Playing with the future

Leaders are often very good at managing the present and responding to events and issues as they arise. After all, it is often people's ability to troubleshoot that helps people get promoted. But, a key part of being a good leader is managing the future. This is far more challenging.

The one thing that we do know about the future is that we do not know what the future holds in store. We can make predictions based on past trends, we can devise likely scenarios and plan around these. But in the end, managing the future is a journey into the unknown. What makes the future particularly difficult to predict is not knowing how people will react to changing circumstances. Economists spend years devising models to anticipate the effect of various changes to taxes, commodity price changes and so forth. But these models often struggle with anticipating the capricious and messy decisions that people make within these changing circumstances. For example how many economists or business leaders predicted the recent recession?

(Some have argued of course that the reason that astrology exists is to make economics appear scientific!)

One approach that is widely used to manage the future is to use whole system open simulations. These are different from simulations that you may have come across such as console computer games (including flight simulators, of course) or training exercises where there are a limited number of options from which to choose. These are essentially 'closed' simulations and a great deal of effort goes into designing the 'rules' of the simulation (if x is chosen then y occurs). In essence they seek to codify and 'bottle' human complexity. Whilst they are interactive they are not developmental nor do they change much in the light of learning and experience. Such closed simulations also struggle with people who seek to break the rules or who are just not sure what to do.

People breaking the rules (or at least bending them) is almost, perhaps, what makes us human rather than automatons.

So if an organisation wants to investigate

• how a new service might be delivered,
• how a new organisational structure might work,
• how a new product might change the market,
• how a partnership or strategic alliance might work out

... a whole system open simulation might well be a very effective and efficient way to do this.

The basic ingredients of a whole system open simulation are:

• Get all the stakeholders in the room together - ie anyone who will be affected or will want to affect how the future happens
• Put people into roles that are similar to (but critically not the same as) their existing roles so that they can apply their knowledge, experience and insights
• Give people a 'map' of the new system/structure/product (etc.) with enough information to bring it to life but not so much as to overload people with spurious detail
• Set up some tasks and objectives for the stakeholders to work on (such as agree a plan, or test an idea, or trial a new service...) within a concertinaed time frame
• Consider how you may want to 'interrupt' the flow with 'events' that could happen in order to test reactions and consequences
• Give people the time to reflect on what they have discovered from being part of this fictional system - what did they learn, what surprised them, what concerned them etc?
• Finally give people time to resolve - 'now what?' - what learning needs to be applied to real world and how?

Because these are whole system 'open' simulations there is no need to try and predict or seek to contain the simulation. The simulation itself is a voyage of discovery and becomes a crucible of learning. People find out how they may need to adjust what they do and how they will behave in the future within the new circumstances. (As a consequence, simulations are a very effective tool in the development of leaders and managers.) Strategies & plans can be devised, refreshed or jettisoned.

Perhaps one way to sum up whole system open simulations is to say that they are about taking your shoes off rather than forcing shoes onto your feet. People can play (and bend the rules) within such a simulation and so learn, innovate and plan for the future. As Roger von Oech (author of 'A Whack on the Side of the Head') said "Necessity may be the Mother of invention, but play is certainly the Father"

Do you want to play?

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?

Original blog post: http://jonharveyassociates.blogspot.com/2010/03/whole-systems-no-time.html

Conference 2.0 - the beginning of the end to old style conferences?

I went to a conference on shared services last week. Some good speakers and the workshops (even though they were essentially advertorials) were useful also. But I left with the usual feeling of a huge loss of opportunity. There was so much expertise and insight in the room that was left untapped, more or less. Whilst I had a couple of interesting chats with some other delegates - these were mostly random. 

I blogged about this (http://jonharveyassociates.blogspot.com/2010/03/conferences-bah-humbug.html) and then a did a bit of research... and it seems that there is a growing movement to have what might be termed 'Conference 2.0' events.

From what I can glean and indeed what I would add - the hallmarks of such events are (and could be) this:

• You create a social networking site before the event and allow people to post questions and invitations on it before hand.
• During the event itself - people may tweet and comment on the speakers and organise a wave of ideas to be presented.
• The social networking happens further in real life at the event - so that people can connect with each other perhaps in an Open Space type way (see http://jonharveyassociates.blogspot.com/2009/06/open-space.html)  - I envisage a wall somewhere in the event where people can post suggestions for discussions at certain times and then meet up (a kind of organised transparent coffee break if you like - where people can design to meet someone - perhaps someone they connected with in the run up to the event...)
• And the social networking happens post the event also - with threads of discussions continuing to happen in virtual space.
• Suppliers and exhibitors could be involved in all of this too of course 

And what is great - is that we are seeing these kinds of events happen here in this space. All we have to do now is make all conferences as interactive as these.

