Who are the 'ultra shrinking violets' in your organisation?

There is a great discussion on the IDeA website (do subscribe if you have not already done so: http://www.communities.idea.gov.uk/c/140560/forum/thread.do?id=5040218) about what are the characteristics of a 'systems thinker'. Robert Park of Edinburgh City Council introduced the idea of the 'shrinking violets' who often get marginalised, an idea which was picked up by various people deeper into the discussion. My last contribution to the thread included:

I prefer to think not in terms of training people to be systems thinkers but instead of helping people to reconnect and widen their systems thinking capabilities. The question for me is how come we have created organisations / society / politics where systems thinking is beaten out of people. I suspect that has far more to do with greed and power. On this basis, I think the systems thinkers that we see (as opposed to the people who have the unseen inner potential &/or quietly working in the background in a systems thinking "ultra shrinking violet" way (?)) tend to be people who are centred, grounded and inwardly powerful - to the degree that they have no need or desire to have power over others... The ultra shrinking violets are probably very centred too!

So my questions to you: are you an ultra shrinking violet working undercover, as it were, quietly trying to subvert the organisation you are in towards one that takes greater account of whole systems? Or indeed are you a leader who supports these people or do you overlook them? Or worse do you banish them?

Who are the ultra shrinking violets in your organisation?

Change alchemy: using pictures & photographs

Leaders create strategy. Or rather, perhaps, they create the conditions whereby good strategies are generated and followed through into actions and results.

A good strategy says not only what will be done but also what will be achieved. 

Pictures can help to motivate change and also create a vision of the future.

It is said that when Turner painted “Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhon coming on" he was assisting the abolitionist cause.

What pictures are helping you implement your strategies? What other pictures might help more?

A small milestone

Just to note that over 10,000 pages from this blog have been uploaded over the last 14 months. To celebrate this, I have created a PDF of all the pages from this blog. If you would like a copy, please email me and I would be happy to send one to you.

Please keep reading & browsing!

Thank you.

Big Society: report on the network meeting

OK – so I am reflecting on the Big Society network meeting (see below) at the Department of Communities and Local Government that happened last night (6/7/10). All in all, I am very glad I went. As always a great networking opportunity and I met some lovely people with whom I plan to keep in touch. It was also helpful to hear a little more about how the plans for the Big Society are shaping up – although everything is very much in an early stage of development as was stressed to us by Paul Twivy yesterday. The format used did allow some shaping of the agenda from the floor – which was a healthy innovation for a meeting in a government building.

I could be very picky about the process used (it was NOT open space technology in my view and it concerns me that some people will have left last night thinking that it was) but I recognise the constraints that the organisers were working under. The room size for the numbers present and air con were severe limiting factors for sure. There was some tweeting and talking about the (minimal) visible diversity present in the room and indeed amongst the people who got up to nominate discussion sessions. And so I am left feeling that several opportunities were missed to join people up and indeed allow those collected the chance to help shape the future agenda. Much more could have been achieved with a little more space, time, design and cool air.

Where next? I am hoping this is just a beginning and over the course of the next few months, there will be more scope to develop this idea of a Big Society. Some questions are buzzing in my head (and I am grateful to the meeting yesteday for helping to stimulate these thoughts):

• Can you get ‘owt for nowt?’ (Energising, coordinating, developing volunteering in the UK won’t happen without some considerable investment in a range of structures designed to do this. This was a point made several times last night)
• What local leadership will help the Big Society come to life? (There are already many volunteers in local government at all tiers already, including several thousand unpaid community / town councillors. Moreover there are many district, unitary and county councillors too. Beyond this there must be many thousands of treasurers, chairs, secretaries of thousands of local voluntary groups. All these people have a leadership role and will be helping, or not, draw more people in. What is now needed to support the leadership that will help do this?)
• Just what levers can be pulled to grow the legions of voluntary workers still more? (Some people seemed to believe it was an absence of information about opportunities that was a significant barrier to more people getting involved. Others wondered whether just be inviting people, that in itself would bring more on board. Others, including me, wondered if a key factor was confidence in that a person needs this to be prepared to volunteer. There were many more factors explored such as the use of technology. My hope is that evidence and research, as well as more ruminating, will help identify what interventions will achieve the most gain  and guide action from here.)
• How do you engage the unengaged or even the ‘don’t want to be engaged’? (If the Big Society is to really take off, many more people will need be involved. How will some people, particularly those who may feel they have nothing to offer, be attracted to join in?)
• What wheels need to be reinvented and which existing one, with a bit of oil perhaps, could work far better? (For example, Paul Twivy spoke yesterday about the idea of a new mutual financial institution that could provide low cost indemnity insurance to volunteers etc. I was left wondering don’t we already have a people’s financial institution called the Post Office? I am worried that in the rush to produce some shiny new ‘Big Society’ some existing structures, such as local libraries, may just be overlooked. Equally there may be some bodies that have served their purpose and something new is required. These decisions need to be made carefully, I think.)

