EVENT: UK Employee Engagement Network meeting 28 June, 12.30, Russell Square, London

Through a ning on employee engagement ( http://employeeengagement.ning.com/) a bunch of UK people thought it would be a good idea to get together to discuss practice in this field. We have set up this date for this. (28 June 2010) 

There is a modest fee of £30 to cover food and room hire. It is happening in central London. 

Anyone with an interest in employee engagement - particularly as how everyone's hearts and minds can be harnessed to tackle the fiscal pressures on public services (which is one of my keen interests) - you are most welcome! 

You can register here: http://guest.cvent.com/EVENTS/Info/Invitation.aspx?e=ca03591c-7faf-48f3-8b1d-506ed4368095 Please register soon as we are trying to get an idea of numbers. 

We will be using Open Space to set the agenda - so anything that needs to be talked about - can be talked about!

I hope to see you there!

Coalition: a opportunity for more radical innovation?

I tweeted earlier on today:

Will the gaps in our coalition be a source of strength not weakness: as spaces for innovation & experiments?

It seems to me (at the moment) that having a coalition government opens up many more possibilities for how public services can be delivered. This is partly because this situation is pushing many politicians well outside their comfort zone and they are having to entertain uncertainty, negotiation and consensus building to a degree that many of them have not had to do so before. Or at least they are now having to do this under public gaze. In my experience many politicians like to give the appearance that there are 'right' and 'wrong' answers to the pressing challenges of the day.

Perhaps this coalition will mean that politicians, locally and nationally, will be more prepared to wrestle with complexity and engage with public service leaders, professionals, third sector and citizens in a collaborative inquiry into radical innovation. In these increasingly stringent times, we will need to challenge our core beliefs & assumptions if we are to achieve that goal of delivering more (or at least no less) with a great deal less. (See my blog post for a 'legs eleven' set of ideas on this)

A slightly wobbly coalition could be providing a very supportive context for imagination, bold thinking and a big blooming panoply of small creative ideas!

Political leadership & the Prisoners' Dilemma

The prisoners' dilemma is well known and well used scenario from game theory which seeks to explain why sometimes two people, even though they could easily act in support of each other, will often end up taking an action that hurts them both.

It is based on the idea that if two suspects to a crime are both arrested, they each have the option to turn 'Queen's Evidence' or to stay quiet. If they both stay quiet, the police have enough evidence to put them away for only 6 months each. If they both give evidence - they will both get 5 years in gaol. But if one stays quiet and the other gives evidence - they will go down for 10 years and be let off respectively.

What would you do?

Often people choose to shop the other person - even though that means 5 years in gaol. The resolution of the game all hinges upon trust. If you cannot trust the other person, then your only 'sensible' course of action is give evidence and shop them. (A far longer article if this interests you can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma)

I was reminded of this dilemma as we imagine what might happen come Friday morning, the 7th May 2010 when the opinion polls are suggesting that the UK Parliament may well be 'hung'. In other words that no single political party will have an overall majority. This is extremely unusual in British politics. It would be a situation that the vast majority of the current generation of politicians will not have had to deal with before at national level. So I was wondering how they will handle it.

If this situation happens (and it may well not of course) - the pressure will be on the political leaders to trust each other. And I don't think this will be just about policies - it will be about whether the leaders involved are able to personally reach some common ground and make some lasting deals in the interest of the country (rather than their own political skins or party interests). It will be a serious test of leadership and political leadership. And it won't be easy.

The media may well wish to paint the picture of it all being about 'horse trading' various policies and whether any of their manifesto commitments are deal makers or deal breakers. I take a different view. It will be about those policies of course. But it will also be crucially about whether the people who have to forge a coalition will be able to look each other in the eye and know there is sufficient trust to make a coalition last.

While the stakes are different, leaders in organisations and partnerships have to do this all the time. Whenever a leader is leading, they will only be able to do this with the trust of those who are following. Building this trust can take months or years. It can also be lost in a few seconds.

