Approaches to generate a vision of ‘what good looks like’:
·
The Gap – Spotting the elements of your business
that are missing and describing what that gap is.
·
The Flip – Taking the frustrations from the
working day and creatively inverting them to define a better place to operate
from.
·
The Copy – Using the experience and ideas of
other organisations to boost your own vision of excellence.
·
The Breakdown – Articulating what good looks
like through a small steps approach.
The Gap
·
What doesn’t work in your business? What
loose ends do you have? What recurring problems do you face? ….. about
process
·
What results are you missing? What
performance levels haven’t you achieved that you really need to? What
objectives haven’t been completed? ….. about results
·
Look at the departments that are present in your
business. What is their purpose? Can you define it?
For each of those departments allocate a score out of ten. Ten would represent
that the department is living and breathing their purpose. Zero would represent
that they are as far away as possible as you can get from being ‘on purpose’. Any
number less than ten is a gap.
Pull the three lists you have from previous activities together (missing
items, results unobtained and departments not living ‘on purpose’) into one
document. This next step is going to help you determine a weighting for each of
those gap items (and you can use this approach with the other visioning methods
too). For each item I would like you to score it against these three factors,
to create a score / weighting:
Benefit If the benefit of closing
out the gap is really significant for your business, give it a high score out
of ten. If, on the other hand, the closing of this gap will make little impact
for the business, give it a low score out of ten.
Cost Like the previous factor
score this one out of ten also. A low cost / relatively free cost for closing
out the gap will give you a high score out of ten, whilst an expensive /
resource draining cost will give you a low score out of ten.
Speed A rapid closing out of the
gap (such as today / tomorrow) will yield a high score in this area and a long
and drawn out affair (several months and the need to go through various
committees) will give this factor a low score out of ten.
To calculate your total score (the BCS score as I call it), multiply the
scores you have given each gap for each factor together. This should give you a
score between 1 and 1000. Once you have the scores calculated for each gap you
should then be able to rank them, and this should be your priority sequence as
you head into the implementation stage.
The Flip
The simplest thing you can do with your list of grumbles is to invert them.
Flip them upside down and try to turn a negative into a positive. Taking the
idea of inverting problems a little further, when you tip an issue upside down
what else can you do with it? This is an opportunity – for you to take an issue
you have, trying to determine the opposite and then embellishing it into
something really interesting and useful. Inversion is a great tool but
inverting and upgrading of issues can really deliver some interesting
opportunities when it comes to using problems to drive the creation of a vision
for your business. The inversion method is a great place to start when you are
trying to create your view of the future because the pain of today is real and
tangible to your team.
The Copy
What the other business or industry does is less important than the
principle behind the activity. In some cases the application will be identical
and you can transfer it straight into your business. In other cases you might
need to spot the underlying principle and then translate the idea into your
business. Every methodology that you can read about, or can witness for
yourself, has principles sitting behind them. Spot these and you can apply the
essence of the idea quickly and easily to your business. Now that you have some
‘new’ principles to apply to your business the next challenge is to bend and
flex them so that they can become meaningful for your business.
The Breakdown
To get your vision development process moving with this method I am going to
invite you to chop it up into a number of smaller pieces. The size of the
pieces is up to you and will depend on how your business is structured.
5W1H stands for: What Where When
Who Why How. These headings in their own right can help you to become more
explicit with each segment, prompting you to describe what good looks like for
each of these words. For each segment you have identified for your business
answer the questions of who, what, where, when, how and why and see what you
can create. Answering these questions can help to improve ownership of specific
activities (who), improve the way an activity is carried out (how), reinforce
the rationale and purpose of an activity (why), help to define business
routines (when), confirm any location specific issues (where) and the
specificity of the action itself (what). Pull all of the 5W1H articulations
that you have created and voila, you have another approach to creating a vision
for your business. Ensure that you looked at each area of your business and
defined what good looks like for each area.