So as always, more questions than answers – but let’s keep the dialogue going!

Why we need 'Austerity Charters'

A few weeks ago I was talking with some civil servants about the implications of the budgetary cuts to come. One matter that was concerning them was the impact on staff discipline. As one person put it succinctly "why should I seek to sack an underperforming member of my team, when I know that if I do, the then vacant post will be frozen. It is better to have 50% of one person than 100% of nobody".

Another possible result of the current circumstances will be that just when you need everyone to be thinking about how to innovate and do more with less, people will be more inclined to keep their heads down and play 'safe'. (I have blogged about this already here.)

There are probably many more examples of perverse & unfortunate consequences of the current resource regime in public service organisations. The question is: can anything be done about this? My proposal is that every public service organisation should develop and approve what I will label an 'Austerity Charter'

The purpose of these charters will be to make crystal clear the principles, policies and values that will underpin how decisions will be made about where and how the large reductions in expenditure being considered will be implemented. For example, one point might cover the issue above such that posts vacated as a result of disciplinary action will not necessarily remain frozen, might go some way towards alleviating the problems that might emerge otherwise. Another part of the charter might seek to clarify that decisions about job losses will not be influenced by what action a person takes to innovate better ways of providing a service.

I don't really know what would go in such an Austerity Charter. But I do know that it up to the organisations themselves to resolve and that this will be best done in as open and inclusive a way as possible. Trade unions and staff associations clearly have a role to play, as do other stakeholders. (You will not be surprised to know that I would favour a whole system approach to the development of such charters.)

Such charters probably already exist but in the various fragmented & suspicious minds of all those who are affected, be they people who are likely to be made redundant or those will have the task of making such decisions. Nobody will find this easy, and some will find the process over the coming months distressing and life changing.

With reference to transactional analysis, will the leaders of the organisations be 'adult' enough to agree, focus and make explicit how these austere measures will be implemented? Or are we moving into a time where not only will the decisions be made behind closed doors, but the way of making the decisions will also be kept secret and implicit? I believe the latter approach is likely to lead to more staff distress, more harm to citizen/customer service, more distraction, less innovation and, probably, more procrastination and sabotage.

What do you think?

Or has your organisation already produced an 'Austerity Charter'?

Big Society with a big Open Space

In anticipation of a meeting I am going to next week:

The Big Society Network is an organisation to exists to help people achieve change in their local area. Our aim is to create a new relationship between Citizens and Government in which both are genuine partners in getting things done: real democracy using all the human and technological tools we now have available. This partnership will also add a third and fourth leg to its sturdy chair by involving business and the voluntary sector.... On the afternoon of the 6 July we plan to bring a cross section of people from across civil society into a conversation with the Big Society team. (http://bigsocietyopennight.eventbrite.com/)

I thought I would post three excellent videos about Open Space in action and how the process helps to nurture engagement and responsibility - themes that will no doubt be picked up by those present next week. (The event is still open for anyone who wants to go...)

Recently posted 3.5 min clip about Open Space in the city of Harrisonburg, USA, sponsored by the local Mayor

Same sponsor, this time 4 min clip about sustainability issues

Jutta Weimar and the Berlin-based BOSCOP team present a short 6.5 min 'trailer' for Open Space

I am very excited by the fact that the meeting next week will be "facilitated using open space technology which will enable all participants to shape the agenda". It will be most pleasurable to be part of an Open Space that somebody else is facilitating! I will let you know how it went... watch this space.

And many thanks to Brendan McKeague of the Life School (Perth, Australia) for these youtube links. And thanks to Ingrid Koehler of the IDeA who alerted me to the event.

Cost reduction in a cold climate

Barry Toogood from Mentis - has just sent me a link to an excellent paper which will stimulate your thinking around the subject of how to move forwards in these austere times. It contains some useful mnemonics & frameworks for thinking. Do have a read and I am sure that Barry would be interested in your thoughts. (Copy me in too - thanks!)

