects productivity in almost every area, not just your staff.

In truth permanently stressed staff are just another symptom of a stressed work design.  When you have the work design right better staff morale, lower sickness rates and lower staff turnover come with it naturally.  You will always have these issues, but the levels of them can be reduced significantly, with a similarly significant impact on your costs.

Here’s a real life example:

We ran a systems thinking intervention in a UK call centre. Working together with management and staff a new improved work system was developed. The improved system allowed staff to feel they were really able to help customers, empowering them and making them happier in their work.

Amongst the many other great results for the business there was a sharp drop in the average number of days absent from 6.81 days per year, per employee to just 4. The CIPD reports that the average cost per employee for a day’s absence is £600. With their new absence rate at 56% less than the average call centre the client saved £96,000.

Employee turnover also fell from 28% per annum to just 11%; well under the call centre industry average of 20%.  The CIPD state that staff turnover costs an estimated £2,250 per person, so this saved them £148,000.

You see what I mean? Employee stress levels are just one small symptom of a bad work system, and yet when the system was redesigned this aspect alone saved this client nearly a quarter of a million pounds a year, as well as making a difference to the lives of all of its employees.

So back to the stress questionnaire; how did you score?

For each tick in the box you score 1.  A high score (max=20) indicates an individual with a low level of job stress.  A score of 15+ is indicative of an individual who is in a job which is perceived as satisfying, giving the individual an opportunity for expression and achievement.  A score of 10 – 15 suggests that there are many things within the job situation which could be improved.  A score of less than 10 indicates a job which is a great source of stress.

If your staff score highly congratulate yourself, you’re doing okay, well done. If your business or department scored less than 10 call us… together we can make it better.

Gill

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Then I’d like to officially launch my new book, but first a story.

A year ago, during a meeting with a CEO, I was asked a question which stopped me in my tracks. “What’s it worth to my organisation if I improve my service?” he asked. My initial reaction was that it was a stupid question. “Surely everyone knows” I replied, “better service means more business, lower costs, better brand equity, better morale and greater customer loyalty?” “Yes, but by how much?” he responded.

The question ate away at me, like when you see someone out of context and you just can’t place them. So I decided I wanted to answer it. As a result last February I started to do the research. I found study after study that confirmed that better service delivers better organic growth due to increased customer loyalty but it was the numbers that shocked me. For example a study by Xerox showed that customers who rated themselves ‘very satisfied’ with the service bought six times more than those whose experience left them as just ’satisfied’ customers. But most encounters are miles away from the dream of getting a very satisfied customer. And the big story is that most organisations still fail to attend to the basics.

Take my recent example:

My eldest son, Daniel, passed his driving test. The cost for insuring a new young male driver is extortionate. But a few companies are now advertising a service where a black box is attached to the car which monitors driving style and speed and if the driver persistently ‘behaves’ then premiums come down. And, obviously as a concerned dad, I liked the idea of knowing what my son was up to every minute of every day (for the record I would have paid extra for a wee camera in the car).

It all seemed like a great idea until I actually tried to buy the product. Once I negotiated various IVR phone systems and got passed from department to department the company told me that “yes they offered the service, but no I couldn’t buy it over the phone.” I was seriously annoyed as the insurance fee was around £3.5k (twice the value of the car). So I went to their website which, after 20 minutes, told me that because my wonderful son may occasionally want to take his 3 friends with him on their weekly outing to raid the discount cream cakes at Tesco, they would not accept the business. Note to the underwriters, who I appreciate may not have many friends; most teenagers have at least 3 chums these days. And not only did the company not get my son’s business I cancelled my own insurance policy (as did my wife Denise) and we all took our business elsewhere.

The point, if you needed it, is that service matters to the bottom line of your business, no question – but during the research I also found three other increasing trends:

1. Speed really matters to customers.
2. Staff morale is lower than ever.
3. Due to the continuous expansion of social media there’s a much greater likelihood that your reputation will be permanently damaged if you fail to address your service levels.

I was now about four months into my study and decided, ‘what the hell, why not write up what I’ve found and also explain what to do to deal with these trends and come out on top. So I decided to write a book.