Picking Your Vision Strategy
The tools that I have shared in the past few pages can be applied in
different ways, to different levels within your business, for different
purposes. Again, you can layer these approaches to suit the needs of your
business and ensure that ‘what good looks like’ cascades its way effectively
through your organization. The way that you apply your operational visions is,
of course, up to you. A combination of all three levels (business, departmental
and individual) serves most of the clients I work with and could be a good mix
for you too. A broad picture being painted for the business, with a detailed
vision for the individual areas that are under-performing and supportive
explanations of what good looks like for members of your teams that are
struggling with their current roles is a powerful combination.
Business level - high level view
of what performance should look like.
Departmental level - how the
functions should work properly, and with each other.
Individual level - what a good
day looks like and what standards need to be achieved for a specific team
member.
Putting these ideas into action and designing a business that constantly
moves toward its vision. Where are you right now? Is your business in a good
place? Are you wanting to make some minor changes, or are you looking for a
complete overhaul? Do you have target areas to address quickly? Do you have
longer term objectives that need some focus and attention to move them along,
right now? Knowing where you are right now is essential so that your plan to
reach your vision is effective. The other main reason that I want you to be
clear about where you are right now is so that you can reflect on the journey
that you have travelled. Are there any anecdotes that you have about your
current level of performance? Are there any stories that summarize the way
things are today? If you need to reinvigorate your improvement activities at
any point in time, look for the quick wins.
The Future
Using milestones is a great communication tool with your colleagues, your
team and your superiors too. Thinking of your change program as both a one trip
linear plan and also a virtuous circle can provide different ways of thinking
about your plans and give you a different outcome than just thinking in one way
alone. A few people will need most of the results that you generate, so make
sure that you keep them happy. Know who needs what from your change project and
factor this in to your plans. Be realistic about how the people in your
business will react to the change.
The Change
Getting a team together. Choosing who you team up with is vitally important.
There might also need to be other people that need to join your team, in
different roles to help the project along. Creating an action plan.
An alternative way to plan is to start at the end (with the objective having
been achieved) and imagine your way back to your present situation. The linking
question is ‘because I’d…’ and you use this to link your objective back to its
penultimate action and then keep repeating until you end up at today. make sure
that you are aware of the Kaizen principle (small steps helping to build
confidence and momentum) and that you consider breaking up the first few steps
of your action plan to help take advantage of this approach. Introduce these
elements into the action plan template by adding in the following items to the
list I mentioned under the 5W1H sub-section of this chapter: Outcome
(Check). Change in approach? (Act).
The simplest approach is to gain agreement with a key stakeholder of your
project before you start as to what they want to see at the end of the project.
Without a formal signoff you run the risk of not completing your project, but
just stopping without any benefit. Making a project plan visible can make a big
difference to the progress made on it.
Timings, resources and sequences
From a timings perspective; do the deadlines look appropriate to the needs
of the business, the workloads of the people working on the activities and the
overall success of the project? From a resources perspective; do you have the
right tasks on the right people at the right time, or is it overloaded in some
areas? From a sequence perspective; are the activities linked in a logical manner
that allows for the most effective and efficient route to the finish line? Support
and sponsorship. The New Habits: good habits are essential to making change
happen
Killer Questions a list of
questions that were to be either answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’. No narrative, no
stories, no supporting information. The questions were focused on key parts of
their business process and were used to great effect to focus people on the
right activities (which of course means that the questions need to be balanced
out for the operations of your business). Killer questions are a great way to
convert the design of your new process activities into day to day action.