How do you, as a leader, build and sustain trust with those whom you lead?

Moreover - how do you build trust with your enemies..?

(Next weekend could be very, very interesting...)

How visible is your leadership?

I was once working with a factory that made parts for cars. My assignment was to help them improve the quality of their products. The Senior Management Team had begun to put in place many of the critical ingredients of their strategy and were beginning to make progress. The workforce we unconvinced.

Over the course of several conversations it became clear that their doubt rested on what happened on Friday afternoons. "We know that the senior managers don't really mean all this stuff about quality because when push comes to shove at the end of the week, we ship the parts to keep the numbers up. We know that they will come back in a few weeks time under warranty." 

We took this message back to the senior managers who said this was not the case and they were totally committed to quality as evidenced by the number of posters they had put up. 

But then one day something significant happened. 

The Managing Director went down to the shop floor one Friday afternoon. He listened, he observed and he took action. "Stop the line - we have to sort this out!" 

It probably took all of 4 minutes for these words to echo around the plant. From that point onwards, whilst the quality strategy was never plain sailing, the workforce began to believe that it was there to stay. 

What are you going to do today? 

What have you already done?

Tackling the financial crisis: What is your ‘legs eleven’?

The challenge is on to find ways to reduce costs, maintain essential frontline services and do what can be done to protect jobs. However as the general election campaign continues to unfold, the true scale of the reductions in public funding are becoming ever clearer. Soon we are probably going to be in ‘another country’ where the usual efficiency measures simply won’t be enough.

To quote a politician from the last few days (and I forget who!) “it can’t just about reducing the paper clip budget, wishing for an end to bureaucracy and freezing a few empty posts”. New and starkly different ways thinking & acting are going to be required.

And so I came to wondering how the beliefs about how to do ‘more with less’ might need to change. I came up with 11 ideas – 3 beliefs to stop, 3 beliefs to start & 3 beliefs with which to carry on. The 10th idea is about stepping back and the 11th poses a radical ‘why not...?’. 

In my view, we need to:

