At one point I was asked to deliver a project in a high-risk, highly-regulated service in a national organisation. It was an area that I hadn’t worked-in before and I was pretty anxious about doing no harm. Reading through the internal documentation; previous external consulting firm reviews, reports and project documentation, the organisation had repeatedly tried to solve these problems. And every time that they had tried, the problems kept reappearing. It is what I call a whack a mole scenario. No matter how many times leaders whack one problem on the head, another related problem popped-up elsewhere.
The response
In services systems where doing, designing and implementing the wrong thing can cause harm (or in this case endanger lives), the only antidote is to get knowledge. Working with a head of service, I set about guiding a team of consultants and managers to deliver a plan to meet somebody else’s analysis of the problem, I also gained permission to study the service as a system. This in effect doubled my workload, but meant that I could begin to understand the ‘what and why’ of performance. Effectively this meant spending long hours and some weekends in the work with various workers from around the country and company. Over a few months a picture began to emerge of the system and how the work actually worked. I also began to analyse data differently (against purpose in leading lagging format)..
What was learned
This study resulted in a very different picture of performance. One that helped to explain why previous attempts at solving the problem had not worked. And unfortunately, it also revealed that the project that I was guiding to delivery was also not going to work either (although I did deliver against the specification on time in full). In the drive to do things quickly, they had assumed they knew the causes of the problems that they were seeing. This led to introducing solutions that would actually generate new problems or problems appear in different related services. And perhaps worse still, they were solving the wrong problem by hard-wiring new IT into the system. A move that would entrench the problems further and make them harder to undo (at quite some cost). Unfortunately, none of the measures in use told them anything useful about the service (against purpose). Instead they had performance against targets. The actual solutions lay in another core service area that required skilled intervention.
A tricky conversation
I knew that I had a due diligence duty to have a tricky conversation with the executive leader. Eventually I managed to secure 30 minutes to take them through the systems picture and data. When the leader had their ‘aha’ moment, and understood the underlying causes they held their head in their hands. The project was fully delivered.
Thoughts and Observation
I am particularly proud of this work as this has the potential to make this high-profile regulated service area safer. Studying services as systems is a powerful initial first step in transforming any organisation. This was the first time this critical safety service had been studied as a system. Doing this with people (normatively) is even better. Unfortunately, it is common to find such issues when conducting scoping and it is almost always a difficult conversation to have, particularly in top-down command and control style organisations, or where mono methodologies are dominant and often fiercely protected. It is however, the right thing to do (even if it comes with a personal impact). Facts and evidence matter, and there can be a time delay in cause and effect. Eventually the learning may trigger an ‘aha’ moment.
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Commercially sensitive
I have a duty of care to organisations that I work with. Information related to the organisation is commercially sensitive and never discussed. I always make the organisation anonymous.
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