Here is the link to the paper:

http://www.mentis.co.uk/COST-PAPER.pdf

What is your cutting angle?

In many organisations there is a great deal of what I call ‘quick fix’ (QF) activity. You can recognise QF by the fire-fighting loop that many parts of an organisation get caught up in going round and round. People come to work and work hard – “bloomin’ hard!” And, every now and then, something goes wrong and there is a mistake. And as we all know, often from a very early age, “you can’t win ’em all!” To err is human, near enough is good enough. But the mistake has to be fixed, using up more time and resources. This only adds to the work load and probably increases the chances that more mistakes happen.

Stay fix (SF) on the other hand takes a subtly but radically different approach. When the mistake happens the ‘stay fixer’ will wonder “why?” In other words they will wonder what elements of the system (the whole system) made it likely that that particular mistake would occur... They are thinking about prevention. The mistake still has to dealt with of course but at this point, the stay fixer spins out and seeks to fix the system and put in place changes that reduce the chances that a similar mistake will happen in the future. At this point prevention is done (not just considered) and so work becomes easier and indeed people begin to work smarter not harder.

In any organisation, activity can be classified as QF, SF or Doing the Business (DTB) where the service / process happens as it should do with no mistakes occurring. Hence an audit of QF/SF/DTB can be conducted. When organisations have done this, they often find that vast amounts of money, time and stress are expended on a combination of QF and SF – sometimes up to 20% or even 40% of the overall budget.

But a choice then emerges. Do you want to carry on spending vast amounts of resource on this ‘cost of failure’ or do you want to invest in SF in order to bring down the costs of QF. Ultimately if you do this well, there can be massive savings in QF costs, even SF costs which in turn bring down the overall cost to the organisation. Not only is the organisation more efficient, it is more effective, economic and indeed elastic (since good SF builds in versatility to changing contexts too). And if SF is done ‘with’ the whole system, rather than ‘to’ it, more energy and commitment is released as well.

However there are a couple of big(ish) problems. The reductions in QF take time to come to fruition. Also investing in SF is a bit like stoking a steam train engine, it takes a while to gather speed. As a consequence, the overall cost to the organisation goes up before it can come down. This is always the case. QF savings do not magically appear without some effort. There is no easy solution to this but the only one which can work, in my experience, is prioritisation of the SF activity. For example avoid trying to reengineer all of your processes in one go – instead select a couple where some early gains are possible which then gives you some commitment and slack to move onto the next and the next and so on. This is why strategic planning is so very important as it helps an organisation select where to invest its SF activity.

There is another significant problem too. Thinking of the QF and SF loops, there is a small tunnel from thinking about prevention back into “you can’t win ‘em all”. People often go through this tunnel when they say things like “I am so busy right now, I don’t have time to think about the wider system, I will do the prevention task a couple of years from now, when I am not busy...”

Blocking off this tunnel requires leadership. This leadership must:

• Role model SF practice (which is hard for the leaders who have been promoted on the strength of QF ability)
• Provide structures, tools and techniques to educate, enable, empower, support and inspire people to work in a SF way (such that QF becomes the work equivalent of leaving home without brushing you teeth!)

Organisations are far more complex than this, but I have found over the years that people find this model helpful in making sense of why continuous improvement is difficult but also what can be done to design a way forward that is doable.

In these current times when resources are going to get ever tighter, the need for investing in SF to bring down the costs of QF has never been greater. However, one can imagine the costs of an organisation laid out as three blocks: DTB, SF and QF. The shrewd leaders and managers will identify where the QF costs are and tackle them one by one. The less shrewd leaders who are in a hurry to sacrifice the future for the price of today will cut horizontally as it were and slice through DTB and SF as well as portion of QF. This will damage the short and long term capability of the organisation as well give up the opportunities to be had from investing in SF. It will also cost more in the long term.

Perhaps one key measure of how shrewd & strategic a leader is, in this current context, will be the angle of the cut: somewhere between horizontal and vertical.

What is your angle?

Cutting without bleeding

Advice to senior leaders on how implement cost savings in the public services

The public services are facing an unprecedented challenge to reduce costs by upwards of 25% whilst maintaining frontline services. There are some who would say this is impossible and that, after years of efficiency savings, there is simply no more ‘fat’ left to trim. This article says the opposite and offers you 10 progressive ideas to assist you in making these cuts without doing any long term damage to the social and physical fabric of this country, or indeed the public services we have grown to depend upon. 