1. Stop believing that inefficient embedded cultures & engrained practices are impossible to change (Yes, it won’t be easy. But now is not the time for pusillanimity: the public services who will thrive through this turbulent times will be the ones who grasp nettles and robustly put delivering sustainable value to citizens / customers / clients / taxpayers very centre stage)
2. Stop believing that there is heaven in the closely & rationally argued detail (The age of 356 page strategic plans is surely over! The endless iterations of turgid guidance should now also be history. This may not [yet?]be the time to throw caution to the wind, but it surely is the time to let it float on a breeze while people are encouraged and allowed to make bold decisions based on shrewd intuition and just a little less than endless ‘due diligence’)
3. Stop believing that yet more ICT is what is required (Without doubt ICT has enabled and streamlined much of what we do. But I also remember a time when word processing was meant to do away with lots of tiresome clerical tasks. The documents are prettier, cutting & pasting has become a fine art for people who have never done it with real glue but we still have yet to reach that mythical kingdom where people don’t have to key in an address several times over. Perhaps it is time to call a halt, or at least a moratorium, on purchasing that next ICT fix)
4. Start believing that citizen engagement can deliver efficiency, effectiveness, economy and empowerment (Cuts or no, we still need public services to educate our young people, to care for older people, to tackle crime, to maintain our roads. But how many of these services that are done for, or even to, citizens would be better off being done with the public? Once upon a time a forecourt attendant filled up our petrol tank: now we do it ourselves. Is that so bad? What public services must go a similar way?)
5. Start believing that there is real and immediate value to had from collaboration and mergers (I have sometimes seen obvious collaborations staring people in the face but then well argued reasons are found to prevaricate or even block such changes. On the other hand, I have seen organisations take the view that “where there’s a will, there’s a way” and drive through a successful collaborative structure. This is a time for such bold action. It is not the time for pickiness, preciousness and posturing to stop progress)
6. Start believing that radical reforming, reframing, redesigning & rethinking services can happen without a legion of expensive consultants (It is my belief and experience that within every organisation there is a huge reservoir of small, and sometimes large, creative ideas for improvement. Often these reservoirs are left untapped whilst the same organisations pay buckets of money to large consultancies who then either plunder the ideas or impose inappropriate models of change on the client or both. I would argue that far more needs to be done to create the leadership and organisational cultural environments whereby these ideas are allowed to flourish like poppies in a field of corn. (Please see my blog: http://smallcreativeideas.blogspot.com/ for hundreds of examples of such ideas)
7. Carry on believing that the employees are the best asset any organisation has (Sadly it is inevitable that there will be redundancies from these cutbacks. I would argue that the way that this is done is critical to the ongoing health of the organisations left behind. There will be much to do to plan wisely and humanely about how this should be done with the staff who will be directly affected. This will also wash over the staff who are left behind. In my view, everything that can be done to make the process as respectful and supportive as possible for all involved is both ethically and financially imperative)
8. Carry on believing in the vital importance of leadership through all of this (These turbulent times will demand superlative leadership that will ensure that strategic, rather than knee jerk, actions are taken. Good leadership will also ensure that cuts are taken intelligently tackling the areas of ‘quick fix’ waste rather than imposing, say, a 15% cut across all budgets, even the ones that are of most value and efficiency. Excellent leadership will mean that the organisations come out the other side of this process even stronger, more flexible, and ever more tuned to citizen demands & aspirations.)
9. Carry on believing in the worth of evaluation to evidence what works, what is most efficient and why (There is no point ‘throwing good money after bad’. There never has been. And now we certainly cannot afford to do so. Whilst it will be easy to cut budgets for evaluation, I would argue it is now even more critical to understand what is working and why, as well as understanding what is not. Evaluation is an investment in efficiency, economy and effectiveness)
10. Step back, explore and challenge all our other beliefs & assumptions that may be costing us dearly (One story I am reminded of is from a council in Yorkshire that investigated its processes for fixing street lights. They found that when a member of the public phoned in to report a defective street light they sent an engineer to verify the report was correct. Usually it was and then they sent another engineer to fix it. They made a remarkable discovery. If they changed their assumption from not believing the members of the public to believing them – they saved themselves a whole lump of resources. How many assumptions do we make that cost us huge amounts of money?)
11. And why not, stop cumbersome procurement and start smart negotiating instead (Have you tested the value of procurement as against old fashioned negotiation? It strikes me that vast amounts of time go into ‘feeding the procurement beast’ that are simply not accounted for when it comes to evaluating the worth of the process. The people who iterate endless specifications, produce impenetrable invitations to tender and then allocate many person days to the process of scoring the bids might be far better off if they simply sat the existing suppliers down in a room and just haggled a bit. There is more I could say on this subject as regular readers will know: http://jonharveyassociates.blogspot.com/2009/05/13-ways-to-ensure-that-procurement.html But why not?)

What ‘legs eleven’ ideas would you put forward? What ideas / beliefs / activities / services / processes / politicians (!) / etc. would you stop, start, carry on, step back from and challenge with a ‘why not’ ?

Customer Journey Mapping: New Workshop!

Will Haywood from Stoke-on-Trent City Council has kindly emailed me to say they have organised another workshop about their CJM approach. It is on 28th May starting at 10.00am. If you wish to go - please email him either by clicking here or here 

Details of previous workshops and their approach can be found by clicking on these links here:

• Customer Journey Mapping Workshop: the results!
• Customer Journey Mapping Workshop
• Customer Journey Mapping

I have also blogged about this too - if you have an interest:

• Customer journey mapping and attendance allowance

Some questions I would pose about CJM are:

• Can too much mapping lead to exhaustion? (see this post for further ideas on this)
• Can mapping get in the way of exploring?
• Is it appropriate to use the term 'customer' when financial restrictions will mean that partnering with local citizens becomes an economic necessity (see here for more about this debate)
• Is CJM on its own enough? What other organisational development is required to make the most of the insights and ideas gained?
• How hard is it to engage executive and political leaders in CJM? What else needs to be done?
• How much danger is there that CJM sanitises the frustrations and ambitions of local citizens by turning it into a 'map'? How direct, face to face and authentic conversations between service users & providers (at all levels) built into the process?
• What change of culture is required to make the most of CJM? Or does CJM itself stimulate a change in culture?
• How should the investment in CJM be evaluated? How has it been evaluated already? 
• In these increasingly stringent times - is CJM a nice to do or a need to do? What are the key arguments to assert its value?

