delivery

Connecting to Value

Alistair Russell · November 25, 2021 · Leave a Comment

In our experience, focusing and motivating your teams to deliver value for your organisation remains one of the most considered challenges for leaders. Especially doing it in a way that works. In a way that is both efficient and effective. We know that sustaining teams and individuals to do the right thing is critically important and yet it remains hard work for us all. This challenge is heightened in our context of enabling clients to deliver value through the power of digital technologies. In our dynamic and developing contexts, we continue to work at making sense of which managerial and leadership approaches and tools will deliver the right outputs, let alone make sure that the outputs do really enable the value desired.

Addressing this challenge is made more complex in many of our client organisations because teams and individuals are typically ‘citizens’ of many units. Units that have a digital product or service focus, units that have a strategic business focus, units that have a professional focus such as programme and project management, business analysis, quality assurance, user experience etc.. We find that now more than ever, generic objective, KPI driven models rarely deliver for the individual, team or indeed the organisation. Sometimes such models can even work against the delivery of true shareholder or stakeholder value.

In response to this enduring challenge we developed an approach – the “Personal Measurement Framework”. We have used this successfully many times with clients, guided by three important axioms. Firstly, to design an approach that connects with value as perceived by the relevant stakeholders, connects to why your role, your team and your capability exists. Secondly, to provide structure and framework, yet empower individuals to develop their own measurement framework and thirdly, to balance the measurement framework across the full range of measures, not just on the traditional metric of output delivery.

The Personal Measurement Framework starts with the idea of a value proposition from the Business Model Canvas – see Business Model Generation. The process invites leaders and teams to teams to start with ‘end in mind’, to start with the job that their ‘customer’ or indeed their customers’ customer is responsible for delivery and what are the pains and gains for them in delivery of that job. Then the process gets the leaders and teams to make explicit the value proposition of their product or service in terms of the pain relievers and gain creators that they deliver. If appropriate you can add in a step of using the value proposition to structure and engagement with ‘customer’ or agent of ‘customer’ to validate the value proposition.

The next step is to use the gain creators and pain relievers identified in the value proposition to develop measures of delivery of value. And to develop measures through challenging leaders and teams to hold onto the tenets of Kaplan and Norton’s work on balanced scorecards – see Harvard Business Review article. Developing measures that don’t just measure output e.g. tested and integrated code, but also measure development of capability and learning e.g. codified process improvement alongside measures that are meaningful for the customer e.g. transaction speed, volume growth.

The Personal Measurement Framework delivers benefits through explicitly connecting your teams to value delivery with additional benefits delivered through the process that builds ownership and commitment leading to increased effectiveness and efficiency. As with all ideas and models our Personal Measurement Framework is only as good as the leadership that assures implementation, learning and development. And when deployed fully, with appropriate support and collaborative coaching amongst the team the Framework can and does deliver sustained value.

References:

Business Model Generation: Osterwalder and Pigneur, Wiley 2010

The Balanced Business Scorecard, Kaplan and Norton, Harvard Business Review 1992

Show don’t Tell: A new (to me) perspective on change leadership

Alistair Russell · January 12, 2021 · Leave a Comment

As an experienced consultant with a professional heritage in engineering, I have absolutely no academic credentials in literature or any other media. However, with children that studied film and literature at first degree level and also as someone that enjoys films, I have come to understand the idea of ‘show don’t tell’ as used in the criticism of films and all story telling media. As I’ve explored the idea, I’ve come to realise its value as a new perspective on what we do as leaders. The value of leadership that does much more, leadership that shows how rather than just telling you how. And building on our recent insight piece ‘stories matter’, consider how much more powerful you and your team could be in leading change if you did more showing how things are and could be different and less telling.

Taking the ‘show don’t tell’ perspective into our work in the design, delivery and leadership of change enabled through digital technology, it’s clear that its more powerful to demonstrate change in practice rather than just communicate about the change. Both demonstration and communication are important, but I notice that perhaps because it’s easier there is still too much telling. Reflecting on my own experience, a showing approach is more sustainable because of the more active engagement of the other party, in the same way that the audience is more engaged in a story if the author shows you what is happening, the approach invites the audience to work harder at understanding what is going on, rather than just telling you as reader or viewer. For me this a new perspective on the power of such things as agile development where we have seen the benefits in quality of development as well as pace though such things as the minimum viable product (mvp), the sprint etc. I think we can do more if we bring the idea to our work on leading change.

