On Dewy Grass

After returning from the morning walk with my dog Bobby I felt inspired to write this poem. It's been a long time since I wrote any poetry, I normally have to feel in a certain place to find inspiration. Being out with nature this morning provided that muse. Please let me know what you think! x

On dewy grass this morning passed

Two friends without a care.

Together moored by silver cord

Happy union betwixt this pair.

Under foot they crush the meadow lush

As nightly beasts did so afore

Nature’s hues – greens, browns and blues –

In light invites mortals’ awe.

The poppy heads so proud and red

Stand like giants ten feet tall

Passed between the trees upon the breeze

They hark at blackbirds’ morning call.

Down by the river the bushes a-quiver

Out shot a tawny hare –

The river flushed in mimicked rush

And washed the moss rocks bare.

O’ Sweet Gaia earth, this early mirth

Shows although man tries in vain

To steal her wealth with open stealth

Her beauty shines through the pain

(c) Caroline E. Ruiz 2012

Leading from behind

*It's my first post in a little while (sorry!) so I thought I would treat you to a little picture today :o)*

Today I attended my first Great Insiders event. I'd been very much looking forward to it for some considerable time - even more so because of recent events! I met some fantastic people, swapped ideas for how to avoid the common mistakes internal consultants make, and acquired fodder for further thought! (Phew!)

One thing that stuck with me was an expression that Jill and Liz from Suffolk came up with:-

"leading from behind"

Immediately I found a mental picture of something else that is lead from behind, which as a metaphor I felt summed it up perfectly:

The horse represents the company: the head where the vision and thinking goes on (!) could be senior managers or the board, the legs the "powerhouse" aka operational staff who carry the weight of the labour. The head is blinkered, only seeing straight ahead, oblivious to everything around, below and behind it. The legs are tired, possibly overburdened, but follow the head regardless.

The yoke represents the constraints that everybody in the system feels - "that'll never work here because of x, y, z". Regulation, legislation, lack of creativity. Too much conformity, control. (See how the horse frolicks playfully in the field when he has been un-tacked!)

So that leaves the farmer, walking along behind the horse, detached and guiding *ever so gently* via the reins. He is aligned to and can see clearly the direction where the horse is heading. He can also see the bigger picture and steer the horse away from the puddles and divots. The horse trusts the farmer to guide him through the field as they work together to sow the seeds of change (ok, that was probably taking the metaphor slightly too far - I'll leave it to your imagination to take this further......)

So, in case you haven't guessed it by now, Great Insiders are the farmer in this scenario. Here are some of the problems we share with the farmer (amongst countless others):

• The farmer doesn't hold the reins steady enough - dropping them, not applying enough pressure. This confuses the horse, potentially everything comes to a grinding halt.
• The horse becomes upset and kicks or bites the farmer in self-defence, hurting the poor farmer.
• The horse doesn't trust the farmer, and with a mind of its own wanders off, either stumbling on the rough ground and hurting himself, or tempted by juicy grass grazes to excess, which then leaves the horse bloated and regretful.

And my favourite one of all - The horse becomes frightened by loud bangs and runs off, pulling the farmer off balance and sending him flying face-down in the mud (thanks to Paul for this one!) 


Have you ever had projects that have gone wrong and left you feeling, well, shit? 


If you want to be a great farmer, sorry - insider - then download yourself a copy of the report - "7 mistakes... and how to avoid them" and come join us on LinkedIn. See you there! :o)

Strengths and Weaknesses

I've taken a test to look at my strengths and weaknesses, to identify where my natural talents lie! - you can too by following either of these two links:


http://strengths.gallup.com/110440/About-StrengthsFinder-2.aspx


http://richardstep.com/richardstep-strengths-finder-rssf/


The first one is a book that you have to purchase, then enter a code to do the test. The second one is a free test, and is the one that generated the results below:

Your Top Strengths Are:

1. Inclusiveness (100%):
   People strong in the Inclusiveness theme are accepting of others. They show awareness of those who feel left out, and make an effort to include them.
   
2. Individualization (100%):
   People strong in the Individualization theme are intrigued with the unique qualities of each person. They have a gift for figuring out how people who are different can work together productively.
   
3. Ideation (100%):
   People strong in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.
   
4. Achiever (100%):
   People strong in the Achiever theme have a great deal of stamina and work hard. They take great satisfaction from being busy and productive.
   
5. Fairness (100%):
   People strong in the Consistency theme (also called Fairness in the first StrengthsFinder assessment) are keenly aware of the need to treat people the same. They try to treat everyone in the world fairly by setting up clear rules and adhering to them.

Of course, we must remember that these are *models*, and that there are many facets to our personalities, which present themselves in different situations. How we are at work may be different to how we are at home.

But it is, nonetheless, a useful insight into our inner workings..... Have fun finding out what yours is!

Reflections on a very busy week!

Wow, what a busy week! It may only have been four days long but it felt like the longest one ever! I learnt so much this week as well – and I don’t just mean about the processes I was mapping – but rather reading between the lines and gaining some deeper understanding.

