Thinking Big Is Brilliant But...

I read a couple of interesting posts this week. The first was Are We Too Focused On Incremental Improvement by Bill Fox and the second was You Have To Think Anyway, So Why Not Think Big by Karen Rutter.

They are both interesting posts in their own right and well worth a read. Bill's post reminded me of my own Continuous Tinkering Is Not Continuous Improvement from a few years ago. Karen's post was inspired by a quote by Donald Trump and really struck a chord.

Over the years I have managed numerous change initiatives - both big bang and incremental. They have mostly been successful, although inevitably there are a few projects where the results could have been better. In recent years I've not led the initiatives but I've been able to exert some significant influence in trying to steer them back on track when they looked like they were doomed. Without exception, the key to success has been to have a clearly defined vision and set of desired outcomes and a supporting strategy and tactical plan to help achieve those ends.

What is astonishing, at least to me, is that given the amount of material available to leaders and how the subject of management of change now has such a high profile, why some huge business transformations fail to use even a modicum of the subject matter expertise and knowledge base and are often destined to fail almost right from the start. They often have the vision and some ideas of where they want to be, but little else.

In my very humble opinion, and from my personal experience, it would appear that the common denominator in every case is the use of big external consultancies and the expense of home grown talent. Organisations bring in this "expertise", at enormous cost. Swathes of consultants potter around the place, running staff workshops and "interviewing" managers, and present their findings and recommendations. Often, the recommendations are to implement a standard toolbox solution - a Lean offering, or maybe an Agile offering. They leave a set of folders full of instructions, decks full of pretty PowerPoint slides and a point of contact on site, and journey off to the next engagement to make a shed load more money. They also leave the organisation with a sense of achievement but absolutely no idea what to do next or how to interpret the pretty slides into tangible activities, outcomes and results. (I'm reminded for some reason of Arlo Guthrie's song Alice's Restaurant and the "twenty-seven 8 x 10 coloured glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explainin' what each one was").

In the absence of a coherent strategy and tactical change plan, these organisations now do what they understand best - they rebuild the organisation charts, put the same old faces in different boxes and let them get on with it. And twelve months later...they wonder why there is no improvement, or even why some things appear to have got worse and why good things are now broken.

External consultancies want to sell neatly packaged solutions - tailoring these solutions to specific organisational requirements eats into their margins and takes time which stops them moving onto the next client. Even tailored solutions probably don't meet the real organisational requirements, because they rarely take into account the prevailing culture of the target organisation. And in really big organisations, the leadership is so far removed from the people who do the real work, that these "transformations" end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Really successful transformations need to use the internal knowledge, understanding and expertise of the people who do the work. The idea of thinking big is fine - start off with a clean sheet and build a model of where you want to be given no constraints. Work with the people who know best to understand how to transform your as-is, to the to-be, trying not to eliminate the hidden gems within. Think how certain decisions will create dysfunctionality up front and make the necessary adjustments. Model and remodel, understand interdependency and interfaces, clearly define the transition and transformation strategies and tactics and involve the right people at the right time.Lots of transformations talk about harmonisation but end up with discord and incongruent organisational structures, usually where one set of silos is replaced with a different set.

Thinking Big is brilliant, but requires discipline, patience and time. It needs fantastic attention to detail and clear and transparent strategic and tactical planning. Most of all, it demands that leaders trust the workforce and enable them to participate. Above all, forget the idea that you can build a successful transformation on the fly. Despite consultancies claims that they can help you build an aeroplane while it's in the air, would you really want to fly in one?

Leadership - A Duty of Consistency and Common Sense

I read a newspaper article today about a Japanese academic, an expert on China, who works at my old alma mater, the University of Nottingham. She has been forced to leave the UK because she has failed to meet the home office requirement of living in the UK for more than 185 days a year. She was unable to meet that commitment because she had to travel for her work and spent 270 days in China in 2010 and 202 days there in 2011. She has an Australian husband and a one year old son born in the UK. After initially being denied the right to stay in the UK, a judge declared that it was not in the national interest to deport her given her expertise (she advised the UK Government and some of her research was government funded). The Home Office in its infinite wisdom appealed and she has abandoned her claim because of increasing legal expenses.

Meanwhile the country pays host to scores of foreign criminals, often ruthless and violent, who manage to evade deportation, even after serving lengthy prison sentences because they have conned the increasingly useless justice systems over their human  rights.