Just some thoughts. As always I wish Will and his colleagues all the best with their forthcoming workshop!

Hub & Spoke: which method is best?

Traditional way of building a strategy / plan / set of actions:

Whole systems way:



How do you do it?

Why fragment decisions about the future?

Why not bring everyone in a room together and sort it out...?

Simulations and managing the future

Leaders are often very good at managing the present and responding to events and issues as they arise. After all, it is often people's ability to troubleshoot that helps people get promoted. But, a key part of being a good leader is managing the future. This is far more challenging.

The one thing that we do know about the future is that we do not know what the future holds in store. We can make predictions based on past trends, we can devise likely scenarios and plan around these. But in the end, managing the future is a journey into the unknown. What makes the future particularly difficult to predict is not knowing how people will react to changing circumstances. Economists spend years devising models to anticipate the effect of various changes to taxes, commodity price changes and so forth. But these models often struggle with anticipating the capricious and messy decisions that people make within these changing circumstances. For example how many economists or business leaders predicted the recent recession?

(Some have argued of course that the reason that astrology exists is to make economics appear scientific!)

One approach that is widely used to manage the future is to use whole system open simulations. These are different from simulations that you may have come across such as console computer games (including flight simulators, of course) or training exercises where there are a limited number of options from which to choose. These are essentially 'closed' simulations and a great deal of effort goes into designing the 'rules' of the simulation (if x is chosen then y occurs). In essence they seek to codify and 'bottle' human complexity. Whilst they are interactive they are not developmental nor do they change much in the light of learning and experience. Such closed simulations also struggle with people who seek to break the rules or who are just not sure what to do.

People breaking the rules (or at least bending them) is almost, perhaps, what makes us human rather than automatons.

So if an organisation wants to investigate

• how a new service might be delivered,
• how a new organisational structure might work,
• how a new product might change the market,
• how a partnership or strategic alliance might work out

... a whole system open simulation might well be a very effective and efficient way to do this.

The basic ingredients of a whole system open simulation are:

• Get all the stakeholders in the room together - ie anyone who will be affected or will want to affect how the future happens
• Put people into roles that are similar to (but critically not the same as) their existing roles so that they can apply their knowledge, experience and insights
• Give people a 'map' of the new system/structure/product (etc.) with enough information to bring it to life but not so much as to overload people with spurious detail
• Set up some tasks and objectives for the stakeholders to work on (such as agree a plan, or test an idea, or trial a new service...) within a concertinaed time frame
• Consider how you may want to 'interrupt' the flow with 'events' that could happen in order to test reactions and consequences
• Give people the time to reflect on what they have discovered from being part of this fictional system - what did they learn, what surprised them, what concerned them etc?
• Finally give people time to resolve - 'now what?' - what learning needs to be applied to real world and how?

Because these are whole system 'open' simulations there is no need to try and predict or seek to contain the simulation. The simulation itself is a voyage of discovery and becomes a crucible of learning. People find out how they may need to adjust what they do and how they will behave in the future within the new circumstances. (As a consequence, simulations are a very effective tool in the development of leaders and managers.) Strategies & plans can be devised, refreshed or jettisoned.

Perhaps one way to sum up whole system open simulations is to say that they are about taking your shoes off rather than forcing shoes onto your feet. People can play (and bend the rules) within such a simulation and so learn, innovate and plan for the future. As Roger von Oech (author of 'A Whack on the Side of the Head') said "Necessity may be the Mother of invention, but play is certainly the Father"

Do you want to play?

