How has your year been? Do you, like me, like to sit by the fire on Christmas Eve drinking Drambuie and get all melancholy about the highs and the lows? (If not, you should, it’s brilliant, well the alcohol bit is).

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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