Leadership kickoff

The digram demonstrates my approach to the depth I go to, so that real change happens, and it sustains itself.

So, as well as the work within the services, it is also important to get the top down management hierarchy development started. The design of services, the structures, measures, policies and procedures, and staff behaviours, are all derived from one area of an organisation — management. Their decisions, focus and behaviours ultimately are responsible for the culture of the organisation.

If we ignore management, then the work going on in the services will either ultimately fall back to what it was, or fail to truly become something new and better.

Step 1 in this process was to ensure all the directors have been through a two hour session where I took them through the background to traditional management, the case for a new management style, and a real case study demonstrating the difference between the two, and how we got there.

So, the chief Executive got his SLT together for one and a half hours, and started… The agenda looked like this:

1. Intro — why we are here
2. Background — traditional management, the problems with the public sector, and the management of complexity.
3. Examples from this council and learning from the work we have been doing in CS.
4. A set of draft principles that I have come up with, for us to discuss and adjust.

The key part of this is not the detail, but the fact that the Chief Exec is demonstrating leadership, and laying down the future direction. It is non-negotiable, but it is to be defined and agreed by everyone present.

The principles are something like this:

a. Make decisions based on knowledge and evidence, not opinion.

b. Redesign our services so that they are truly person centred.

c. Our operations and decision-making will be driven by purpose, not procedures.

d. Ownership and accountability.

e. Focus on the whole end to end of services, not the functions.

f. We own change and delivery, not the change department.

g. Create measures that help us to learn about our real service outcomes and use them to improve.

h. Leadership and what this is truly about using a commonly understood approach that we are going to develop.

The message was clear, and the attitude from the Chief Exec clearly demonstrated the beginning of a new era. And it starts now, not later. There is a whole set of thinking and activities behind each one, that I cant really go into here because of time. But just taking one, (b) it means that we will be increasingly driven by doing the right thing, rather than only driven by budgets. For the public sector, thats a massive change! For us Service Designers, an improtant point is that it is very difficult to simply take out one of the principles and work on that, whilst leaving the others alone. Systemic change encompasses everything that needs to be included for the whole system that is being considered to change together. Traditionally we love to seperate that which should be considered whole — a great example of how reductionism is so seductive in the wrong situation.

A set of practical principles from one of the teams

Two of the directors in the room are starting service design work, so they are already engaged, and were able to give examples in the meeting of that work.

Next steps — Second Session

The next steps is to get the SLT and the next level of management together, and take them through a two hour session that start this process of change off for them. This now has just happened. The purpose of this second session was to help people understand basics of systems perspective and how different from traditional leadership, What this means for how we lead the organisation?

“The outcome is for participants to to be aware, curious and excited by what I (Chief Exec) want us to do over the next 12 months.”

and this was the agenda:

1. Why I have started this development process. (Chief Exec)
2. What is this approach and why. (John)
3. Examples of what some of us are doing. (Planning Manager, Director)
4. Principles and how they relate to the changes. (Chief Exec)
5. What does this mean for the council, staff, us, the public.
6. What needs to change and the barriers? (feedback from audience)
7. Next steps (Chief Exec)

My section was very short and I brought up that fact that fundamentals of current traditional management thinking was formalised 100 years ago. So by using new fundamentals and understanding the difference between Complicated and Complex, we can learn and then become very different manager and leaders. And also we can create very different services.

It is critical that this is led by the leadership, and the transformation person (me) is seen as the facilitator. The main element was the direct feedback, using simple examples and simply story-telling, from the Planning manager and the Director who is setting up the voids work. Their slot was an hour, and the audience of their peers were able to query than and get further knowledge. The suggested structure for the Planning Manager was:

1. What your intention was at the start.

2. What steps have done and are doing.

3. 1–2 examples of the difference between old vs new.

4. What have you personally learned as a manager; purpose, staff culture & motivation, staff engagement and ownership.

5. How are your management behaviours and tactics altering?

The main topic was not the improvement inthe process, both of them stressed:

1. Its about us, the way we think about the work, and the way we manage.
2. Its about truly releasing ourselves from the mental restrictions we have placed on ourselves (using systems thinking)
3. It is about truly putting the Purpose and the person at the heart of the design.
4. It is about learning, experimenting, and working with the front line on change.
5. It is about learning new management skills and behaviours — moving away from traditional management

The Planning Managers feedback was very much from the heart, and off the cuff, and personal. The follow up questions were indicative of people wanting to know more, and after wards three people came up to her and gave her very positive feedback.

For the next stage, I also put up one slide that was a snapshot from front line staff. This was to indicate the depth that we need to look at — this has little to do with processes, it opens our eyes to the extent of the interralationship of all the aspects of the organsiation that become visible when we begin to exercise our systems thinking understanding. This slide gets to the heart of why simply changing a process fails to truly change.

It made them think. I dont want to tackle these issues now, I jsut wanted them to begin to recognise the depth of the challenge, and that we are not simply talking about processes, or the workflow here.

The event loosened the particpants and they engaged, commented, and fed back positively to the whole idea. There were quiet ones as expected but the key was so hear the real stuff from their own colleagues. (not from a consultant)