When the seas of calm

I am just about to head off across the channel for a couple of days in Brittany with some friends, and I have been paying close attention to the shipping forecast... It doesn't look good!

This has reminded me of what Machiavelli says about calm seas:

‘a common failing of mankind (is) never to anticipate a storm when the sea is calm. A wise prince … must never take things easy in times of peace’*

This is not just a question of you: 

• developing your people
• developing your systems
• developing your structures
• developing yourself

It is also about how do you get your team and the wider organisation to stay ‘keen’ when the seas are appearing calm...? 

How many organisations are currently weathering the current economic storms & Government cutbacks OK because they kept themselves keenly ready for such an eventuality? 

* Machiavelli “The Prince” – translated by George Bull – Penguin 1961

Whole systems? No time!

Occasionally when I raise the idea of using whole systems to broker strategic action plans or ways forward (especially in local government), I get a 'teeth sucking' the response "well, not sure if the chief executive / directors / council members could commit the time to be there - certainly not for all the 2 hours / half day / whole day". The implication being that their time is better spent elsewhere - probably in meetings with other chief executives / directors / council members. Underlying this is also the idea (although it may not be expressed quite so openly) that important decisions have to be taken behind closed doors where politics (both party and organisational) must be allowed to rule.

Allow me to challenge these views of the world with a few ideas & questions: 

• What better place is there to show political or organisational leadership than in the company of a wide range of diverse stakeholders?
• Whole system processes are not in conflict with usual ways of making decisions - such events inform and complement such decision making.
• If simply having a paper strategy is all that is required - then a whole system process is a waste of time. However, if what is required is a strategy that achieves lasting change and results (see stractegies below) - what could more important than being engaged such a process?
• How important is it for chief executives / directors / council members to be seen by local citizens, partner agencies and frontline staff to be actively engaging in debates & discussions about the future? 
• Machiavelli (one of the first public service advisers on leadership) says that excellent leaders must actively seek out and listen to the truth (see below here and here) - whole system processes are driven by the power of truth.

What other reasons or questions would you suggest?

Other posts on whole systems working:

• Making whole systems work
• Improving whole systems with creativity, commitment and complexity
• Process mapping saps creativity
• Have a 'stractegy' rather than a 'strutegy'
• Getting the whole system in the room - Future Search video
• Carrying out a 'confidence audit'

Process mapping saps creativity

On another space, a person posted an enquiry about how best to carry out process mapping. I thought I would reprint my reply there - here too:

Forgive me but...... don't do it!

In my view - mapping processes is a huge waste of time that saps the creative energy of all those involved. By all means get an overview of what happens down to a few stages, maybe even unpack some of these stages to the next level down (what are the 4 to 7 stages within each of these) but GO NO FURTHER!

To take a radical standpoint - process mapping was invented by a bunch of business analysts consultants to keep themselves busy. The police service went for it big time a few years back and look how lean, unbureaucratic and elegant their processes are now....! This may not be want you want to hear - and I accept I am adopting an extreme point of view... but I would ask you to think very carefully about the activities you are embarking on. If I were to take a guess - you have hired some consultants to come and help you with this...? That or else you have an ex consultant working internally with you.

My concern centres on innovation. If you map a process to the n'th degree - I believe that not only are people exhausted by the activity - they also get so attached to the current way of doing things that they then cannot 'see the wood for the trees'.