Wednesday marked the beginning of two days of process mapping communal repairs. We had a mixture of people in the group from different departments as well as a resident, who provided the necessary challenge to our broad generalisations. “Residents always want this….” was met with “Er, no they don’t, some want this….” (or words to that effect).  He provided the necessary checks and balance to “group think”. A good mix of opinions, although it is fair to say a few times the debate got a little over-heated!

On Thursday I made my way to Leytonstone to the offices of a partnering contractor – a bit of a mission via the train with the large *CSI black bag* (now infamous), then in the rain avoiding the enormous puddles. This time the group comprised some of my maintenance colleagues and people in varying roles from the contractor’s end. The discussions in this group generated a “creative tension” as people saw the problems in the system from different perspectives – like two sides of the same coin, perhaps? (my favourite metaphor). It was a productive team and a productive day – I got what I needed from the group and I feel like the day wasn’t just about identifying issues in a process: perhaps more importantly it was about building on and strengthening the relationship between us and them. For instance, I overheard one conversation where two people who had spoken many times on the phone and via email but never met in person realised who each other was – that “a-ha” moment. From personal experience I know that once you know what someone looks like, it makes it a little bit harder to blame them for a problem as they’re no longer a faceless entity.

So, the thing that I’m keen to explore further here is about breaking down preconceptions and doing away with blame to create harmonious relationships with a shared common goal: Blame occurs whenever we work in silos and lack understanding of what each other does.

I’m also going through a phase of reading self-help books. Some people scoff and turn away when they hear that phrase “self-help”, but they’re the ones that are too proud or scared to learn something more about themselves. A good friend of mine says that “inner space is the new outer space” – we’ve learnt far more about our external environment than we know what goes on inside our own heads! Self-help books are a way of exploring the inner psyche to understand more about how and why we think like we do. I think there are obvious ways to relate those teachings to how we interact at work – we are all people, we all have different psychologies, so of course there is some learning to be had here!

My favourite one at the moment is Susan Jeffers Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. In case you haven’t read the book a quick synopsis is how all fears can be broken down to just one fundamental – that you cannot handle whatever it is you’re afraid of. Jeffers states this is pure nonsense. You can, of course, handle whatever happens. But the chatterbox inside our head will feed our subconscious a torrent of negative statements, trying to drive us crazy. And the sad part is, our subconscious listens to this endless attack and inevitably ends up believing it. So we talk ourselves into feeling low and bad about ourselves, that we’re not good enough to do x so we will keep on doing y, and believe that we are never going to achieve great things or indeed happiness. The chatterbox erodes our self-esteem worse than anybody else you will meet in person.

This low self-esteem creates a situation where we end up playing the victim, blaming others for the cause of our problems. When we blame others we are giving away responsibility for our happiness to someone else – we are giving away control! We are told as we grow up to “take responsibility” for what happens, good and bad, and we think in our adult lives that with buying a house, starting a family and working in our chosen professions that we are “taking responsibility”. But that’s not what it’s about, because actually we can all be guilty of not taking responsibility. Here are some statements that Jeffers asks us to consider to see if we are really taking responsibility for our lives:

“Taking responsibility means never blaming anyone else for anything you are being, having or feeling”.

“Taking responsibility means not blaming yourself”.

“Taking responsibility means being aware of where and when you are NOT taking responsibility so that you can eventually change”.

 “Taking responsibility means being aware of the multitude of choices you have in any given situation”.

So, to relate this back to work, a common problem I hear from people is that “nobody takes ownership in this process”. Everybody seems to be handing off ownership to somebody else, who in turn hands off ownership to another. So this is a situation, to put it simply, where NOBODY IS TAKING RESPONSIBILITY.

With nobody taking responsibility, we are not in control of what’s happening; we are blaming each other for when things go wrong without realising that we were in control of the events leading up to the problem arising and we should have been aware of the choices we could make at that time. Our organisations are suffering from low self-esteem! Somewhere, in the neurochemistry of our companies there exists a chatterbox, which is feeding the organisational subconscious damaging negative messages.

Which leads me to ask this question:

What is it that the organisation is so afraid of that it doesn’t believe it will handle it, if and when it comes along?

What customers really want....? #2

So at the end of What customers really want....? #1 I was questioning whether there was a flaw in lean and systems thinking, from the point of defining value as relating to customers - because it assumes they know what they want. 


Exactly.

What if they don’t know precisely what it is they want?

You could also define value as what the customer is prepared to pay for. Again, that raises a conundrum: what the customer may (be prepared to) pay for may not be ultimately what they want – even from a value sense!

Take the example of when you go to a restaurant. You have chosen that particular restaurant because you like the food, the waiting staff are friendly, the atmosphere is pleasant. But when you are presented with the menu you are torn between ordering the steak or a curry. The decision very much comes down to how you are feeling on that particular day as much as dietary and taste preferences. You think you fancy something spicy because all you have eaten the past couple of days is something bland. So you order curry. It comes, it’s very nice but it leaves you with heartburn afterwards.

You have finished your main meal. You regret choosing the curry and wish you’d had the steak instead, if only to avoid the heartburn. By then it’s too late, and really, you made that decision so you have to live with it. Perhaps if you had your choice again then you would have chosen differently. Who knows? But you’re left not entirely satisfied with your experience of the evening. It kind of matched expectations, but at the same time fell short. You still pay the bill at the end – you cannot argue with the restaurant that they didn’t deliver what you wanted because you chose that item from the menu – nobody held a gun to your head and made you choose curry over steak!


