Category Archives: Excellence

Change Principles, Excellence, Learning & Teaching

Beyond the obvious: from symptoms to causes

May 8, 2012 Simon Black 3 Comments

Organisations are complex places and change can become a complex business. We cannot simply expect to make a change here and see an outcome there; outcomes are rarely as simple as ‘cause and effect’. There are many reasons for this, one of which is the fact that different people will see things (and respond) in different ways.

Focusing on the obvious can sometimes be unhelpful

My last blog presented the basic ideas concerning the ‘theo ry o f kn ow l edge’.

One key point was that although many people can see or know the obvious, often the important knowledge is what is largely unknown (to some degree). We need to look further than just what fictional hotelier Basil Fawlty would call ‘the bleedin’ obvious’.

This means that we must ask the right questions. Deming gives a great example of how to improve performance, describing a children’s charity which raises money for medical care and food support, using appeals run through mailing lists (Deming 1993). He points that final performance (how much money is donated to the charity) is largely unaffected by the efficiency of the steps of printing, mailing, payment, receipt, acknowledgement; improvement effort in these areas will be largely irrelevant. The important step which impacts on the willingness of donors to give money is the quality of the message which has been written to them (and which is formulated right at the start of the process); zero defects in the rest of process is of much less importance. This is where a lot of today’s approaches, like ‘lean’, ‘benchmarking’ and ‘process-re-engineering’ fall down – they encourage people to apply tools to a situation – dealing with the obvious; efficiency, flow and defects, without thinking about purpose and what affects the system as a whole. The result is that, after the initial rush of enthusiasm, people do not see great benefits in the change.

This is a warning to those looking at change – are we fiddling around the edges or are we dealing with fundamental change that will make a real difference?

This is not to say that statements of the obvious are unimportant – we can be blind to things that are abundantly clear to our users. People’s observations and opinions of the obvious are not trivial, the key is to examine what sits behind those phenomena and understand them properly.

In a higher education institution, the notion of involving students, although understood and welcomed can nevertheless be accompanied by a little hesitation or even reservation. This suggests to me a degree of discomfort on the part of staff (Will students understand the constraints that we have to work under? Will they have unrealistic expectations? Can students really understand what they themselves need?). Let’s face it, life would be simpler if we didn’t involve students – but that wouldn’t make things better either. We need to challenge our discomfort, face up to the weaknesses, illogicalities and frustrations that continually haunt our work and face up to the need to think differently and make new efforts.

Why? Because any discomfort we have in involving our users in the change process (whether they are students, partners, clients or customers) probably reveals our unrecognised, unknown or deliberately concealed concerns with how the system is currently under-performing for those very people. It challenges the way we work now and how we should work in the future. Basil Fawlty’s chaotic hotel would be fundamentally improved if he and his wife Sybil really worked out how they could together offer great hospitality to their guests – whereas instead they usually (hilariously and painfully) fiddle around the fringes of service, battling against each other.

So let’s not focus on the obvious and superficial. Deming, himself a well-renowned teacher (he won the US National Medal of Technology 1987 and the National Academy of Science, Distinguished Career in Science award 1987), makes an interesting observation on university teaching “I have seen a teacher hold a hundred and fifty students spellbound, teaching what is wrong. His students rated him as a great teacher. In contrast, two of my own greatest teachers in universities would be rated poor teachers on every count. Then why did people come from all over the world to study with them, including me? For the simple reason that these men had something to teach. They inspired their students to carry on further research” (Deming 1982).

In other words, in some cases the obvious (“a good approach”) masked the fundamentals (“poor content”), whereas the real value lies in delivering what people are really looking for. A university could ask students to rate it on trivial and obvious matters and think it is doing great, when in reality it is letting its students down – do we always ask the right questions?