1. In all of your communications about your strategy to implement these cuts make sure that you only discuss the costs of services, never the benefits. For example when you come to publish expenditure on the web, as progressive councils are already doing, do not outline what the money was spent on. Staff and public alike are only interested in what cash (their cash of course) is going out and not on what has been purchased or provided.
2. Beyond telling the public and staff what you are doing (mostly, of course, to avoid Freedom of Information enquiries and comply with statutory consultation requirements), do not seek to involve or engage them in ‘thinking’ about how the resource challenge might be met. They will only bleat on about ‘saving jobs’ or ‘saving services’ and offer no constructive ideas whatsoever. They are not paid enough to be creative. You, however, are paid enough to have all the ideas, take action and be a decisive leader.
3. Make sure you hire a team of expensive, but valuable, consultants to do most of the unpopular leg work for you. Many of them are very bright economics graduates who will have spent all of 8 months or so learning their consultancy craft and gaining experience of the ‘real world’. They will get to understand your organisation inside out in a matter of hours. Do not worry that the partners who sold you the consultancy assignment now seem to have disappeared as they are there in the background closely ‘supervising’ the team that are now working with you.
4. Absolutely do not let smooth talking ‘process consultants’ lure you into thinking that the public services can be ‘reshaped’, ‘redesigned’ or indeed ‘re’ anything. They may even try to suggest that if you work in partnership with other public service providers that ‘things can be done differently and more cheaply’. This is a distraction from the main task of reducing your budget and your budget alone. You did not get to where you are without being fiercely parochial! Be on guard against any talk of ‘whole systems’, ‘total place’ or members of the public ‘living joined up lives’. Dismiss all talk of 'radical efficiency' as well, as this is full of daft ideas like 'empowering consumers'.
5. Sometimes you may get to hear of ministerial announcements or emails from central Government Departments advocating ‘collaboration’. This is a clever ruse to persuade you to give up some power and control. This is to be resisted at all costs. After all, since when did Whitehall Departments ‘collaborate’? Never of course! So their attempts to get you to do it, is clearly designed to weaken you and strengthen them.
6. The best way of achieving cuts, of course, is to demand that every budget holder makes a similar percentage cut no matter what their department, unit or function does or achieves. Although you may be aware (or not) that some functions provide more vital services to the public than others, and indeed some units have already been cut within the last 12 months, this is no consequence. A uniform ‘salami slice’ taken off everyone is the only fair and responsible approach. There are several accountants who will support this strategy.
7. This is not say of course that you do not have a few favoured functions who have shown over the years to be of huge value, who may have invited you to open a new facility or indeed have asked you to speak at their ‘team away days’ etc. The heads of these functions will have shown themselves to be of particular value for money in that they have never challenged any of your decisions. These value for money functions should of course be allowed to cut their services by slightly less than the others. But this should not be widely known until after the event.
8. Whilst you may talk about accountability and empowerment (always very good words to use during downsizing) and that you will ‘leave it up to the budget holders to make their own decisions’ about how to implement their contribution (another very good word) towards the cost reductions, do make sure that you put in place a few ‘no go’ areas. Yes of course it may be cheaper and perhaps better to empty bins once a fortnight, you will know that this is not popular with certain parts of the news media. There are other examples too. Therefore it is your leadership responsibility to make sure these ‘no go’ changes are clear to all concerned. Some managers may moan about having ‘no room for manoeuvre’ but dismiss these people as ‘troublemakers’ who do not really understand what empowerment is all about.
9. Although it might seem like a soft target, one function that must not be cut more than the very minimum is ‘public relations’. These are the people you must rely upon to get your message across to a sceptical public and staff. Money spent on glossy publications and road shows explaining how frontline services are not (really) being cut and only the ‘chaps and chapesses in the jolly old backroom are having their belts tightened’ is money very well spent.
10. Above all, whatever you do, do not let anyone including even your most trusted lieutenants suggest that your assumptions should be examined. You are a senior leader and therefore all that you believe and say must be correct, if not enlightened. 500 years ago Machiavelli may indeed have suggested that true leaders need people around to tell them the truth. But he was clearly wrong as evidenced by the fact that he died a long time ago. Be certain, be sure and be confident: the strategy that you are implementing is unavoidable. (You may wish to write this last statement out and place it on your bathroom mirror.)