Allow me to suggest an alternative approach:

1. Map the process lightly
2. Record this on some big pieces of flip chart paper that you can put on the wall
3. Find a good cross section of people who have an interest in the success of the process - anyone who knows, cares or can do something about the process. This should include some real citizens, a handful of members, lots of frontline officers, some managers and senior manager or two - the more the merrier really. Don't worry about keeping the numbers small - you can get a 100 people working on this
4. Agree a time and place to have an all day meeting with the aim to redesign and rethink the process in question all on that day! Have lots of space, and flip charts, and probably some helium filled balloons too (it helps people find each other)
5. Put the process map on the wall somewhere
6. Put up questions (see below) around the room to get people thinking about doing things differently - these are all solutions looking for problems (so called inductive problem solving rather than the usual deductive - and often reductive - problem solving)
7. Let people loose and encourage people to talk about what they want to talk about to improve the process. (I would advocate using Open Space but there are other large group / whole system methods that could be used too)
8. Bring everyone back together at various points to take stock. People will naturally begin to synthesise a new way of running the process.
9. Empower a small team to take all the outputs from the day to pull together a summary with clear recommendations for change.

These are the questions to post around the room:

• Have we agreed the stakeholder requirements?
• Are the providers involved adequately trained?
• Are there too many ‘handovers’
• Is the process being done in the right order?
• Could it be made simpler with a ‘triage’ stage?
• Could we make better use of technology?
• Where are the sources of rework?
• Why does performance vary – and by how much?
• Could some parts of the process be done at the same time?
• Are there too many checks and controls?
• Could we get the users / clients / etc. to do more?
• Could we get our partners or suppliers to take action?
• Could we create an expert system to make it work better?
• Is there a ‘standard’ way of carrying out the process?
• Where are the delays in the process?
• Could different people or agencies be providing the service (or part of it)?
• Have we made any cultural or professional assumptions that are getting in the way?
• Are the performance measures helping?
• Could we stop doing the process altogether?
• Are decision making protocols getting in the way?
• Does the process contribute to outcome goals

The advantages of such an approach is that it is

a) quick
b) efficient
c) liberating
d) creative
e) cuts through parochialism
f) builds a community rather than atomising it with process analysis
g) works with the whole system rather than drawing on Taylorist time and motion methods

etc....

Perhaps we need Process Exploring.... as opposed to mapping?

Conferences: bah humbug!

While we are on the subject of conferences (see below), please allow me a small plea for doing them in a different way.

The conference I went to yesterday followed the usual groove – a few (and some were good) plenary inputs early on followed by some ‘master classes’ (which if I am being honest were the presentational equivalents of ‘advertorials’) and then some more plenary presentations towards the end of the day. Meanwhile drinks and food were served and then you had the chance to network…

I put network in italics since such networking is a totally random affair. You happen to stand next to someone while reaching for a biscuit and strike up a conversation. I learnt one or two interesting things from these conversations yesterday (did you know part of Plymouth maternity hospital is officially designated part of Cornwall so that if a Cornish mum has to go there for specialist care her baby can still be born in Cornwall…?) but I would have liked to talk about the issues that mattered to me (see the blog post below for example) with others who shared that interest.

It seems to me that these conferences could be far more valuable if they had a parallel space for people to network in and talk about what they wanted to discuss. Borrowing on Open Space – I envisage a largish room where one wall people can post the issues they would like to discuss, a portion of the floor where they are going to be at what time, and then wait to see who turns up. It is not pure open space of course, but it would allow people to find each other as it were. All the other programmed seminars, talks, workshops can carry on too – but this parallel space would allow for something a little different.

On this basis the usual agenda can be published and used to justify people attending – but there would be an added extra – at minimal cost and maximal value. It would mean that people could not leave the event saying that they wish they had talked about ‘X’ since they would have had that chance…

I am going to suggest this to a few conference providers to see if they would like to install this into their events. Watch this space…

So if the next time you go to a standard ‘glossy’ event in London (like the one yesterday was) and you get the freeform opportunity to suggest a subject for discussion in a largish room with bits of paper stuck to the wall – remember you heard it here first! 


Perhaps we should call these Conference 2.0 ??

Shared services: a good or bad idea?