Now that would be a challenge for change…

Change and the knowledge iceberg

April 30, 2012 Simon Black 5 Comments

So, is management by fact a bit simplistic? What about the emotional aspects of work; trust, appreciation, excitement, fear, worry, concern? How can these things be properly addressed. A lot of these things will be more or less important depending on how we see the world. And most people see the world differently to everyone else!

If we want to improve anything it is best to make those improvements from a perspective of understanding – using knowledge. Unfortunately we live in a world of incomplete knowledge and, dare I say it, differing perceptions (we all see things differently). Deming suggests that we work on the basis of a decent theory of knowledge – but what does he mean? I use the iceberg analogy:

* A start point is to understand that there are things that most of us know – obvious, like the peak of an iceberg.

*Next there are the flatter ice floes, which a good ‘spotter’ on a ship might notice bobbing in the waterline. It is important that we know about these and we should get better at spotting them.

* However there is also sub-surface ice (in this analogy) – things not visible to anyone but which we need to delve into or at least give consideration (we have a decent hunch – or ‘belief’ – or ‘theory’ – or experience – that they will be there). Effort is needed either to seek them out or at least think properly about how we might have to deal with them. If we blindly sail through areas were sub-surface ice may be lurking, on the assumption that what we don’t know will not hurt us, we would be a little foolish.

* There is also stuff that we don’t know … and need never know… it is out of our sphere of influence and we cannot do much to manage it – so don’t worry.

* Deepest of all is the ‘unknown’ – we will never know about it – (so again don’t worry)

In summary we should seek reasonable knowledge when we make decisions; we should not ignore things which are too difficult to understand and we should be honest when we are making assumptions. If we do this, then the outcomes of change, whether good or bad, will be better understood and will help to inform us in the future. If we need to broach sensitive subjects: trust, appreciation, excitement, fear, worry, concern, then a conversation is a good start point.

Service Excellence – Are People the Problem?

April 23, 2012 Simon Black 4 Comments

Recently, a colleague helpfully forwarded an interesting link on Service Excellence (see below). Like a lot of research on Service, it throws up more questions than answers. The researchers had analysed a range of studies of service performance and had identified a number of issues.

The headliner was that 80% of employees think service is great whilst only 8% of customers think the same. The researchers’ observations were that customer service employees have a misperception of how good they are. This interpretation seems a bit clumsy. The mismatch in this data should not really be a huge shock; to some degree, employees will tell researchers what they think they should hear – if you asked them in a pub on a Friday night they might rate service differently. The likely cause of this conflict of opinion? The fear factor – who wants to admit that they do a poor job or that their organisation is a bit rubbish?

The researchers described how “Managers are using too much stick and not enough carrot, berating staff with complaints league tables, missed targets and unfavourable mystery shopper reports. Line managers care more about targets than people, as there is data to report, processes to police, bosses to please and larger than ever teams to keep to targets.” This is a very relevant observation; however what becomes frustrating is the way that this research appears to FAIL to identify the link between symptoms (“indifferent staff”) and causes (the list of line management behaviours and protocols presented by the researchers themselves).

Even more worryingly (to use the researchers’ own phrase) the research report states “More worryingly, even when employees were shown facts about customer dissatisfaction, they were twice as likely to blame the organisation as to accept responsibility.” To say this is worrying is INCORRECT – it is not worrying it is in fact highly probable that the workforce have got it spot on; 90% of problems are caused by the system, not the people – so no wonder employees think that it is the company that is the problem!

The fundamental difficulty with the research observations is that they present PEOPLE AS THE PROBLEM, which in 80-90% of cases is unlikely [see messages repeated by heavyweight thinkers like Deming since the 1950s, Senge and more recently Seddon].