UPDATE:

On 26/6/10 this post was mentioned by Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for the Department for Communities and Local Government who tweeted "Without endorsement, I loved this" (http://twitter.com/EricPickles). Thank you Mr Pickles!

And today I noted that this blog is now listed on http://mcarthursrant.blogspot.com/ McArthur's Rant - Human Resources, Organisations and HR 2.0 as one of a number of blogs that rant!! I am tickled! Thank you Scott McArthur!

Radical Efficiency: Different, better, lower cost public services

Went to a fabulous session this morning which launched a new report from NESTA about 'radical efficiency' and how to make it work. The point was well made that delivering public services in a radically different way is no longer just very important or even critical - it is an imperative! Here is a link to their excellent report:

http://www.nesta.org.uk/home/assets/features/radical_efficiency

The launch had some excellent presentations and questions - which prompted lots of ideas in my head about how to make effective and efficient innovation happen. I will write more later - but here is quick summary which I have already tweeted (of course!): 

• Use the common wealth to create more common wealth...
• Look for ways to connect consumers together to create new expertise resources
• Stop blaming central govt and just get on with taking radical action locally
• Break accountability 'rules' and give authority to the point of service delivery
• Lead so that you enable risk taking, not to close it down
• Get everyone in one room so that professionals can 'hear' the voices of consumers directly!
• Think of doing more with more (not less) - but redefine what you count as your resources
• Create a culture where structure & passion coexist sublimely to achieve real results

My huge thanks to everyone involved with the report and indeed present at this morning's event. (I wish we'd had the whole day to debate the issues emerging... perhaps NESTA would like to organise such a day....?)

50 years of research into expectations

I have had the pleasure of being a cohort member of the National Child Development Study which is a longitudinal study extending back over 50 years. Throughout my life I have completed various questionnaires and being medically examined in order to trace the ingredients of what goes to produce people of my age. The Study's data have been used by researchers countless times and from around the globe.

Most recently, Radio 4 did a series of short programmes featuring cohort members where they compared their predictions aged 10 with how their lives have actually turned out. (You can listen to the programmes here.) I have listened to these broadcasts and not only are they a delightful example of social history, one particular conclusion appeared to emerge.

There seems to be a strong link between how successful a person is and how successful they expected (or were expected) to be. Put simply, if a person's parents expected them to do well in life, people often rose up to meet that expectation and did pretty well. The converse was also true, to a limited extent. Clearly life 'success', however that is measured, is down to a myriad of factors to do with social class, educational achievement, race, gender etc etc. But the importance of expectation, self belief and the confidence in oneself which go hand in hand is there, it seems to me.

This got me wondering about what leaders can do to support and nurture expectation, and conversely what they can (and do) do that erodes confidence and an expectation of success.

The other week, I was running a leadership development programme and we got to talking about how leaders can help build cultures of continuous improvement through praising and expecting the best of people. One manager said that he had not thanked any of his staff of late since none of them had done anything extraordinary that, in his view, deserved a thank you. Another manager suggested that he might not be looking hard enough whilst another wondered why none of his staff were doing anything extraordinary... It was a good debate.

So my questions in this blog post are: 

• How much success do you expect from your staff?
• How do you let them know what you expect of them?
• When do you thank your staff: what do they have to do to get your thanks?
• What are you doing that shows you expect high performance from your team? 

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge: Albert Einstein

Just been sent this great set of 100 inspirational quotes about education and learning. It is a joy to read! Perhaps one or two of there will inspire you to consider what more you can do to create learning organisations where improvement is in built!

http://www.accreditedonlinecolleges.com/blog/2010/75-inspirational-educational-quotes-for-the-classroom/

Learning never exhausts the mind: Leonardo Da Vinci

Enjoy!

(and thank you Accredited Online Colleges)

The 4 E's

Clearly we need all public services to be:

• Effective
• Efficient
• Economic

But we also need them to be

• Elastic 

as well.

These must be the 4 E's of improvement and making sure that the cuts are done strategically not just reactively! Given that 'events' happen (credit crunch, volcanos and oil leaks)... versatility is vital!

Three juggling balls: keeping leadership in balance in these stringent times

A couple of weeks ago, I was facilitating a leadership development programme for some local government managers and we got to talking about the looming cuts and how it will be to work in this environment. We addressed some difficult issues in that context, not least just how far above the parapets they might want to put their heads right now. This was all within a programme which sought to assist them in finding & developing their authentic leadership style and approach. In other words: how to put their heads above the parapet and be an exceptional local government leader.

