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!

Is strategy dead?

An article appeared on the Wall Street Times the other day suggesting that even if strategy was not quite dead - it was not looking too well:

During the recession, as business forecasts based on seemingly plausible swings in sales smacked up against reality, executives discovered that strategic planning doesn't always work... (Full article by Joann S. Lublin and Dana Mattioli is here)

This was my response:

Ossified strategic plans have always been dead. But managing the future has always been and will always be - absolutely critical to business success.

In my book, the best strategic leaders spend their time creating 'stractegies' rather than 'strutegies' - where the emphasis is on dynamic action rather than glossy pages. To do this, leaders need to generate the conditions where creativity, commitment and complexity are brought together and used in search of shaping (rather than succumbing to) the future. Ideally, strategy is not something that lives in a few glossy pages, or indeed in an (expensive) consultant's report.

Instead strategy should live in all the minds & actions of those working in and with the organisation.

Effective strategy is not created top down in my view - it is built, person by person, from the outside in.

Leader as midwife

Just came across this - I thought I would share it

Being a Midwife
The wise leader does not intervene unnecessarily.

The leader’s presence is felt, but often the group runs itself.
Lesser leaders do a lot, say a lot, have followers, and form cults.
Even worse ones use fear to energize the group and force to overcome resistance.
Only the most dreadful leaders have bad reputations.
Remember that you are facilitating anothers person’s process. It is not your process.
Do not intrude. Do not control. Do not force your own needs and insights into the foreground.
If you do not trust a person’s process, that person will not trust you.
Imagine that you are a midwife; you are assisting at someone else’s birth.
Do good without show or fuss.
Facilitate what is happening rather than what you think ought to be happening.
If you must take the lead, lead so that the mother is helped, yet still free and in charge.
When the baby is born, the mother will rightly say: ”We did it ourselves!”

John Heider, The Tao of leadership

How much of you leadership is this kind of facilitation?

The power of a good checklist

Yes - we all 'hate' checklists and all that infuriating 'box-ticking' that goes along with it... But are we in danger of overlooking the power and usefulness of a good checklist that has been well researched?

Listening to the radio this morning (BBC Radio 4) I heard a piece about how the airline industry & World Health Organisation has been working with the NHS to deploy the 'Surgical Safety Checklist'. The main principle of this seems to be about team work and making sure that, at the start of an operation, everyone knows what they are doing.

To quote a well known meerkat - "simples!"

There are the other stories about these developments here, here and here. And there is more information about the whole approach to create "The Productive Operating Theatre" on the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement here.

But back to checklists... how many other services could be improved for want of a good checklist? Whenever I talk about 'knowledge management' (which is often over complicated beyond belief) I talk about the value of a simple checklist as being the embodiment of practical knowledge.

What checklists do you work with... and what new ones would help?

UPDATE: A couple of good articles here too: New Yorker 1 & New Yorker 2

Performance management or performance leadership...?

In preparation for a presentation the other day, I got to thinking about performance management - and I challenged myself to think about what I had learnt about the subject. First I wondered whether there is such a thing... I think you can manage people, you can understand performance and you can improve your own performance. But I was left wondering whether you can ever manage someone else's performance. Should we in fact be talking about performance leadership...? What do you think?

Beyond that - the following observations occurred to me:

• People are strikingly different, so any 'regime of performance management needs to reflect this
• Performance management is not just about skills & protocols, it is probably far more to do with relationships
• Too much carrot or stick does not work. Too much carrot can easily become patronising or lead to the kind of excesses we have seen in financial institutions of late. Too much stick leads to some really odd behaviour
• I think that attitude is key. If you believe, really believe, that people will work perform well then in my experience they usually do.
• Appreciating people lies at the heart of good performance management.  Catching people doing the right things right helps hugely.
• Performance management should be far less about forms and far more about conversations
• Whilst I am not of the view that you can or indeed even should try to evidence everything, evidence is critical in having those conversations
• Performance management only works with two way respect
• The importance of good listening cannot be over estimated.
• Performance management centred upon self management is critical. I don't believe it is the job of a manager to be a jiminy cricket.

What are your observations?

(Please add your comments below - thanks.)

Strategic geography

‘besides keeping his men well organised and trained (a prince) must always be learning some practical geography: how the mountains slope, how the valleys open, how the plains spread out’ (Machiavelli “The Prince” – translated by George Bull – Penguin 1961)

How do you do this?

As a leader, how do you stay in touch with the hinterland that your organisation occupies?

Do you know what is over the next hill, or where that river flows?

How will you be more true to yourself this year?

Happy new year! May it be all that you hope and wish it to be - for you and those whom you care about

The golden rule for leadership appears to be that there are no golden rules.  Many of the best leaders in the world appear to defy ‘gravity’ and all the learned research on what makes a good leader.

And yet we continue to search for the magic and key ingredients. You won’t fine the ingredients here. But... you may find some of your ingredients after considering the questions and thoughts in this blog.

One of my favourite books on leadership is by Warren Bennis entitled ‘On becoming a leader’. The message that stands out from that book for me is the importance of authenticity. His view is that good leaders are true to themselves. The difficult bit is knowing who you are and then being true to that understanding.

Who are you?

As a leader - how will you be even more true to yourself this year..?

When would you say 'no' to authority?

The Milgram experiments are famous for demonstrating how people will, under the right circumstances, carry out violent acts due to authority. (Details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment)

But what of the people who refused to go along with the elaborate experimental charade. I have just been pointed towards this site (thank you 'the psychologist' January 2010) which has a first hand description by someone of why they refused to administer more pain to the 'subject':

Then the most disturbing part of the entire experience occurred: The professor brought in the learner and I was flabbergasted. His face was covered in tears and he looked haggard. He offered his hand and thanked me for stopping the experiment, saying that the shocks hadn't really hurt but anticipating them had been dreadful. I was confused as to whether he was in earnest or acting. I left unsure, and waited outside for the learner so I could discuss it with him. After about a half hour he had not appeared, and I was convinced that he was an actor and that my suspicions about the experiment had been correct. The report that I received confirmed that the experiment was designed to see how far subjects would go in obeying orders to administer pain to others. It had arisen out of the desire to understand the widespread obedience to horrendous and brutal orders in Nazi Germany. The report also confirmed that the professor and learner were indeed actors, although not professionals — and I have always thought that they deserved Academy Awards anyway...

It is worth a read! http://www.jewishcurrents.org/2004-jan-dimow.htm

And this got me to wondering - when would I refuse to go along with authority - under what conditions would I say 'no'?

How about you?

Leadership in three words?

Prompted by Professor Richard Wiseman (a very suitably named psychologist who is very active on the interweb: http://twitter.com/RichardWiseman) who has just asked people to sum up 2009 in three words (see this link if you are male and this one if you are female) - I thought I would ask you:

Which three words sum up the kind of leadership we need for 2010?

Please add your comments below. Thanks!

The fun principle...

The challenge for many leaders is how to encourage the kinds of action that you want - that will be good for all concerned. Here is a small experiment in Sweden that achieved a remarkable feat: getting people to use the stairs when there was an escalator available. You might be surprised by the result!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXh2n0aPyw&feature=player_embedded

How do you use fun as part of your leadership?