In a world away from restaurants and back in construction - where decisions can be made many years in advance of knowing who the end-user/customer really is, it can fall to the client and their team to make those decisions on behalf of their customer. From this all else in lean/systems thinking flows (purpose - to meet customer demand, SIPOC, and so on).....


So my questions are this (and I don't have the answers yet - so happily welcome your thoughts):


- Do we make too many assumptions about what the customer wants because 1) we may not know who the end-user/customer is, and 2) even if we do, they don't really know their own minds (indecisive - "product out" v "customer in" thinking)?
- How can you prevent customers from having regrets after you've delivered to them what they (you) thought they wanted?
- Do we pressurise customers into choosing things because there isn't enough time to fully explore all the options? If so, how can we make time?

It is too easy to identify who the customer is, make assumptions about what they really want (taking it for granted that when asked they really know their own minds - how many of us can say that truthfully & with total commitment to follow through without disappointment at the end?) and from that build a whole product that purports to meet that exact demand. 


And that's assuming we know our end user!

What customers really want......? #1

On Tuesday I went to the Grand Opening of a rural exception scheme I had been working on for the past five years. I handed over my “baby” to a Development colleague in August last year when I changed jobs internally, safe with the knowledge that the hard work was over with. (The scheme was not on paper “controversial”, but had met with a minority of local opposition who had instigated legal challenges in a desperate attempt to thwart development proceeding. All actions failed. Cost reimbursement was sought from the defending council. The moral is it doesn’t pay to be a trouble maker purely for the sake of it).

At that point it was up to timber frame roof level, so to see it blossom from an unruly, obstinate child into a beautifully mature and welcome addition to the village was tear-inducing. All I could say when my construction-colleagues asked me what I thought was that it was “brilliant”, “wonderful”: I was a little lost for words (highly unusual!)

I was privileged enough to have a look inside one of the properties, which had by now become the home of a young family. The lead tenant had grown up in the village, and whilst he had lived with his parents in the village his whole life his girlfriend had lived with her parents - with their baby - in the city as there was nowhere suitable (affordable) for them to be living all together. Their story was the very reason why we stuck with the scheme, despite all the challenges, pursuing it to the very end. Because it may only have been eight units, but those houses became homes for people desperately in need of affordable accommodation in a community that sees middle-aged city workers moving into their area for a “better quality of life”, without appreciating their migration pushes up the prices for those born and raised there, beyond hope of reach.

But I haven’t written this blog to whinge and moan about the lack of affordable housing in rural areas. That's another story. Instead, what struck me when walking around her home was how design decisions I had made early on had contributed to the delight she now experienced living there. I want to explore this further.

I always drew on my own personal experience from how I live in my home, the design changes I would make to make my life easier, and brought that to the table with this scheme. For instance, I decided not to box in the under-stairs cupboard (as had been done in my home - before I ripped it out) because it limited valuable storage space with a stupid piddly little door for access. I could see that this family used it to store their daughter’s pram – something that would not have been possible if it had been enclosed. In one of the flats (which I unfortunately was not able to gain access to) I had installed a sun-pipe into the upstairs landing, because as there were no windows there would not have been any natural lighting – something I detest in my mid-terrace house. The Quality Assurance Manager informed me that they really chucked out a lot of light into that area - which is exactly what I had intended.

However, those design decisions were made before I embarked on my systems thinking learning journey. I made “educated guesses” at what it was our future residents would want to see in their homes, drawing on personal and professional experience. I had no way of asking them specifically what they wanted. It was perhaps by luck, perhaps by intuition that I happened to get those decisions right, and ended up with a finished product that met (you might say exceeded) their expectations.

This made me consider what I now think may be the fundamental flaw in lean or systems thinking: we start with defining the customer and then what value means to them – as in, what we need to do to meet their expectations. But what if we - and more to the point, they - don't know what those expectations are at the crucial time?

To be continued in #2

A waste of a day....

Aaaarrrrrggggghhhhh! 
I've had an absolute pig of a day trying to get through to various companies via their call centres without any success - all of which are based here in the UK, before you go waggling the finger at oversees outsourcing as being the root of all evil in customer service. One in particular I feel especially aggrieved at, so much so that I've started drafting an Official Complaint. I thought I would share the main points from it, along with my attempts at constructively suggesting possible improvements, for you all to snigger at or sympathise with. I haven't sent it yet. I may have a different (more toned down!) view in the morning. But this is what I really mean...

1. An automated telephone routing service with far too many options: I fell asleep half way through its announcements! It also seems to route you through in loops – particularly if you end up somewhere where you thought you needed to go given the options, then spoke to someone who said you needed to be somewhere else, so back through the system you go again – why can't you just put your customer straight through to the person who can resolve their query!

2. Keeping your customers on hold for fifteen minutes is unacceptable. Have a call back service to leave a message – and use it! And don’t keep repeating that we can contact you via email because after the first eight times of hearing it I’ve got the address, I’ve emailed whilst I’ve been waiting on the phone and that hasn’t got me a reply any quicker. I need an answer NOW! (That's why I've called, rather than written....)