Out of the conversation that we had (and I am most grateful to the team of managers, whose contributions, declarations and questions helped me shape these thoughts), emerged for me a model based on three 'juggling balls'. I imagine that many public service leaders are, right now, having to work out just how to throw these three balls around:

Ball number one is professional integrity. Almost every public service leader I meet is highly focused on shaping their contribution to making their part of the world safer, cleaner, healthier, wealthier etc... They have a real concern for helping achieve valuable & robust social outcomes in return for the taxes paid, as efficiently, effectively and elegantly as possible. But in this time of looming cuts, these same leaders are naturally worrying that they will have to implement changes which they know or believe will work in the opposite direction. Maintaining a customer / client / user / citizen focus, professional standards and ethics is going to be huge challenge for many public service leaders.

Ball number two is survival. Alongside this desire to deliver VFM with professional integrity, there is natural desire to survive and stay in the job. Balancing how much to 'play the game' and engage in 'career supporting' actions against how much to engage in 'truth telling' which might be perceived as 'career limiting' actions is a dilemma for some, perhaps for many. Working out how best to challenge the status quo to deliver more VFM without upsetting those who structured (and prospered from) the existing regime is an issue that many public service leaders face all the time. The current economic pressures bring this into even sharper focus.

Ball number three is work life balance. Juggling the first two balls could well be at a cost, possibly a high cost to the leader involved. Preparing for change that will deliver increased efficiency in a way that keeps all stakeholders happy (especially those who have more power than others) may well take a great deal of emotional effort and physical toil. There is a need therefore to pay attention to this third ball and keep a close eye on whether the overall impact on body, soul and personal relationships are indeed worth it.  

I am very interested to know how public service leaders are indeed handling these three balls?

It strikes me that the best jugglers will be: 

• Clear about their purpose and what their ethical 'bottom line' is
• Mapping their stakeholder interests shrewdly, knowing who has power and what their preferences are
• Developing their expertise at challenging people so that they 'wriggle but don't squirm'
• Paying attention to their own bodies, minds and personal relationships, watching for signs of damaging stress
• Considering their long term career such and exploring how being in a job is not necessarily the same as being gainfully employed
• Staying in touch with the people and communities they serve and looking for evidence of harm or benefit
• Practised in looking at innovative ways to deliver more with less

 And probably many more things.... how are you improving your juggling skills?

Cutting consultancy spending & improving services at the same time!

Today the government has announced how it plans to reduce public sector spending by more than £6bn. More than a billion of this, will come from savings in 'discretionary' spending on consultancy, travel etc says the BBC news website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8699522.stm

Here are some ideas that I have blogged about in the past about how consultancy budgets can be slashed by taking a radically different perspective on consultancy & organisational improvement:

http://tinyurl.com/keepingthewatch1 - how not to steal the taxpayers watch by using consultants more shrewdly

http://tinyurl.com/keepingthewatch2 - small creative ideas blog brimming with ways to improve efficiency & effectiveness in public / third sectors

http://tinyurl.com/keepingthewatch3 - what goes wrong with consultancy reports and why they often waste money

http://tinyurl.com/keepingthewatch4 - getting the whole system in the room as a cheaper & better way to make plans

http://tinyurl.com/keepingthewatch5 - why we need small & creative ideas now more than ever...

Please browse and let me know what you think...!

Thanks!

Why we need 'small creative ideas' now more than ever...

... and how to spend less money on external consultancy:

I run two blogs: this one and my other one which is dedicated to supporting, communicating and celebrating the small and creative ideas that are making a difference in the public and third sectors. Click here for more details. That blog now has well over 300 ideas for how to improve efficiency or effectiveness or flexibility or all three. It has been browsed over 13000 times in the last year and bit. Please visit and please add your ideas to the stock there. And of course feel free to plunder the ideas for use in your own organisations.

Sometimes people ask me why I set up the small creative ideas blog. I guess it is because I am generally fed up with the focus on big initiatives and massive reengineering projects and whole scale restructuring as being the answers to better results. Instead I take the view that within almost all organisations are people with ideas for improvement urgently wanting to be heard. But it seems that these organisations would rather hire expensive consultants / programme managers / high flying executives to come in and do improvement to the organisation. The implicit beliefs underlying this are that we need people from outside (or at the most senior echelon) to have all the big ideas.