Before you turn away, this isn’t another article about the nonsensical human rights regulations and their constant abuse and deliberate misinterpretation by our liberal elite. The problem is more that we have lost sense of consistency and common sense in so many parts of our daily lives.

The problem occurs in government, across the civil service, in local authorities but is also rife in private companies and corporations. The larger the instituition, the larger the problem. As systems get bigger, they get exponentially more complex, and as complexity increases inconsistency is almost inevitable. The failure to address inconsistency is largely because we fail to use common sense.

How often do we see businesses embarking on massive redundancy programmes, eliminating their valuable, knowledgeable and loyal staff, only to take on more useless managers and expensive contractors with no loyalty, and with no experience of the real and specific organisational issues that face them.

If we could use a little common sense every time we spotted an inconsistency, we could start to eliminate the inconsistency at least, and maybe even fix the root cause of the problem that gave way to the inconsistency in the first place. In my circles it’s called Continuous Improvement. By fixing problems as you encounter them it is possible to start to control complexity by reducing the number of problems that can occur in the future.

But instead of fixing the right problem, our leaders cover up the issues by creating new rules and regualations and introducing more complexity and more inconsistencies. And the vicious cycle starts over.

As we head towards the general election our politicans should seriously think about policies that end these nonsenses and engage their frontal lobes with a bit more rigor before they embark on the next round of rules and regulations that make our blood boil.

Sadly, it will be too late for Dr Miwa Hirono.

Teams In the Workplace – Flogging a Dead Metaphor?

You could probably wallpaper a small city with the amount of material that has been written about Teams in the Workplace. That search term alone provides 112,000,000 items to browse through. It seems that nearly every day a new article pops up on LinkedIn or HBR or some other illustrious business compendium about how to better manage your teams,  the dangers of underperforming teams,  how to rebuild a failing team and the like. And, inevitably, a good percentage of these articles will make reference to the sports team metaphor.

I’ve been lucky enough to have worked in some very high performing teams whilst simultaneously being part of some very high performing management teams. Conversely, I’ve worked in some highly dysfunctional teams, almost always under even more dysfunctional management. Since I’ve been self-employed I’ve spent most of time my working with groups of people who are referred to as teams, but who are really more a bunch of people thrown together organisationally, geographically or functionally (or a mix of these). The distinguishing feature of these people is that they primarily operate as individuals supporting other individuals, groups or even 'proper teams'.
In the circles I operate in, mainly the quality and process management and consulting world, there are plenty of lone wolves like me. Auditors, project quality managers, process evangelists and consultants often act as one man bands – working with and amongst many teams, but almost always on the periphery of the teams themselves. The nature of the work sometimes necessitates this, but often the people who take on these roles do so because it fits their personalities both in and out of the workplace.

For extroverted introverts like me, this is an ideal situation. I get to focus on the things I do best, for the people who matter the most – namely my customers. I’m not generally subjected to random time-wasting team meetings, and rarely have to suffer the humiliation of clichéd team building exercises like bowling night or a two day outward bound course, both of which fill me with utter dread – the former because it’s a showcase for my total lack of bowling ability, the latter because I used to spend much time in the mountains in the company of my dog or with just a few close companions.

That doesn’t make me anti-social – I’ll go and share a beer and good conversation with my colleagues any day of the week – I’m just averse to being organised in the name of team building when I’m not a member of a genuine team. (Some people might say that I take this aversion even further, and that I’m actually averse to being managed, but I couldn’t possibly comment.)

Good, competent individuals know what needs to be done to achieve the appropriate synergies between themselves and their colleagues. Good leaders are able to see where there may be deficiencies in skills (hard or soft) and plug the gaps accordingly with additional staff or through coaching and mentorship. Likewise, they see where there is discord and take appropriate actions. With good people and good leadership, teams actually become self-forming and self-managing.
 