3. Answering a customer’s stroppy email insisting upon a call-back that very same day with one phone call, followed up by an email does not correspond to dealing with a customer query. Sure, it’s “answering” it, and that’s great if all the customer wants is to know that somebody does actually work at "Company X". But if you need to garner more information before you can help the customer (which you did because I deliberately did not give too many details away because I wanted to speak to a real person) then you need to actually have that two way real-time dialogue with them. Not leaving your number for them to call back doesn’t exactly help if they're then expected to call you back. Even worse when they call the number back you dialled from, it’s not a direct line and it goes back around the houses of the automatic routing system (see point 1). So I emailed back, got no response, gave up, fumed for a bit, then decided to write this letter (well, blog for now) when I’d calmed down to see if this would spark some constructive communication?

4. What is it with the nationwide - perhaps global - culture of covering your back to avoid blame? (I'll just cc him/her in just in case) Does your manager really need to be cc’ed in to an email so they know that you have simply called someone – even if you’ve not actually dealt with their query properly? Is that a good thing to show your manager….. really? Or would they prefer to learn that you’ve done your job by resolving the issue before it became a complaint and everybody is happy? Today all I wanted was to speak to someone to get to the bottom of my query – I didn’t care if it was phone, email or even pigeon that got me the response, I just wanted information. Instead, I got nothing. Except you probably met your targets for response, and alerted every man and his dog to an impending complaint. Great. But that wouldn’t give me job satisfaction.

I could go on - but I'm wasting my evening now thinking about it. I think it's best to leave the letter for now, have another beer and resume complaint in the morning. I might have my less sarcastic head on tomorrow..... (will they take me less/more seriously then?)

Washing the dog

I've given some thought this morning to how to change the culture of an organisation with efficacy. Now, you could come up with all sorts of analogies but I'm going to use one I'm pretty familiar with - that of washing a dog. This assumes that a need for change has been identified and agreed. It attempts to take account of how resistance to change can be managed - because it does - even when it's the people themselves coming up with the changes, because not everybody will agree in the early days.

Firstly, you wouldn't approach washing a dog part by part, getting each bit wet, shampooed, rinsed and dried before moving on to the next part- you would wash the dog as a whole, applying each stage to the dog all over before commencing the next part of the task.

But too often we hear senior managers saying "you need to start with the frontline" - those delivering the service or making the product. So we train these guys in lean systems thinking. I liken this to dipping the tail in the bath. The tail gets wet but it doesn't wash the dog. At the other end we hear people on the ground saying "but we need senior managers to understand and support us". So we spend some time training them, which is like washing the head. Again, this bit gets wet too but it's not washing the whole dog. (And anybody who has ever tried to wash a dog knows they especially hate getting their heads wet!)

So to wash the dog we have to submerge its entire body in water so all of it gets wet at the same time. Whilst some dogs love this (mine has a penchant for lakes.....) - just as some companies love to shake things up and be very innovative - the majority HATE getting wet. A wash is imposed on them. They like their current smell, even if you think it stinks. They don't mind the odd bit of dried dirt caked around their elbows and hocks. It's a souvenir from their latest adventures.

So to wash the dog we have to coax them into the bath or other washing area. We have to hold them gently but firmly, steering them where they need to stand. We have to make sure the temperature is not too hot, nor too cold, but just right. We have to shower them slowly so they become wet all over evenly. We have to massage shampoo into their coats and give them lots if reassurance to comfort them, and praise when they have done good.

In the same way, to implement a lean transformation we must apply it to all levels of the organisation simultaneously so one bit doesn't dry out/lose interest before the whole is complete. Change has to happen at the right pace, evenly. Those facilitating the change must be clear, firm, encouraging and reassuring.

Hopefully by the end of the exercise you will have one clean dog (but possibly also a very wet bathroom!)

A lesson in how not to communicate.....

Over the past few months my colleagues in the CSI team and I have been working alongside external consultants on a department wide review of processes. I've taken the lead in a key service area -I'm its "champion". This has involved facilitating the redesign of the existing process to remove the waste, aligning it to meeting customers' needs and reducing frustration for staff.


Post redesign an action plan was compiled to map the route from the existing process to the new and improved one. The aim is to initially work through the action plan in one region only. Once the new process is stabilised there it will be rolled out to the others.


In my eagerness to get things moving I handed this action plan over to the staff in the region so they would take ownership for it and begin working through. No problem there, except I failed to place myself in their shoes and anticipate how such a massive amount of work seemingly being dumped on them in one go would make them feel.


I returned to the region today to see how things were progressing and the daily meetings seemed a little flat. At the end of the day it became clear why: people were overwhelmed with the scale of the work required for the action plan and simply did not know where to start (I referred to it colloquially as a monster, and they agreed it was!)


The action plan currently extends to four pages of excel spreadsheet with all likelihood that this will expand further as more things are added or existing actions are broken down into more detail. The issue is, faced with such a mountain to climb, where do we start? I admit this was something that I had wanted to talk to the teams about before. It was certainly not my intention to hand it over then walk away without further input, although that seems to be the impression I gave.