I went to conference yesterday (info here) all about Shared Services. Whilst there were some compelling & candid stories about the value of such arrangements, I remain unconvinced that this approach is relevant to some or even many parts of the public sector or, for that matter, even beyond into the commercial world. It seems to me shared services rest upon two key and dubious ideas:

Firstly that demand is not infinitely variable such that responses can be boiled down to just a few which are then ‘programmed’ into the software and people that make a shared service thrive. Whilst I would tend to go along with the 80/20 rule and that there are patterns to observe, I also think that people are infinitely variable. Certainly for myself, whenever I get caught up in a shared service vortex where I have to ‘press one’ to find out my balance, ‘two’ to make a payment, ‘three’ to etc. – I almost always find myself waiting for the option (usually number nine – by which time I getting very fed up) to speak to an actual person. Perhaps I am cynical, but I do wonder whether such services are actually designed to put people off.

The second idea I would challenge is that you can fragment a customer (or citizen / client / user) driven process into component parts without losing something from the ‘whole’. For me, the greater number of people who are involved in delivering a service to a client – the more likely something will go wrong which will have to be fixed.

But the conference left me with a few good ideas and points to ponder on… (So thank you for the invitation from Public Service Events.)

But what do you think of shared services – is your experience (either as provider or receiver of such a service) good or bad? Are the economies of scale significant to just smoke & mirrors hiding an underlying inefficiency? How would you improve efficiency and effectiveness?

I am open to persuasive ideas…

Getting the whole system in the room - Future Search video

A short video which says a great deal in only a few minutes about Future Search and getting the whole system in the room.

Watch it here

More information about Future Search - see my other blog entry - which has further links on it too. Click here

Whole system working is:

• Easily done
• Efficient and VFM - 2 facilitators can handle a group of 60, 100, 300 and more
• Effective in building resilient, connected & strategic communities or practitioners and clients / taxpayers / citizens
• Able to produce 'stractegies' (centred on action & results) rather than 'strutegies' (that look pretty on the glossy page - but that is all)
• Able to cut out endless carousels of linear consultation...
• Enlivening and empowering

Just get everyone together in a room for 1/2 day or more to:

• Review a service / project
• Plan a way forward
• Redesign or rethink a process or a service
• Write a new manual
• Sort our the requirements on a new system
• Tackle a wicked problem
• Etc

In effect it is about working with a 'mesh' of stakeholders rather than treating them as the ends of the spokes where the change / project team is the hub. Hub & spoke working consumes vast quantities of time, money, coffee and emails. Instead - get a 'mesh' of people together to appreciate the big picture from many different angles.

Stealing the tax payers watch?

There is a well known and very old joke about consultants, indeed it is probably on a wall in Latin somewhere! You know the one: management consultants steal your watch, tell you the time and then keep the watch. It would be funny if it wasn’t so true! And it would be even funnier if public service organisations did not waste so much money keeping it true and wasting millions of tax payer pounds as a result.

Take this for example which I have extracted (and anonymised) from a tender published this morning: “We are therefore seeking to appoint consultants with the appropriate experience and expertise to develop a detailed action plan to...etc.” The client wants a team of consultants to use the clients existing “desire to take performance to the next level and establish xxx as a leader in this field on a national if not international level”. The tender helpfully outlines all the partners and projects that would need to be reviewed and mined for their information & ideas so that the external consultants can create the action plan wanted. The tender helpfully even goes on to suggest some of the main themes for improvement action indicating that a good amount of analysis and development work has already been done.

This type of tender is frighteningly common. I could just as easily have quoted from another one I saw two days ago seeking help from external consultants to come and write the future of their district for them. And there are countless others I have seen in the past: tenders seeking external consultants to deliver an expensive report based ‘fix’ to them.