I often think we have taken this whole sporting metaphor too far when we’re dealing with the workplace. Shoe-horning a group of individuals into a ‘team’ when it isn’t necessary is a waste of time and effort by all parties. I often see it as (yet) another management indulgence – because the books and the articles say it’s a good thing, so a manager does it. The reality is that the vast majority of professional sports people fit into this category of 'groups of individuals' rather than teams. Squash and tennis players, swimmers and athletes, golfers and cyclists are primarily individuals brought together on occasion to compete under a flag - an artifical team - Team GB, the Ryder Cup team or the Davis Cup team. There may be some strategic pairing or tactical placement of individuals to boost the overall 'team' achievement but ultimately it is always about the performance of the individual, regardless of the team. Even soccer, cricket and rugby teams are ultimately teams of individuals and even the best managers are powerless to do anything about a group of players who can't produce the goods on the day.

I said at the beginning that I'd worked in some very high performing teams. Those 'teams' were made up of hugely talented individuals and guided by hugely talented leaders. None of them indulged in puerile team building exercises - they succeeded because of mutual respect, and the  desire to do the best for themselves and the people they worked for, and with, both internally and externally.

The witicism says that there's no 'I' in team.  I'm not so sure about that. The best teams are full of 'I's!

 

 

 

Can Outsourcing Quality Really Be A Good Thing?

After twenty two years climbing corporate ladders I decided to go freelance back in 2006. On several occasions I have taken on a contract as a Project Quality Manager. Generally, this means working as a team member of one or more projects, helping the team, and mostly the project manager, to make sure they are following corporate standards, using good practice and generally steering them in the right direction to ensure that quality is built into the end product.

One of the contuining conversations I have with myself, is whether this kind of outsourcing is a "good thing". My accountant and bank manager would certainly say that it is. With my experience I can command a decent daily rate, and usually I'm protected from political shenanigans which means I can leave my work in the office when I leave the building. I enjoy working at the coal face, engaging with project teams, and even occasionally facilitating beneficial changes in the organisation. Above all, I always try and make a difference.

But my passion is about helping organisations improve, especially in areas which seem to have fallen out of favour as core functions within the business, like quality and process management. More and more businesses are outsourcing their quality and process activities, either to individuals like myself, or to larger outsourcing consultancies like Wipro, Accenture or Cognizant. And this causes me a great deal of concern. In fact I touched on this very dilemma back in 2011.

On numerous occasions I have sat in on Town Hall meetings where the senior management extol the importance of high quality and effective processes and in the next slide indicate that these functions are being outsourced. What sort of mixed message is that? They are basically saying "These are critically important to us but we're going to outsource them to the lowest bidder because cost savings trump everything else"!

When organisations make their quality and process specialists redundant it makes me feel that part of the organisational conscience is being ripped out. These people form a part of the glue that keeps many of the other parts of the business together. When I have been privileged enough to lead quality and improvement activities across the organisation, myself and the members of my team have been among the very few people who interacted with everyone in the business, pretty much on a daily basis. We also had strong connections with other related organisations, mainly other UK delivery centres, but with other global teams. We were uniquely positioned to help teams and individuals reach out to other people who had knowledge that could help our people.

Outsourcing these roles and functions may still ensure that core activities are performed. Contractors can undertake audits, assure compliance, identify and even lead improvement activities but as outsiders they will never be treated in the same way as genuine peers to the engineers and delivery team members. And the little bits of knowledge they accumulate, and the networks they build, will disappear out of the organisation at the end of the contract, leaving the next person to start building up those relationships all over again.

I've often commented that I believe there are two types of quality staff. There's the old style manager who hides behind dusty old standards and checklists, focusing on policing the business, and avoiding change. Then there are the proactive, modern quality leaders who drive change and improvements, strive to add value and work closely with people to help them meet and exceed their objectives. In some ways both of these are preferable to itinerant quality staff, like myself - who have probably been driven to ply their trade like modern day quality mercenaries because their traditional roles have been outsourced.

I've been very fortunate that I learnt my trade as a permanent employee, and managed to embrace all kinds of quality related disciplines on the job. I can double up as a project or programme manager, a process improvement lead, a communications manager or even an operations manager, and I can lead major business change initiatives. But some of the younger people I work with who are starting out on their first quality contracts will not be so fortunate. They won't be offered the same types of opportunities that I was, because those opportunities won't be available to externally contracted quality staff (no matter how good they are).

A dedicated, effective, value added quality service, culture and mindset takes a long time to build in an organisation. And like a reputation, it takes very little for it to be shattered beyond repair. So, if you are considering outsourcing your quality function, think again. Do you really want your reputation to go down the pan in order to save a few overhead costs?