All is not lost though. I had a lengthy chat with the regional director about the action plan (and other changes) and we have resolved a way forward to tackle this monster! I feel happier now afterwards for two reasons:


1. This was the engagement with the teams I had hoped for - a positivity and commitment to working through the plan earnestly; and
2. That honesty helped me understand where they were struggling and show what more I could do to support them through it.


My failure to clearly explain the next steps confused and possibly demotivated the teams, but from that I can take a valuable lesson in communication. And today has now paved the way to progressing the action plan by breaking it down further, focussing initial efforts on a few key changes.


I hope they feel as positively now as I do!

Book Review - The Machine that Changed the World

The Machine that Changed the World

Womack J, Jones D, Roos D

Free Press (1990)

The story of lean production – Toyota’s secret weapon in the global car wars that is revolutionizing world industry

If, like me, you are only just beginning your journey in understanding lean then this book is a great place to start. It sets out the background for the emergence and development of lean production, moving away from mass production that dominated for most of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, and which evolved from craft production before that. This book has been called previously a “management classic”, explaining and stimulating “world changing transformation in management thinking”.

This book does not set out to examine how lean succeeds in Japan because of its society’s unique features. These are considered to be of secondary importance. It is not a book about what is right with Japan and wrong with the rest of the world, but rather what is right with lean production.

Whilst the book focusses on car production it is not difficult to see how the principles of lean could be applied to service industries as well. The story this book tells is about so much more than just the technicalities of a method of production. It looks in depth at two very different ways of thinking and how humans work together. There are many colourful examples throughout the book about how Americans tried to understand what the Japanese were doing in their factories, and jumped to hasty conclusions that bore no resemblance to what actually went on. This is because they lacked a more fundamental understanding of the lean system of work: It is one thing to use the tools from the “lean toolkit” to effect some change, but without addressing the system as a whole (and the resulting culture) then continuous improvement will not thrive.

Another point that struck me when reading this was how slow the rest of the world was to react to such a radical change in production method, even when the results were plain to see. Toyota began using lean in earnest in the 1950’s-60’s, with other Japanese firms following suit shortly after (to varying degrees of success). The US and Europe followed much later in the 1990’s-2000’s, and consequently are playing catch up. The Japanese companies’ success with lean production may be due to the establishment of vertical and horizontal keiretsu – groups of companies with common business interests, such as banks, investors and suppliers. Machine makes reference to these as if they were infallible – one of the keys to success - but the Japanese recession in the early 1990’s showed that these conglomerates were not invincible after all as many collapsed, leaving a big dent in Japanese production.

Machine paved the way for a whole industry of books to be written on lean, since its initial publication in 1990. One of my most burning questions is what happened to lean production in the intervening two decades?  Thankfully, there is an Afterword that attempts to answer that very question. The reader is also directed to two other books written since for more information – Lean Thinking (1996) and Lean Solutions (2005).

So what else have I learned from reading this book? In short – I know I will never buy another GM or Ford motor car again! 

Some thoughts on the "yoof" of today #1

This entry is slightly off-topic, but I felt strongly riled enough to write it so here you go!

Theresa May appeared on BBC Breakfast on Friday morning, defending the government's plans to increase the sale price of alcohol announced in Wednesday's budget. This is all in an attempt to tackle "binge drinking", with the finger firmly pointed in the direction of young adults.

Spin doctors have cleverly devised a label for the ritual of buying cheap booze in the shops beforehand, with the intention of getting drunk cheaply at home (at least cheaper than buying it in pubs and clubs) as pre-loading. *Sigh* It seems like nowadays every behaviour must have a label, you know. That way we can easily identify it as a Problem and attribute blame to somebody!

Anyway, this whole piece of journalism was farcical, for two reasons:

1. That binge drinking is a Problem associated with the youth of today and nobody else, and that raising the price of alcohol will combat this

2.That Theresa refused to admit her drinking habits. If she herself did not have a Problem then there would be no shame in admitting her consumption, surely?

The main argument is complete and utter BS. (We all know the truth about MPs drinking in the House of Commons bar thanks to the Telegraph.)

"Binge" drinking is as much a rite of passage as the first kiss or rebelling against parents - it's probably integral to both! It’s about exploring life and its boundaries, developing values and the self into a normal, functioning member of society.  It is unfortunate that the media have latched onto binge drinking as the scapegoat of most causes of social degeneration. “Binge drinking” brings to mind word associations of hoodies, riots, teenage pregnancies, and other general anarchy.

And this is, of course, on the assumption that it only affects young adults and not any other demographic of society. Let’s all be honest here, binge drinking happens irrespective of age or gender. It is part of the culture of many sports (I recall heavy drinking sessions from early afternoon to early hours of the following morning over a weekend, during my rugby-playing days…..) And if there’s a party – be it birthday, wedding, divorce, and so on – then we could all be guilty of drinking to excess and regretting it the following day. But this is conveniently forgotten about when we’re talking about what’s wrong with society…..

So the Problem is binge drinking, and the solution is higher sale price. Never mind that this will also penalise responsible drinkers. Why, oh why, I keep asking myself, does nobody ever look deeper to the real, fundamental causes of the Problems? Perhaps because that involves too many uncomfortable truths, or too much change to put things right, that may be beyond the scope of a single term in government?