Writing a book is a bad decision. Here’s why: it’s really, really painful. And getting to the end of the first draft doesn’t mean that ‘you’re nearly finished’, in the words of the Carpenters (Simon, you’ll know this group), ‘You’ve only just begun.’ As I neared the end of the project and after numerous edits and chapter re-writes the only way I can describe writing a book is that every day is the intellectual and emotional equivalent of passing a pineapple. And just to rub salt into the wounds, when I told my mother that I’d finished my first book she replied ‘well done son, you never were much of a reader…’ cheers mum!

Hence in the interests of avoiding a nervous breakdown I opted to keep the book short. And those that have had an advance look were as surprised as my publisher that the book seems half decent. Here’s what some of them said:

“A wake-up call for those who want to survive and thrive.”
Professor John Seddon

“This book offers its readers the chance to leave positive transformational legacies.”
Jim Mather, Former Scottish Minister for Enterprise

“Truly really great and very well written. It’s easy on the eye, fun and interesting to read. It’s like a blether with a mate. And I’ve stepped away from it remembering what the messages are – now, there are not many books which can do that.”
Eileen Flockhart, Business Change Manager, Lothian & Borders Police

The book is now available to buy on Amazon’s Kindle store (and if you don’t have a Kindle you can download a free Kindle reader from Amazon for almost any device and join in that way.) I’ve also provided a few sample pages in PDF format so that you can try before you buy.

Buy it on the Amazon Kindle store here

Whether or not you buy the book I’d like to make you an offer. I’ve also turned sections of the book into a 30 min executive briefing for senior managers. So if you can get your management team in a room I’ll happily come and present the findings of the study for free and I’ll also do another half hour on how to improve service, cut costs, be more innovative and improve morale (the second half of the book). The only caveat is that if you’re not in mainland UK I’d ask that you cover my travel expenses, though if you’re somewhere warm I’m sure we could cut a deal. Just call the office on 0131 440 2600 or email admin@vanguardscotland.co.uk

I hope you enjoy the book.

Stuart

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On the upside this year has seen us working with amazing clients to deliver phenomenal results. One client has added hundreds of thousands of pounds to their turnover by reducing their lead time to a day. And in another case elderly people waiting on home adaptations and care packages have seen their waiting time reduce so much that the doctors are estimating they’ll get around four more years of independence at home and live longer. That’s why I joined this business, to make a difference and as the A-Team’s leader Hannibal always said, ‘I love it when a plan comes together’. So I’m always massively disappointed when I meet managers who proclaim that they want ‘radical change’ only to realise that their idea of radical was a tiny tweak to their service standards and giving their staff only slightly more attention than number 25 on an advent calendar gets on Christmas morning. On the other hand I never cease to be amazed and delighted by what front line staff can do when given the chance.

But this is a time to forget business and think about friends and family. When I was 6 years old my parents moved to Glenrothes. I grew up beside Kay and Pamela McMullen. Through my teens I worked for their dad in his video shop, he taught me a lot about having an idea and going for it.

We lost touch when I Ieft home, then about six years ago I went back to do a consulting job at VELUX UK. Kay was working there and was on my team. We’ve been great friends ever since. One day I called to speak to Kay and her manager told me that she’d be off for a while as her 12 year old niece; Pam’s daughter (Hope) had died following an operation to try to relieve her suffering from painful Ulcerative Colitis.

As you can imagine Pam was and still is devastated by the loss of her child. She has since tirelessly tried to help others by raising money for Crone’s disease and Ulcerative Colitis.

Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis (UC) are both Inflammatory Bowel Diseases. Sufferers experience unpredictable bouts of urgent diarrhoea, pain, profound fatigue and anaemia, with, for some patients, associated inflammation of the joints, skin, liver or eyes. Malnutrition and weight loss are common with patients often altering their eating habits to alleviate symptoms, so most won’t be tucking in to a big Christmas dinner like you or I.

It’s not something many people are very aware of, most confusing it with the rather different condition of IBS, but together, UC and Crohn’s Disease affect about 1 person in every 250 in the UK, men and women alike and the causes are yet unknown. Diagnosis can occur at any age, so yes it could happen to you or yours (though I really hope not) and research shows that Crohn’s Disease has been rising steadily, particularly amongst young people.

There is no cure for UC or Crohn’s at present (except for UC, if the colon is surgically removed, the operation in which 12-year old Hope died), but treatment can control the disease in most cases. Worldwide research is rapidly increasing understanding of IBD, and so hopes for better treatments are high. Funding makes a big difference to how quickly that happens and to the level of support suffers get in the meantime.