So, what does “show, don’t tell” mean? In storytelling, it is considered vital to master the art of showing. When you tell rather than show, you simply inform your reader of information rather than allowing them to deduce anything. You’re supplying information by simply stating it. For example, getting a character to describe how someone is feeling. You might report that a character is “tall,” or “angry,” or “cold,” or “tired.” That’s telling.

Showing paints a picture for the reader to develop in their mind’s eye. Rather than telling that your character is angry, show it by describing his face flushing, his throat tightening, his voice rising, his slamming a fist on the table. When you show, you don’t have to tell. Cold? Don’t tell us; show us. Your character pulls her collar up, tightens her scarf, shoves her hands deep into her pockets, turns her face away from the biting wind. Tired? He can yawn, groan, stretch. His eyes can look puffy. His shoulders could slump. Another character might say, “Didn’t you sleep last night? You look shot.” When you show rather than tell, you make the reader part of the experience. Rather than having everything simply imparted to him, he sees it in his mind and comes to the conclusions you want. More importantly they are the reader’s conclusions. What could be better than engaging your reader, giving him an active role in the storytelling, or should we say the story-showing? Clearly, it is a mistake to take show, don’t tell as inviolable. The theatre of the reader or viewers’ mind is more powerful than anything Hollywood can put on the screen. Well-written books and films trigger the theatre of the mind and allow readers to create their own visual, to be active rather than passive participants.

Our insight that if you take this maxim of ‘show don’t tell’ into your leadership you will lead more powerful change, you will lead more sustainable change, it will be everybody’s change not just yours. Looking ahead, think about:

designing the process of change to have much more time allocated to activities where colleagues learn how to change rather than are just told;
changing your behaviour to show new leadership approaches in action; and as we’ve said before,
shifting the balance of your change comms to stories that show the change in action.

Importance of the New

Alistair Russell · December 4, 2020 · Leave a Comment

Like all of us, the Laing Russell team has had many new consulting experiences in recent weeks and months. Our own learning from these new experience has prompted us to reflect on the very significant value of proactively seeking out the ‘new’, the ‘the road less travelled’ to encourage development and change. The challenge of needing to do things differently has been a very positive experience, even though at times it was uncomfortable.

The way we work has had to shift significantly during our time with this pandemic. Perhaps, like many we have a significant, natural bias towards working in ways that we are practiced and comfortable handling. Given the strategic focus and outcomes of our work, we depend critically on a senior executive team being confident and committed to a path. Delivery of that clarity and commitment has always required a team working together in sessions, lasting a few hours or a couple of days.

Classic recent challenges have been how to make that process work in this new context. Both in terms of designing and delivering workshops over a video-conferencing service or when we are all working hard to stay 2m apart in a room and manage our masks.

It’s been hard and at times frustrating. Methods, behaviours and tools that have worked in the traditional context sometimes don’t work so well in this new context either ‘on-line’ or in person. In some ways the most important thing is that we have been challenged to find new ways, forced to re-evaluate and forced back to first principles about what we are trying to achieve with our client.

Three tactical insights from recent weeks and months working in this pandemic context are:

up significantly the quality and amount of preparation you allow yourselves, winging it on the foundation of your many years of experience will not deliver what you want for these key meetings;
keep it even simpler than you may have done in the past, particularly when guiding a client senior exec team through a significant on-line session – shorter, more tightly focused discussion, taking a debate in micro-stages makes it easier to manage, easier to build steadily towards agreement and commitment to a plan of action;
mix it up and keep everyone active, building on established axioms of needing address different parts of our brains, designing and managing the detailed micro-stages of variety and importantly ensures everyone is active on their keyboard inputting ideas, answering poll questions etc..

We’d value your perspective on what you are finding works well in practice.

And to return to our initial, more abstract insight. We know that constraints prompt innovation, we know that it is new experiences that inform the classic learning cycle. We encourage you to take that step further and push yourself to seek out new opportunities to try new things.

Enterprise Change done right: keep your vision in mind

Alistair Russell · November 9, 2020 · Leave a Comment

Whatever the label used by our clients, be that transformation, digital, agile or change, fundamentally we see our purpose as enabling change. Laing Russell is about getting enterprise change done right.

Recent Bain & Company research endorsed our perspective that the central focus of any programme of work in this area should focus on changing the behaviours of the human beings. In contrast to what is often taught on MBAs and promoted by the writers of airport business books, our insight is that enterprise change is complicated and it is unhelpful to reduce the complexity of the real world to simplistic, predictive Newtonian models.