Do you treat your employees like rabbits?

For tonight's entry I drew inspiration from my little white rabbit, Magic. 

Do you treat your employees like rabbits?

The Client's role in Lean Construction

This blog has been adapted from a piece of coursework set in the "Construction Planning, Tendering and Finance" module I'm studying in my undergraduate degree in Quantity Surveying. The original question was framed around the complete refurbishment of a pharmaceutical manufacturing premises within a programme of no more than 42 days. The question asked you to provide advice as if you were the Commercial Manager within a construction firm that was preparing a tender for submission as part of a framework agreement.

Pfizer, East Kent

In answering this question we had to devise various iterations of a project network analysis detailing the shortest time, optimum time and associated costs, before recommending to our Managing Director which would be the best to base our bid on. I couldn't decide which way to go at first because there was insufficient information provided about the Client's requirements, so I went with the systems thinking view - and recommended further discussions with the Client first before deciding. *D'oh!* Well, it got me thinking more about what clients (note the small "c" now) need to do if they really want to implement lean into their construction projects. I will draw on my own experience here too, as an "intelligent client" in the development department of a housing association.






Since the days of Latham (1994) and Egan (2002), the construction industry has - to varying degrees and levels of success - drawn lessons from lean in manufacturing and implemented them. One of the key things recommended from both government-commissioned reviews was how partnering can improve the construction process by reducing costs and time and improving quality.


Partnering comes in two forms: project partnering and strategic partnering. The first is more transient as it exists solely for the life of the project, but with repeat business over several projects can lead to the latter. Framework agreements have been set up by many public-sector organisations, in part to counter the OJEU requirements, but also to build relationships with a select number of contractors/suppliers with a view to forming a strategic partnership. However, what clients have mostly failed to realise is how simply forming a framework and working with the same contractor(s) over a series of projects does not constitute "partnering" let alone the lean construction approach advocated by Latham et al, if they still follow the old entrenched adversarial practices.


By old entrenched adversarial practices I mean the following:




1) Providing little real information up front about their (clients) expectations. Many questions arise as a contractor prepares a tender: How soon do they want the building(s) completed? What is their budget for construction costs? What standard of quality do they want/need to achieve? Most importantly, which takes precedence if there has to be a compromise?

2) Following on from above, clients send out invitations to tender with incomplete design information, usually because of time pressures (in housing circles, the usual cause is HCA grant-funding deadlines), sometimes through lack of expertise or detail in the Employer's Requirements. This inevitably leads to variations once work has commenced.

3) Clients prefer using adversarial standard forms of contract. Two-party agreements mean that any risk passed to the contractor will be forced down every link in the supply chain until it finally falls on somebody at the bottom, who may not be best placed to accept that risk. This is irresponsible, and likely to cause problems when it goes wrong (if anything, just by delaying the project's completion).

4) The supply chain bears the cost of the contractor going bust. The client may come out a little burnt, but by and large can depend on bonds, Parent Company Guarantees or warranties to protect their interests. The contractor might go bust for a number of reasons but the most common is poor cash flow. If the contractor goes under then the subbies don't get paid.

5) Risks are handed off so far as possible onto the contractor, even those it would be fair for the client to retain. Liquidated and Ascertained Damages (LADs) are written into contracts as a calculation to protect clients from the loss of revenue through delayed project completion. They do not represent a penalty - such clauses are outlawed in the UK - but they are there as an almighty stick if the programme gets a little shaky.

So what should clients be doing if they want to follow lean principles?

1) Clients should provide as much information as possible about their expectations from the project, including what they consider their "Key Success Indicators" are (I've avoided using the term "Key Performance Indicators" here because it's so annoyingly linked to targets in people's minds - see my previous entry on the absurdity of targets!) During construction they should be continuously measuring output performance against the KSI's.
Also, it's o.k. for contractors to ask questions if something isn't clear during the tender stage, so long as the client is fair in their answers and provides the additional information to all contractors involved in the exercise. So contractors, don't assume what the client wants (because you make an ass out of you and me...)


2) The problems with variations fall into two camps: those instigated by the clients and those instigated by the contractors. The first is due to a lack of the client's understanding of just how disruptive variations can be. They think "wouldn't it be nice if we had gold taps instead of chrome, I wonder how much that will cost?", so they ask the contractor and he tells them and they agree to the additional price. For clients it's as simple as asking a question and getting a response, but in order to provide that response the contractor has to source a suitable product, maybe price it from different vendors, throw in a bit of negotiation to weedle the price down, omit the original sum from their contract calculations and add in the new one, work out the difference and then inform the client. And all that work for an answer that might be "no, that's just too much money - what about silver ones?" And all the while the clock is ticking on the programme..... The way to overcome this variation problem is to freeze the design before construction commences (locking in the standardisation chock).
Usually the latter is caused by Employer's Requirements that are drafted as product-based specifications. In the current downturn there have been many suppliers/manufacturers that have gone out of business and so their products no longer exist. This leaves contractors having to establish what it was performance wise that the client wanted from that particular product by using a substitute, and that throws up questions of comparable quality. I would therefore advocate the use of performance-based specifications instead of product-based ones.