However it seems to me that the most important ingredient in success for any organisation - large or small - is motivation. This is not just the motivation to turn up, or indeed the motivation to do good professional job. The kind of motivation I am talking about is the desire to think "how can we do this better?... how can we deliver even more to those we serve?... what do I and my colleagues have to do to achieve even more than yesterday?..." This kind of energy is rare in many organisations. Indeed, many of these organisations do not even know what they are missing.

If organisations focus on bringing in outside "experts" (often at huge costs) - I think this kind of ordinary but rare motivation is neutralised (or at the very least it is not nurtured). At the worst - people are turned off and will maybe even seek to sabotage the organisation or harm it in some way.

I know I am not alone in thinking this - but I and my fellow 'activists' against the "bring in the expensive experts" approach to organisational development are sometimes marginalised. Perhaps this is because many senior people do not allow themselves to really believe in the boundless creative energy of more junior people - despite the oft favoured words of "our people are a greatest asset". Large consultancies, naturally, collude with this view and happily (and expensively) introduce cumbersome systems of performance management, target setting and human resource management strategies (etc.) which weigh down the organisations and squeeze out creativity.

I declare that I have a profoundly optimistic view of people. I believe most people, given the right conditions, default to being creative, clever, enthusiastic and committed. But given the wrong conditions, all of us can become cynical, de-motivated, dull and tedious.

And so this is why I created the small creative ideas blog. I wanted a blog that would celebrate the small ideas - the small ideas (that can easily become the big ideas with great results too) that come from the ordinary people in organisations - the people whose voices and ideas deserve and demand to be heard. I want that blog to be part of the effort to help make this happen - because I believe it is good for business, good for people and good for the world.

Crucially, I am interested in what leaders in these organisations (where these ideas bubble forth like a mountain brook), are doing to create the right context. This for me is critical. Simply exhorting organisations to do more to unleash the small ideas with big results is not enough. I want to hear about and publish here what leaders are doing to make this happen. In this way I hope that other leaders will learn and add to their own practice. These ideas are welcome in this blog or in my other one.

My ultimate aim for the small creative ideas blog is that it will become a self regenerating hub, humming with the small and creative ideas from all over the world that are making the world a healthier, wealthier, happier and sustainable place for us and for future generations. Please contribute & please circulate. Thank you

Making business breakfasts that much more valuable

I was invited to a business breakfast networking event the other day organised by one of the big banks. It was part of their strategy to reach out to small & medium sized enterprises and offer support to their profitability and development. A wholly good thing to be doing in the current economic climate and I applaud their intent.

After a couple of useful conversations with two people over a coffee and croissant, we were invited into a larger room to engage with the main event. But I use the word 'engage' somewhat incorrectly since the meeting became, broadly speaking, anything but.... For more than an hour we were given a series of presentations which were so general that they added very little to my knowledge base. (And I don't think I was the only one.) We were then offered the opportunity to do some further networking which essentially involved visiting a small exhibition of people at the back of the room. I know I am being critical - and I was after all given a free coffee and croissant. But please allow me to look this particular gift horse in the mouth - and suggest some ideas that could make such events far more: 

• Energising
• Engaging
• Business developmental

 ...and as a consequence, a much better advertisement for the sponsoring organisation.

So here are my nine suggestions: 

1. Stop talking at people, ditch the power points and instead talk with people (and certainly avoid having any speakers who say of their slides "I didn't write this by the way!")
2. Assume that the people attending already know a great deal about business and inquire into this - people might have some excellent ideas or lessons learnt to share
3. Invite questions from the people attending and indeed ask questions of them too so that an interactive event is created
4. Allow people to know who else is in the room - perhaps by having a business card display and swapping scheme
5. Leave out any hard sell and instead focus on what interests the people coming along - you can ask them beforehand as to what subjects might be discussed
6. Arrange the chairs in cabaret style to encourage interaction between people
7. Have a 'wants and offers' notice board to facilitate people finding each other during the event
8. Be clear about what success will look like - from the viewpoint of the sponsor, but also from the viewpoint of the participant
9. Use the internet to allow the conversations to continue afterwards - either via the sponsoring organisation's website or some platform like LinkedIn

And this is just the start. I think there is a myriad of ways to make small events and conferences such as these of much greater value to all concerned. And we need fresh & effective ways of interacting, connecting, learning and sharing like we have never needed them before!

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...)