There are many useful models and thinking frameworks that we use to focus and structure clearer, more productive conversations about what to do as leaders of change. Our recent experience is that the foundation for us all is to persist with a clear vision in mind. Success comes from using that shared and explicit clarity of your desired outcome, your vision, to guide your actions in leading change.

In building that shared, explicit clarity on the vision, the framework developed by John Kotter is better than many in creating a checklist to get you started. The focus on a sense of urgency, as Kotter describes it, is key. A critical early step is to develop that clarity around what we would call the rational and emotional ‘case for change’. Crucially, it is important that case has the support of sufficient number of the wider and influential leadership team.

Kotter argues for gaining the support of 75% of the leadership population, although often it is more important to just start. Rather than wait to hit a specific threshold. Our recent insight is that you have to persist with creating that sense of urgency and never stop working at it. This persistence includes using more ‘viral’ communication approaches, building stories as we set out in our last insight piece.

A critical, perhaps the most critical, part of your leadership behaviour is the communication of this vision. In our experience you cannot ever do enough communication, especially two-way communication. Communication is much more conversation than broadcast, more of a process to enable the change to be led by others. Enabling and empowering others to interpret the vision and make it their own, which Kotter calls enlisting that volunteer army facilitates others to translate the vision into their own changed behaviour. Once outcomes start to be delivered, the role of leader moves on to activities such as removing barriers, designing and delivering early short-term wins, and sustaining acceleration of delivery of the change that has been delivered. At all times it is important to institutionalise the change byanchoring or embedding the changes in systems, process and corporate culture.

An important reflection from our recent work is that whilst Kotter’s model is useful in making sure we think things through and develop plans, following the model will not on its own deliver the outcome for you, and you will not realise your vision.

To achieve your vision of lasting change, you must persist with all of the activities that are summarised in Kotter’s model, all of the time. Spot opportunities to deliver or embed your vision that you had not seen in your first round of strategising and planning. Review and learn from experience in a fast cycle. In practice, it never was and never will be a serial, sequential start to finish activities. Leading change is messy, it’s a parallel set of on-going processes that need to be led. Persist and do it right you will deliver.

Stories as a key tool for change

Alistair Russell · October 21, 2020 · Leave a Comment

We got some valuable advice from a learning and development colleague to just start. Start writing up and sharing our insight, don’t wait until you are clear and definitive on what might be called a content strategy. Bring a more agile, iterative approach to our consultancy by sharing our insight with our client community. Especially, given the most important thing for us is to be the node for insightful dialogue with and amongst current and prospective clients.

In that spirit, the thought we had over the last couple of weeks is to highlight and remind us all how critical it is to set out and promote stories as part of the process of delivering change within organisations. And to pay attention to the way the stories are told. The specific steps that you take to build awareness, understanding and commitment across the organisation that ultimately lead to the changed behaviours that deliver the desired outcome.

So, we know it’s not just about having the right answer, the right thing e.g. the right digital strategy, the right enterprise architecture, the right change portfolio, the right statement of a new customer journey, the right solution design, even. We know it’s also about how you enable that ‘right thing’ to engage with the real world of the organisation and the people in it. We learnt many years ago the importance of stakeholder engagement in delivering change, how important communication is. The thought we are adding here is that it is not just getting the messages right, the words in the communication. It’s also about the way that the words are communicated and about building the messages over time to become coherent stories that will enable change. Preparing for and delivering specific conversations at the right time will ensure the stories have the desired outcome.

A good example was a discussion at a panel focused on DevOps that I chaired with HSBC, BBC and Legal and General a week or so ago. We noted that delivering value from DevOps for your organisation is not just about re-orientating your teams along product or service lines, not just about the tools, it’s not even about the ‘micro-standards’ that we made the case for in an earlier insight piece. DevOps is about shifting the behaviour of the people in your organisations as a whole, and not just those that work in digital technology. And a critical part of the process that delivers that shift in behaviour is the stories that are told about DevOps. Stories help the process get started and build confidence that the approach will work. Stories of success and learnings from failure build commitment and performance and stories sustain everyone when it gets hard.

We encourage you to devote time and resource to take your consideration of stakeholders and communication strategy to the next level of maturity. To adopt an approach which is more akin to campaigning. To consider the stories that you would like to be circulating in the organisation about the right things you are doing. And to take care to think through the steps you will take. The conversations, the messages you will deliver at key stages, the evidence and materials you will need to reinforce the power of the stories.

Stories are a key tool in changing behaviour to deliver change.