(Just google 'conference 2.0' and you will see lots of thinking and practice like this.

Such events could be so much more efficient and effective.

Get the whole system in the room!

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

 

Original blog post here: 

Are consultants stealing tax payers' watches?

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?

Original blogpost: http://jonharveyassociates.blogspot.com/

Thanks!

Just a quick thank you to Tom Reynolds and all who were involved in organising and facilitating yesterday's Leadership Development Community of Practice Focus Group at Layden House. It was very good afternoon for learning and networking - and hopefully offering some ideas about the development of this COP. 

The discussion around evaluation of leadership development and how to weave that into the commissioning process was useful and could well have gone on for quite a while longer!

It was also refreshing to have the space for providers, commissioners and supporters to meet without the shackles of procurement getting in the way! Equally more time for this would have been useful!

I found these two links on evaluation that might interest some:

http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/14067/01/Leadership_Evaluation_report.pdf 

"This report evaluates a Leadership Development programme delivered by the Wessex Courses Centre (WCC) and commissioned by the Hampshire and Isle of White Workforce Development Confederation (WDC). As part of the ongoing commitment to incorporate evidence into practice, the WDC commissioned an independent evaluation as part of this development course. This evaluation wasundertaken collaboratively by the Health Care Innovation Unit (HCIU) and the School of Management at the University of Southampton."

http://www.wkkf.org/~/media/10BF675E6D0C4340AE8B038F5080CBFC.ashx

 

"This handbook is guided by the belief that evaluation should be supportive and responsive to projects, rather than become an end in itself. It provides a framework for thinking about evaluation as a relevant and useful program tool. It is written primarily for project directors who have direct responsibility for the ongoing evaluation of W.K. Kellogg Foundation-funded projects. However, our hope is that project directors will use this handbook as a resource for other project staff who have evaluation responsibilities, for external evaluators, and for board members" 

 

Apart from the fact that I always thought it was the Isle of Wight... these two documents look interesting.

 Thanks again and good to meet everyone yesterday!

Jon

This handbook is guided by the belief that evaluation should be supportive and

 

responsive to projects, rather than become an end in itself. It provides a framework

for thinking about evaluation as a relevant and useful program tool. It is written

primarily for project directors who have direct responsibility for the ongoing

evaluation of W.K. Kellogg Foundation-funded projects. However, our hope is that

project directors will use this handbook as a resource for other project staff who have

evaluation responsibilities, for external evaluators, and for board membersThis handbook is guided by the belief that evaluation should be supportive andresponsive to projects, rather than become an end in itself. It provides a frameworkfor thinking about evaluation as a relevant and useful program tool. It is writtenprimarily for project directors who have direct responsibility for the ongoingevaluation of W.K. Kellogg Foundation-funded projects. However, our hope is thatproject directors will use this handbook as a resource for other project staff who haveevaluation responsibilities, for external evaluators, and for board members"

 

 

 

Disruptive technology... or maybe disruptive questions?

I met an old friend for lunch yesterday and we got to talking about 'disruptive technologies' - the kinds of new gizmos and systems that really change the way we live our lives. I remember Charles Handy talking about this in his book 'The Age of Unreason' - although he did not call them disruptive technologies then. One of his ideas was how the invention of the chimney meant that you could have a house with more rooms - and so began the fragmentation of family life.

Of course when we think of disruptive technologies we are now more likely to think of the internet, MP3 players or indeed how my car ESP system helped me manage a skid on snow the other day without ending up in a ditch.

But I got to thinking about what might be disruptive questions? The sorts of questions that if asked of a way of working - might just change we the way we look at a service and encourage people to do things things differently - in a leaner way perhaps.

Over the years, I have been collecting a set of questions which I often present to people to help them redesign a process or a service. I say that they come with a guarantee: if you ask them seriously of any process or service and don't find at least one (or indeed two or three) ways of improving the service, I will eat my hat!

So here are the questions - which I offer as a means to help people reflect on their ways of working and come up with new ways of doing it (in no particular order):

 

• 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?
• Could some parts of the process be done at the same time?
• Could we get the users / clients / etc. to do more?
• Are there too many checks and controls?
• 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?
• 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 providing the service altogether?
• Are decision making protocols getting in the way?
• Does the process contribute to outcome goals?

I hope this proves useful to people. Please blog here with any results that you come up with.

One of my favourites was from a local authority that looked into its street light repairing process. They quickly realised that when they sent out an engineer to see if the street light was in fact not working (as had been reported by a member of the public) they were in fact assuming that the public probably lied. When they changed this assumption to 'the public are probably telling us the truth' - they saved themselves huge amount of resources by sending out the fixing engineer first.

Jon

http://jonharveyassociates.blogspot.com/