Metrics The right measures can
direct your team into living and breathing the new vision as part of their
normal working day. Many businesses will only consider ‘
ouput’ metrics, telling you a story of what happened in the
process. ‘
Input’ metrics can be
really useful to help you gauge what is happening with the start of the
process, and whether it is being triggered correctly. The other type of metric,
process, is similar to the input
metrics with one small difference. Depending on where you are in the process
itself will determine how much control you have over the outcome of your
process. There will be some fundamental measures that you will want to always
have in place (e.g. safety, profit, on time delivery, quality, costs etc…), but
there will also be some temporary measures that you would like to have in
place. Temporary measures are exactly that, something that you need to focus on
until the actions that produce the result become a habit. Measures are a means
to an end; if you don’t like what they are telling you, change what you are
doing. I refer to analogue metrics being things that can be measured on a scale
(such as supplier on time delivery) and digital metrics refer to activities
that are either present or not (such as holding a meeting, or not). many organizations
develop them in a very one-dimensional way, one suite of measures that the top
management use. This is a good place to start but having different measures at
different levels in the business can help your teams to behave and operate in
the way that your vision requires.
There is no issue with using the word target with your team, for many it
will work well. The reason I like the term reasonable expectations is that it
instantly gives the feeling that it has been thought through and isn’t some
ridiculous figure plucked out of thin air (unlike when a Finance Director once
asked for raw material stock targets to be less than minimum working capital…).
Metrics are a great way to help drive the right behaviours and develop the
right kinds of habits.
Reporting lines Formal reporting
can take the format of regular written reports, presentations at agreed
intervals, weekly email updates, one to one meetings (with a fixed agenda),
agenda items at routine management meetings, visual management systems and
more. Informal reporting usually takes care of itself, hence the name. the
formal reporting has got to yield a greater return than the effort / time it
takes to produce and review the reporting.
Routines can help translate parts
of your vision into day to day activity, bridging the gap of how you get from A
to B. Cause and effect thinking can be a useful approach to take when thinking
about making a shift in your performance; routines are great when they are
focused on activities that generate specific outcomes (in this case, your
vision).
Formal Reviews Having a time out
from the day-to-day busyness to look at all of these (or whatever combination
you opted for) can really help you to spot opportunities for improvement. A
regular time slot with a standard agenda is the key to making this approach
work. The meetings don’t have to be long, just long enough to ensure that you
cover the main points, review any actions from previous meetings and capture
any new actions that you need to see happen.
The Implementation
Execution Without execution
nothing happens. Tiny steps can be used to great effect if the project seems
too much to handle for some of your team. Dedicating time to individuals, or
small teams, to work on the business change activities can just be a matter of
discipline and doesn’t have to just come in large chunks. Leading on from the
last point, preparation is often undervalued and underestimated in terms of how
it can increase the effectiveness of delivering a change program. Keeping the
tempo of the execution is the final point
Project reviews How do we get our
tasks back on track? If your tasks aren’t behind schedule then ignore
the question, close the meeting and get on with your day. Stopping on a regular
basis to take stock and to evaluate your current efforts versus results is
important to make sure that you are doing the right things in order to effect
the right change.
Learning variation on the PDCA
model and is called
CARL, which
stands for: Challenge Actions Reflection Learning. The way that you use this
model is to periodically stop and consider your personal effectiveness at
effecting the changes that your plan is requiring.
General project monitoring General
progress should be tracked by a regular team meeting. This isn’t the review
meeting that I mentioned earlier in this chapter, this is the nuts and bolts
review of looking at the deadlines and asking the person assigned to that task
for an update on the deliverables.
Looking for the signs As you
progress through your project you will want to keep an eye out for signs that
you are moving towards your vision. Most people find that these types of
projects are difficult when you consider them as a whole, but when you treat
them as a series of small projects all linked together they can become more
manageable.
Achieving and developing ‘what does
good look like’ Don’t forget to celebrate with your team; the performance
your business will now be achieving and the style in which is does it should be
(considerably) different to how it was before you started. This leads to a very
logical question – what does good look like now?
Tangible results For the majority
of your changes the improvements you make should lead to an improvement of the
money your business has to play with. making the place a more pleasant place to
work will potentially improve a financial aspect of your business through
better productivity or performance.