So here’s what I thought we could do to help.

This year we ran a successful conference with lots of useful learning points. Those who attended the conference paid £165 per head but they got the live experience, the chance to network and ask questions and lunch thrown in. I thought I’d invite you to watch the videos of the conference presentations for no charge but if you like them to please consider making a donation to Hope’s charity – ‘Hope for Crone’s and Ulcerative Colitis’.

The video presentations are as follows:

• Jim Mather, Former Scottish Minister for Enterprise opened the conference with an address on ‘The changing landscape of business and why we need change’.
• Laurence Barrett, CEO of Falkirk for Business discussed ‘Why leaders need to change and how to do it’.
• I talked about ‘Why service, morale and innovation matter and how to grow your business and reduce costs’.
• Steve Thomson, Planning and Monitoring Manager and Scott Walker, Project Manager, both from award winning pensions provider Scottish Life, demonstrated how they made dramatic turnarounds in speed of service delivery.
• And Ron Skea, Operations Director at Abertay Housing Association offered an entertaining view on his research into ‘How to create change when people really don’t want to do it’.

If you can’t make a donation – no problem, I hope you get value from the information. www.systemsthinkingmethod.com/conference/videos.html

Have a great Christmas and New Year and I’ll be back in January.

Stuart

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It’s very cold in Scotland today and there’s lots of snow at my home, lovely but a pain in the neck. On cue my heating broke. I called the number on my gas boiler. The PHD in boiler repairs that I spoke to asked me to specify the part I needed. I told him that I was a lover not a fighter and therefore not really a man hence had no idea about boilers. It simply wasn’t working and we were cold. He was a complete pain in the bum, stating that unless I could specify the part needed he wasn’t coming out! Not only was his service appalling he was trying to get the solution to the problem before he fully understood its extent or symptoms. It reminds me of…

Three years ago I got a phone call from a potential client. The call went like this: “We need a new database for our service but our boss won’t give us the money unless you come in and tell us we need a new database.” I explained that we didn’t work like that so we agreed to start the project by first trying to understand the problem.

The company serviced gas boilers for the public sector and unlike in the private sector doing this work was mandatory. So what was the problem? Quite simply: That not all boilers were getting serviced every year and as a result the local authority was exposed to legal action if an appliance went wrong.

You’ll probably notice that we started by re-defining the problem, we didn’t for example say that the problem is ‘we need a new database’ because doing that would have led us to building a new database…not the problem.

But identifying the real problem is only the start; we then wanted to know the extent of the problem and then try to get a handle on its causes. By starting to dig a bit deeper we found out that in a typical year around 30% of boilers were not getting serviced, and the consequences were quite serious. If an appliance were to fail that could mean that a vulnerable person was left without heating, or even worse if a boiler were to explode council customers could be injured or killed.

Time to have another go at re-clarifying the problem – ‘In a typical year 30% of council boilers are not serviced the consequences of which are that people could be left without heat or worse be injured.’

So why is problem clarification so important? On a personal level have you ever had an argument with your partner only to discover that after three days of sleeping on the sofa you were both arguing about something totally different? Have you ever sat in a meeting only to find that no-one is actually clear on what you’re trying to achieve? I recently attended a meeting where the problem in a waste collection service was defined as, ‘we have to move to a system where we collect the bins fortnightly’. The problem was that I simply didn’t understand the problem. Here’s another example from the call centre world, ‘We have to take on more staff because we can’t handle the level of demand.’ In both cases the manager is about to spend more money and then won’t know if the problem has been fixed… why? because they didn’t correctly identify the problem.

The solution is to define a problem by capturing its symptoms without assuming the cause.

And the better you can define the consequences the more you can add context and create urgency for change. When Al Gore, former US Vice President and climate change activist, defined the global warming problem he didn’t say ‘there’s some snow melting somewhere north of Seattle, a penguin might get ill.’ Instead he presented Antarctic ice coring data showing CO2 levels higher now than in the past 650,000 years, explained that the 15 hottest years in global recorded history have all occurred since 1995, that extreme weather is getting worse, that glaciers and ice sheets are retreating all over the world and that if this continued it was possible a major ice sheet could collapse raising global sea levels by approximately 20 feet, flooding coastal areas and producing 100 million refugees.