But why are these consultancy assignments like these such a huge waste of money? Here are my reasons:

1. A small external consultancy team is most unlikely to be able to grasp the full complexity of the issues in question. They will only ever be seeing a few frames in somebody else’s long running movie. 
2. The very nature of the work to generate a consultant-owned report and set of recommendations to be delivered to the organisation is unlikely to nurture the degree of commitment inside the client organisation (and wider system) required to see the plans through to results 
3. The process used by most consultants involves talking to a number of stakeholders in a more or less linear fashion, often more than once. This approach does not generate the inter linking of all the stakeholders involved and is much less likely to generate a creative solution to requirements in question.
4. Moreover because the connectivity of the stakeholders is not fully harnessed (because each one only gets to talk with the consultant team rather than with each other) the resulting plans are likely to be less sustainable. An approach which seeks to develop a connected ‘strategic community of stakeholders’ is much more likely to achieve long term as well as short term goals in my view. 
5. By bringing in an external consultant to carry out an ‘expert led’ project ‘to’ (rather than with) the client’s system, the client is in severe danger of giving out the message to its own staff of “we don’t think you are competent or trustworthy enough to the job required”. I have never met a client where this was their intention, but I have met many staff who thought it was. There is a long term cost to this.
6. By not embarking on a more participative and ‘whole system’ approach, the client is missing out on so many of the insights, energy and knowledge already held within the staff and stakeholders. Tapping into this for the sake of meeting the current requirements as well as nurturing a culture of engagement in the future provides so many more benefits than a sterile external consultants’ report can provide.
7. Finally, the costs of bringing an external consultant team up to speed, and then paying for them to talk with lots of people and analyse existing documents are huge. It is far cheaper and more effective, instead, to get the key people who would need to be involved (including those who wrote the existing reports) all together in a room for a day or two to have some good conversations. The resulting energy, creativity, and shared understanding of the complex detail & ‘big picture’ views of what needs to be done is far more valuable than any external consultants’ report.

And so I would ask you, if you are a client who is planning to hire in a team of consultants to write a report for you: could far more be achieved instead by bringing the key people together in room for a day or two? Yes, you may still value having an external facilitator to help you think through the design of such an event and ‘hold the ring’ for you on the day itself. If the event is designed well, it will also write its own report.

• What do you think? 
• Could this be better value for money?

Truth & leadership #2

And on holding back the truth

‘…moreover if he finds that anyone for some reason holds the truth back he must show his wrath’*

• Within your team – what do you do to ensure full and frank discussions?
• How do you make it clear to them that you need the truth?

* Machiavelli “The Prince” – translated by George Bull – Penguin 1961

Truth & leadership

‘A prince must therefore always seek advice… he must always be a constant questioner, and he must listen patiently to the truth regarding what he has inquired about’*

I knew a Chief Executive once who was so ‘pleased’ with the results of a staff survey he had commissioned that he had the resulting report copies and all the questionnaires shredded.

• Do you have people around you who tell you the truth? 
• How do you know?
• If the truth is not what you want to hear – how do you react?
• How does your leadership inspire truth?

* Machiavelli “The Prince” – translated by George Bull – Penguin 1961

The responsibility of being a leader

Machiavelli indicated that for him decisions should only be made for the sake of achieving the purpose of the organisation… That was the only arbiter. For Machiavelli – the ‘state’ was everything

What do you think?

Over what issue might you be a ‘whistleblower’ for the sake of the state?

Change alchemy: Evaluate

When you evaluate something you give out a series of important messages:

• This is important – so important in fact that I want to know how things are going
• I don’t just want to know that something is working – I want to know why
• I also want to know what bits are not working so well
• Indeed I want people in my organisation to be guided by ‘what works’ rather than ‘we’ve always done it this way’, and
• This change is here to stay – but I am open to making it work better and hearing others’ views

What messages have you put out recently?

Allowing organisational culture to change...

I spend a good amount of time thinking about and helping clients move from one organisational culture to another. For a long while I have been conscious that such cultures are not easily changed since they represent something very deep in the organisation. Indeed I wonder sometimes whether these cultures can be changed at all.

I have just come across a very helpful article by Richard Seel which comes closer to my thinking about culture than anything I have read before. It is well worth a read! You can access it here (New Insights on Organisational Change).

I very like the idea of searching for a few 'nudges' (or grains of sand as described in the article) that can help a new culture emerge and come to life. In the article, Richard refers to the 'leader as midwife' - which of course I have blogged about only just recently.

Please read the article - and let me know what you think!