3) Clients could opt to use a multi-party contract, such as PPC2000 (the first of its kind and developed by Trowers & Hamlin), which supports various forms of risk allocation. Unfortunately its use (certainly in my experience) has been next to non-existent, because clients like the safety of tried-and-tested methods. They feel protected hiding behind a contract bound to litigious forms of dispute resolution, much like children run to their mother expecting her to wave a magic wand to make it better, rather than resolving contractual issues themselves ultra-atriis (as adults.....)


4) The supply chain needs to be fully integrated and this is where the multi-party contract comes into its own. Not only is there a direct contractual link (very usefully!) between subcontractors, suppliers, main contractors and client, risk can also be distributed to those who are best able to take it. So no warranties, no heavy risk loading.
A progression from this would be the establishment of a project trust, into which the client places the contract sum, and the (sub)contractors draw down from as work is completed and agreed. This means if one party is removed from the equation the others can be reassured they will still be paid.


5) As mentioned above already, risk should be evenly distributed between the client and the winning contractor and its allocation decided early on in the tender process. All contractors tendering will include a premium for accepting risk, as an element of their profit make up. As a client, if you pass more risk onto the contractor you may think you are getting a better deal but really you're just pushing up the tenders. Of course, a contractor that is desperate to win work may reduce their profit, even running the project at cost, but that will only backfire on the client when they go belly up due to cash flow issues (a MAJOR risk).
As a rule of thumb, time risks are best allocated to the contractor whilst cost risks should stay with the client. Quality risks belong to both parties ("quality is everyone's responsibility" - W.E. Deming, the great systems thinking master).
To that end, I don't believe that clients will want to drop LADs from contracts (unless they are very trusting of their partnering contractor - or stupid, you decide!) but they should be very realistic. There is a fall back formula the courts or adjudicators will use if one is not explicitly written into the contract, so it would be wise to take the opportunity to calculate the actual business loss a late completion would cause and insert that in the contract.




A final point about strategic partnering is that it offers a real opportunity to implement continuous improvement, by sharing the learning from project to project. Reviews of what went well and what could be done better next time are a valuable tool, particularly if all the project team are involved in those discussions. Mistakes will happen, specification items will become outdated and things will change in the external economy, but through strategic partnering we can learn, we can grow and we can get better. Together.

The Absurdity of Targets

I've been meaning to write this entry for a while, as it's a particular aspect of systems thinking I feel passionate about. The theme today is how setting targets does not drive improved performance and can instead create perverse behaviours in the attempts to achieve them. I've chosen to use a personal example here to illustrate my point, rather than a work-based one.


A few years ago I joined Slimming World in an attempt to lose some weight. I went along to the first meeting full of trepidation at what this plan would involve, but after hearing so many success stories and picking up the cheery vibes I was convinced of its reputation and made the commitment to give it a go.

I won't liken my body to a temple (unless you want to compare it to the ruins of Greece or Mayan culture!) but rather a complex organic system involving thousands of biochemical processes. My purpose in joining SW was to lose weight and to do that it advocated a radical change in diet towards eating healthily. My processes of consumption were "redesigned" - shopping habits altered from a mad dash around the supermarket, avoiding temptation from aisle-offers, to planning all the meals for the week in advance, writing a shopping list accordingly and sticking to it! Cooking methods also changed: olive oil was swapped for fry-lite and weekend breakfasts were grill-ups instead of fry-ups.


These "new" processes interacted in combination to change the output of the system. On my first weigh-in I was delighted to learn I'd lost half a stone that week. Motivated by my achievement I stayed on for the round circle group session, also known as "image therapy". This involved the consultant reading out your weight loss that week followed by a discussion of how you felt it went, concluding with setting yourself a target weight loss for the coming week.


I noticed whilst staying to this session there were mixed successes: some people gained weight, some people stayed the same but the majority did actually lose weight - I'd have been discouraged if that were not the case! The people who stayed the same or gained usually knew the reasons why. I amounted this to variation from the standard process - they hadn't followed the plan 100% because it had been someone's birthday and there was cake, or their husband had left them so they had drunk a bit too much at the weekend (to celebrate, of course).


Over the next few weeks I was fortunate to lose more weight, but soon I became bored with the rigidity of the plan and consequently strayed on occasions. This inevitably led to a weight gain, but I philosophised this was part of the weight loss "journey" - instead of going straight to my destination I was taking the scenic route!


Now the really interesting observation from all this was not how I reacted to the weight gain (or loss) in itself, but rather how that compared to the target set the week before at the inquiry of the consultant. I noticed myself feeling the same pattern of emotions depending on the outcome of the week's weigh in:

• If I had gained weight and so not met my target it made me feel like a failure. I questioned the success of the plan, my commitment to it and failed to take into account the success of the journey so far. Many times I would have thrown away all my hard work based on missing just one target!

• If I had lost weight but not met my target then I felt a mixture of disappointment at not achieving it. This distracted me from the fact that I had lost weight that week and undermined that achievement. I then felt guilty for feeling bad instead of celebrating, particularly when the group congratulated me.

• If I had lost weight and met my target then I felt infused with a renewed enthusiasm, a euphoria and a confidence that I could achieve anything. It either led to cockiness as I set myself a higher than normal target (possibly even unrealistic) as a challenge, or if there were lots of weight gains then I played down the achievement, again undermining it.