The next step is to try to contain the problem. The goal here is to deliberately put sticking plaster over the problem. You know you’re not trying to solve it, merely to avoid the amplification of the problem to buy some time to allow you to get to the root cause. For example in our boiler servicing process you may put on some overtime with the explicit agreement that it’s only until you get to the cause of why so many appliances don’t get serviced within the agreed timeframe.

Now you’re into analysis. The job is to get sufficient knowledge about the problem to enable you to identify the root cause. You may use tools such as process mapping, tally charting, demand analysis or capability charts. And in this case the cause was that in 45% of cases the engineers did not get first time access to the property. Further investigation then showed that the design of the outbound appointment setting process was at fault. In other words had we taken the word of the manager the client would have spent £30k on a new database that would not actually have solved their problem.

As you can imagine the client was very happy, not only did he avoid spending money needlessly and solve his problem, he also got a team trained in how to look at problems differently and this is the real value here.

So the next time something goes wrong in your business take a moment to ask a few more questions before jumping in with what looks like a solution, you may find that you’ll solve the underlying problem faster and better, and learn something in the process.

Note to my boiler repair person: please read this article as I’m still freezing, I really need your help.

Stuart

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"We are card counters at the blackjack table"
Billy Beane – The Oakland Athletics

Five years ago I read a book called Moneyball , and as long as I live I will never forget the core message, in fact it’s one we should all try to take to heart. The book is about forty something baseball team General Manager Billy Beane, who’s dream is to win the last baseball game of the year – the World Series.

They made it into a movie with Brad Pitt and in the opening scene, having just lost his best players, Billy sits around the table with his talent scouts discussing who they should approach for the next season’s team. He listens to the same tired clichés being trotted out about who they should pick, "this guy is great looking, and this guy has a great build, what about him he’s really muscular…", and on it goes. But the GM has had enough, he looks the head of the scouting team right in the eye and says the immortal words "you’re thinking about the player attributes in the wrong way, all that matters is the numbers." Later on in the movie the head scout screams at Billy that he is "A stupid *******, there’s more to baseball than the numbers".

But Billy persists and hires an economics major to help him pick the team. He chooses players for very specific skills: one is chosen for his ability to get on base, another for his ability to pitch – even though no other team will touch him because his pitching style is weird.

The scouting team and the management of the club then fight him every step of the way. They go behind his back to play the team in a way that it should not be played (think of it like hiring Lionel Messi for your fantasy football team and putting him in goal). For the first nine games the team get creamed, and everyone laughs at Billy. By this point he’s had enough and decides to take matters into his own hands and puts the team back in the positions for which they were hired.

And guess what happens? The Oakland Athletics win 20 straight games in a row, the longest winning streak in history. Eventually in the last game of the season they get beaten. But the team that won that year had spent an average of 1.2 million dollars per game to win; Bill’s team had spent an average of just 237,000 dollars per game. The owner of the Boston Redsocks then approaches Billy and offers him 12.5 million dollars to run his team.

The events of both the book and the movie are based on real life and Bill’s strategy persisted in getting high league performance for low running costs. And if you think about it the Redsocks owner wasn’t really trying to buy Billy’s skills, he was paying for Billy’s system, a system that worked. But the question for me as I read the book was this, "why did so many people fight the new system?" and I don’t think there is one answer but I believe that it lies in frightened people’s desire to maintain the status quo, to make sure that we they keep their job, that they don’t have to do any more than the minimum and that they don’t break from the herd; even though what they’re doing clearly doesn’t work.

Yet all Billy was doing was running the numbers, finding the players with the best numbers in the different disciplines and putting them together in a team. Sounds simple really, meanwhile other managers were choosing players on the strength of their jawline. But remember it only sounds ridiculous if you can stand outside the game and see in, from the inside – and when everyone else around you is doing it, it sounds sane.

And I bet if you took the same bunch of baseball managers and told them that we use targets based on no scientific rational, that we put customers with different needs through the same standardised process and that we functionalise services, they would be able to see the inefficiency of it with the clear eyes of the outsider and laugh their heads off. But like them some of us keep on doing the same thing year after year hoping somehow for a different result.

However the Billy Beanes of the business world are growing, and they’re delivering winning streaks week after week. And just like Billy they put their secret sauce out there for everyone to see – despite resistance they look at the world through the eyes of the customer, they use measures in the right way, they differentiate between value work and waste, they see the folly of IVR machines and workflow systems, they vilify service standards and they crush the idea of the front office back office split. Because they too understand the core message in the book – think differently. And their willingness to look at their system from the outside and change it works. As their peers struggle on the innovators are getting promoted faster, earning more money and getting more respect… funny old word isn’t it?