So, in summary, although the research article found out some truths, unfortunately they have only one eye open to what they are seeing. They recommend giving people (service staff) a kick as implied by their term – ‘improving attentiveness’ (how do you make people more attentive?) although like any modern HR practitioner, they include some soft and cuddly stuff (still ‘kicks’ actually), such as “Managers need to engage employees and treat them as you want them to treat customers, coach staff to think more commercially and show why giving your full attention to customers is so important.” To be fair they go on to urge managers to do less reporting on sales figures and more observing and guiding their front line colleagues. However, in any type of organisation, if you do all these positive things but don’t remove all the conditions of targets, scripts, reports, procedures and sanctions then nothing will change – except employees will get even more annoyed and will feel under increasing pressure – and this will be observable to customers, eventually, as even WORSE service. There is still a lot to learn.

To see the original summary of this research, go to the article on the peoplemanagement.co.uk site: http://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/pm/articles/2012/03/staff-deluded-over-standard-of-customer-service.htm

Better insights on service can read here:

Seddon, J. (2005) Freedom from Command and Control, Vanguard Press, Buckingham, UK.

Excellence, Myths

Is it an egg?

April 2, 2012 Simon Black Leave a comment

One item is ovoid, solid, brown, less than 10cms tall; another is about the same size and shape but a striking blue. Here are the two items; similar, but different. Lets take the one on the right – is it an egg? Yes it looks like an egg, but what about the second – is it an egg? Probably? Possibly? But what about that colour? Maybe the shape is not quite right too.

A perceptive person may seek out other information:

• is each item heavy or light? – actually they both weigh the same, about 60 grammes;

• are they rough or smooth? – generally smooth, but both are slightly matt to the touch;

• cold or hot ? – both are cold, but warm up easily enough in your hands

Who cares?

When my 12-year-old son is feeling cheeky, and thinks that he can catch me unawares, he will secretly pick up one of these, suddenly shout ‘hey Dad!’ and throw it at me to test my reflexes. He knows that he will get a reaction – I might laugh, get cross, duck, catch it, jump out the way or use any combination of these behaviours.

And what happens if it hits me or I drop it? With the brown one – well, nothing ; no mess at all because despite being the right shape, colour, weight and texture of a chicken egg it is rubber. Until it bounces off the floor you would never really know, even if you look at it closely. However, the strange blue egg will make a terrible mess. It is of course a duck egg. Thankfully my son has never tried to throw one of the blue eggs at me!

When we say we ‘manage by fact‘ what do we really mean? The facts are obvious aren’t they? Like the eggs, facts are probably not obvious – we usually work on the basis of our best ‘knowledge’ and that knowledge can be very variable. Knowledge ranges from pure facts to pure guesses; from fixed perceptions and preconceptions to a broad balance of possibilities; from empirical evidence to ‘belief’. The most surprising thing is that, to some degree or another, none of these things are necessarily ‘better’ or ‘worse’; ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.

A belief might be well founded, based on experience or relate to something that is essentially unmeasurable or unknowable – we have to go with a reasoned belief. The problems arise when people use beliefs (and I am not talking about religious beliefs) in the face of contradictory, reliable evidence.

For example, if a manager believes people are motivated solely by money, that manager does not have helpful knowledge of motivation and will therefore end up working with people in unhelpful ways (for them and, ultimately, for the manager too). The evidence concerning what motivates people at work is out there and should be sought by that manager, be understood and applied.

In another case a person may believe that female workers are more efficient than male workers, so that person’s behaviour towards workers of different genders may end up being distorted and again will ultimately be unhelpful.

At the other end of the scale we have facts; and ‘knowledge of facts’ can equally be an area of difficulty. Surely, if sales this month are up 10% on the same month last year, that’s a fact – but what does the 10% difference really mean (and I am not getting philosophical here)? Look at the diagram here – one person might see the last data point circled in red for February as great performance compared to Feburary in the previous year; others might be less sure.

As for the rubber egg – seeing that as a real egg is surely wrong (other than for use as a ball to bounce at your Dad perhaps)? Well not exactly. If you want to collect eggs from a broody hen, it is important that you replace her freshly laid egg with a replica that is such a good copy that she is convinced that it is a real egg. Now what does that mean for management by facts?

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