Because of the negative feelings of failure, disappointment, guilt, wavering commitment, I began to alter my behaviour in the days between meetings. Firstly, I committed the cardinal sin when trying to lose weight as I became obsessed with the scales and weighed myself every day and at different times of the day to try to understand what affected my weight. This meant instead of following the standard processes of healthy eating, I could cheat! So if I had a "bad" day then the next one I ate very little by way of restitution. I also chose lighter clothes for my weigh in after a bad week, heavier clothes if I thought I could get away with it without showing a gain. (There are many more examples.....)


In this way it made a mockery of what the scales were really measuring, and consequently whether I had truly met my target or not. But the cycle continued week in, week out.


Eventually I plucked up the courage to take a stand and said to the consultant that I no longer wanted to set a target. She seemed a little taken aback but conferred it was my prerogative to do so. The reason I stopped setting myself interim targets was because it was distracting me from the end goal: a weekly target of losing 1-2lbs compared to a *however-long-it-took* goal of c. 6 stone: the latter goal was my idea of "perfection", when I would be happy with my weight.


As a result of removing the targets I stopped beating myself up on weeks when I gained. I left meetings feeling as if a line had been drawn in the sand, and that the next day was a new beginning. I placed my overall end goal in sight instead of arbitrary interim targets. My positivity made it easier to stick to the plan, by being kinder to myself and more realistic.


In a future blog entry I will explore how understanding the capability of the system by measuring what is really happening is a much better way of understanding processes and facilitating change accordingly, rather than setting arbitrary targets.

Why residents are like starfish - and how to make a difference

Recently I’ve been working with a group of residents to bring them into the systems thinking fold. It was initiated by the Resident Involvement team, and was a great way of getting back in touch with the Voice of the Customer. I designed and delivered two half days of training with a week’s reprieve between: the first contained theory of what systems thinking is and the tools we practitioners use, the second using those tools to gather real data.

During the week between sessions they were set some homework to  find out what happens on their estates, with regards to services the company provides them (cleaning, gardening, caretakers and so on).  The start of the second session was devoted purely to feedback on their findings. It took longer than planned to go around the table but that was no trouble as their findings were pure gold. I made copious quantities of scribbles in my note pad to refer to later!

We also revisited some fish-bones that we started in the first session, examining why residents do not get involved in estate inspections. It was a chance for them to vent and linked closely to the results of their homework. We also established what it is that matters to residents, and potentially did away with the spurious notion that residents like the existing system of scoring estate inspections (they don’t).

I left the Horsham office feeling energised, yet grounded. There were no surprises with what the residents were telling us, other than perhaps they were, actually, realistic with their expectations of what they want and what we can provide. I hope that they too gained something useful from the training; a different angle that they can bring to the next Resident Involvement event – a systems thinking point of view.

Which brings me nicely on to a story I was told not so long ago about a little boy and his father. They were walking along the beach as the tide was going out; hundreds of starfish littered the sand, stranded by the waves. The little boy went over to the nearest one and picked it up, returning it gently to the sea. He went back for another, again returning the starfish to the waters. This continued several more times before his father remarked:

“What are you doing, son?”

“Returning the starfish to the sea, Pa”.

The father cast his eye over the beach and the many glistening bodies of starfish waiting for the tide to come back to return them home. He shook his head in futility at the effort.

“There’s no point in that, son. There’s too many and you’ll never make a difference.”

The little boy continued, picking up yet another starfish and dropping it into the sea with a plop.

“I made a difference to that one,” he replied. “And that one,” he continued, returning another, and another.

There may only have been seven residents present at the training, but you have to start somewhere! The training had a heavy focus on the Voice of the Customer, so they could appreciate their input into our continuous improvement, and they could contribute to the next Resident Involvement event with a systems thinking mind-set.

If they begin to question why we do things in a particular way (is there not a better way?) and ask to see the data that backs up our statements, then that training will have made a difference to them.

Introducing..... The Standard Pig!

The other day my colleagues and I took part in an exercise on standardised work. The concept is that on the up-hill path of continuous improvement standardisation of work practices acts as a chock to stop you from rolling backwards to the old ways of doing things.

You start the exercise by asking the group to draw a pig. The result may come out something like this.....

If there's someone in the group with some artistic talent you may even get this:

You then congratulate the group on their impressive sketching skills and move on to giving them a piece of paper with a grid of 9 boxes marked out. You then lead them through a set of instructions involving marking M's, W's, arcs in various degrees and circles, at set positions within certain boxes.

The end result should be something that looks like this:

(Minus those annoying numbers in circles....)

The funny thing is, if everybody has been following the same instructions carefully then the pictures should all look like this (albeit some pigs will have slightly longer legs, fatter tummies or curlier tails).

The purpose of this exercise is to show how having clear instructions (policies and procedures) enables a standardised drawing (output/service) to be produced. The amount of variation between different outputs is reduced. It looks like a pig - even though it's not necessarily a pretty or character-ful one! The customer knows what they are going to get from your artistry (service) - the quality delivered is the same regardless of who does the drawing (where demand is received in the organisation).