Stuart

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In the afternoon at the end of our upcoming conference on the 2nd of November I will run a special bonus session explaining in person and in more depth how to utilise this technique to advantage your work.

It will be really nice to get a chance to meet some of you in person and put faces to emails and if you have questions we can chat after the session.

The bonus session will last an hour and will cover:

• The different types of problems associated with the three main business models we all use.
• The causes of these problems.
• How to solve them fast to improve service, cut costs, improve staff engagement and transform your competitive advantage.

You’ll also learn how Scottish Life and City of Edinburgh Council won awards and received the highest accolades from their customers.

I am only planning on doing one session on this topic this year. So book your conference place now and get the bonus session included in the cost.

Stuart

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What bothered me was not that my wife was being chatted up by a Frenchman, after-all they have croissants for breakfast so I reckon I could have taken him, but that Denise was speaking French after only four weeks. She explained that it was ‘no problem’ (you can imagine you were there by saying this in French accent) because she didn’t really learn the language; in-fact she chose to learn the pattern and structure of the language by using the weirdly effective Michel Thomas method.

In his early years Polish born Michel Thomas[i] was a survivor of the concentration camps and French resistance fighter in WWII. But in the latter part of his life became a master at teaching language. Thomas’ view was that there are no bad students only bad teachers. But he rose to the top of his profession not just because of his passion and enthusiasm for teaching language but because he had unlocked the code for learning language.

Thomas figured out that most language schools started by teaching vocabulary and whilst it worked, it was also a long and very laborious process. Only those that really wanted to put in the effort would get to the point of conversational fluency. So he approached the problem of learning from a different perspective, Thomas studied the structure and pattern of the language. For example learning was made easier by explaining that all words ending in ‘ary’ such as necessary, were the same as the English word but with just a slight difference in pronunciation. Once you knew the patterns you’d realise that you suddenly knew hundreds of words. The same is true of phrasing. And only in later, more advanced stages of learning would he teach grammar and individual words.

Pattern recognition is also how top sportsmen and women achieve mastery in their field. Christiano Ronaldo is widely accepted as one of the world’s greatest football players. Recently Castrol, the motor oil manufacturer, sponsored a study to answer the question ‘what makes Ronaldo great?’ One of the tests involved Ronaldo, another player, a goal and a pitch black warehouse. In the test the other player, standing around 40 yards away, would cross the ball to Ronaldo and half way through the arc of the ball the lights would be switched off. Could Ronaldo put the ball in the net? Yes was the answer, every time. The other participant failed miserably, in-fact he didn’t even connect with the ball. Then the scientists made the test more difficult. What if the lights were switched off at the point of impact with the ball; would the world’s greatest footballer still be able to hit the back of the net? Again he managed to score the goal; though he only knocked it in with his shoulder because he was concerned that the ball might hit him in the face! I’d have just been glad to have been in the same vicinity as the ball.

The question was then posed, how did he do it? Again pattern recognition was the key. Ronaldo has put in so much practice over the years that his brain has coded the different patterns of where a ball will land. It looks like ESP and genius, but really its hours and hours of practice. So how many hours of practice are necessary to reach mastery at this level? According to Malcolm Gladwell in his book ‘Outliers’, around 10,000 hours, or ten years is the number that keeps coming up.

But is the same true of business? What makes for a great business person, are they born or made? According to Gary Klein, an American psychologist, our success at work has nothing to do with our innate talent; it has to do with putting in the hours and seeing the patterns.

Klein’s work is cited in a brilliant book ‘Bounce’[ii] by Times journalist and 2-time Olympian Matthew Syed. Bounce, like Klien’s work, goes against the grain by suggesting that top sportsmen and women do not have supernatural genes but have had access to tons of practice, which in turn has given them massive self-belief, which when coupled with an outstanding coach generates world class performance.

Both Klein and Syed explain that true mastery of any subject, sport or business endeavour occurs when you start to see patterns. Syed gives the example of how chess masters can look at a board and see different patterns of play. And Klein explains that fire fighters who look like they have sixth sense about knowing when to leave a burning building are really just drawing on years of pattern recognition built by attending lots of fires.

In business, New York Times journalist Malcolm Gladwell[iii] also discussed the importance of seeing patterns in business, though he described those who have attained business mastery as ‘having deep knowledge’ (as discussed in Bounce). In a 2002 article on the failure of Enron , Gladwell stated that the company – filled with and run by McKinsey consultants – failed because of a belief that brains would win over experience. In other words, it matters not a jot how many degrees you have, what’s more important is how much you know about how the work works!

Let me give you an example from a company we were recently asked to study. Previous consultants had been in for 10 months and given the business a clean bill of health, but the CEO wasn’t convinced, he knew something was wrong. Because we knew the patterns to look for we’d spotted the problem within a few days.

In service organisations you can break pattern recognition into 3 main service archetypes:

1. The transactional business.
   Call centres, booking offices, sports centres, e-commerce sites, council tax. There’s literally no process and the key to solving the organisation’s problem is to design against demand.
2. The process orientated businesses.
   Repairs, housing benefits, police fines, housing allocations, machine or boiler servicing, service requests for food safety etc. The key is spotting the value work.
3. The project or casework environment.
   Installations, public sector planning and building control, enforcement systems, the criminal justice system, adult, elderly and child care, mortgage processing, marketing agencies. Here the solution is around the work distribution.

And in many cases organisations are hybrids, in other words a mix of two or more of the archetypes.

When I’m working with a leader, a new consultant or internal consultant the first thing I teach them is the patterns to look for in a business. And they all say the same thing ’suddenly I feel like I’ve got a sixth sense when I walk into a new business or area’, this is exactly what Matthew Syed says sports writers say about elite sports men and women ‘it’s like they have ESP in the game.’ They don’t, they just know how to see the patterns.

It took me around seven years of consulting before I started to see the patterns, but when I did it was like I’d got a pair of X-ray specs. It means that, contrary to popular belief, change can happen fast; a bit like if you were playing Gary Kasporov in chess, you’d be bewildered at the speed at which you’d be beaten. But you’re simply losing to someone who’s done their time and knows how to see the patterns.

If you’d like to know more about how to spot the patterns in a business come to our conference where I’ll be explaining it in more detail. You’ll learn what to look for and how to create more change faster and easier. Alternatively if you’re quite happy with your lot you can use the same technology to learn French. That way the next time my wife is engaged in conversation with a French chap I can give you a buzz and you can let me know if he deserves a punch on the nose.

[i] ‘Michel Thomas, a test of courage’ by Christopher Robbins, July 2003

[ii] Matthew Syed, ‘Bounce, The Myth of Talent and Power of Practice’, 2010. Fourth Estate

[iii] Malcolm Gladwell writing for the New Yorker Magazine in 2002, ‘The Talent Myth’

Stuart

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So, how did they manage it? They looked at things differently.

According to Audit Scotland, despite intensive effort and investment over the past 3 years, the average time to process local applications in Scotland has stayed the same and for major applications it has increased. This at a time when the number of applications received is down by 29% on 2004. Yet during this same time period the operational cost of processing an application has risen by 17%.

98% of planning applications across Scotland are local. In 2009/2010 only 65% of local applications in Scotland were determined within 2 months. Yet from our recently completed 2 year study of 4 planning departments (3 in England and 1 in Scotland) we can tell you they are now processing nearly every one of their local applications in under 6 weeks. How? Simply put they are using a different method. A method that was missed in the major shake-up of planning departments in 2009.

For example we found that:

• The implementation of the pre-application process in the studied councils had the effect of increasing demands on time but reducing revenue.
• Government imposed standards have contributed to the delays in the determination of planning applications.

These are just two of the seemingly counter-intuitive truths about the way that planning is traditionally designed and managed.

Here’s what Andrew Taylor, Chief Executive of City of Lincoln Council said about the new methodology we showed him:

“If you want to make dramatic improvements to your service and cut your costs, you must see Stuart’s information on planning; this data is critically important and has helped us significantly improve the performance of our council over the past two years.”

If you’re in planning (of course this particular application of the Vanguard method works in all casework environments) and you’d like to know more then call to arrange a 45-minute executive briefing with me.

Please contact us on 0131 440 2600 to book a briefing session for your management team. There is no charge.

Please remember that we also have a conference coming up in 6 weeks that will allow you to meet some of the people that have achieved similar results using the method.

To find out more visit Change Thinking Change Results Conference

Stuart

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