NOT OR but AND

For July's blog, I thought I’d share some experiences on how we are better finding our way into the future as an organisation, through the murky and ever-changing quick sands of reality.

I’m quite an intuitive thinker, and whilst I can get into the detail, my go-to is big picture first. I assume that the detail can be sorted out if the big picture works.  And yes, sometimes that can mean I “ass”ume.  But often it works. So, in thinking about change for service delivery, my mind tries to leap to an end state that feels plausible for delivering what we need to for our clients. 

Learning from my colleagues over the past five or so years has instilled in me a respect for lean start up iterative thinking, particularly around product-market fit.  What I’ve learned leading a change programme at Hymans (this is my seventh blog on the topic if you’re interested?) is you essentially need to take the same approach for continuous improvement.  Not because we completely lack product market fit, but because the service is delivered by people, and people never quite work exactly as you expect.  And on any meaningful timescale, client priorities will evolve too.

So, my instincts have been to focus on vision, and have slowly but steadily learned more respect for those who rightly emphasise continuous improvement as the way to adapt.  In many ways, following the Toyota way. But that doesn’t mean I now place less value on vision. NOT continuous improvement OR having a vision, but continuous improvement AND having a vision.  Hopefully any computer scientists reading this enjoy the logic gates. 

One of the key benefits of having the vision is we hopefully have fewer tricky decisions to unwind, and it’s easier to coordinate our teams’ activities.  But given the pace the world changes around us we’ll there will inevitably be the odd step back for each few steps forward.   

If you prefer stoical philosophy to logic gates, then as Seneca wrote “If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favourable.”

My experience is that there’s something about human psychology that either favours:

·       the concrete or clear plans for the next step of continuous improvement, or

·       the intuitive appeal of a vision for a better future that is many steps away and might never be reached. 

An expert in Jung could probably give a better explanation than I can, but it does feel like it fits with the Insights wheel we regularly use at Hymans.

Personally,  I hope over time I am becoming more adept moving from strategy to initiatives to roadmaps to key results and back again – and being clear where we are in conversations.  That recognition of what level I’m talking at has reduced miscommunication a lot – as often debates seem to be because we’re at cross purposes, rather than cross with each other or actually disagreeing.  Just having parallel arguments.  A wise woman once described giving people the framework to orient their discussions as map making.  That metaphor really worked for me.  The next step is the zoomed-in version of google maps when you’re a short walk from your destination, the strategy is the zoomed-out version where you’re trying to plan a big trip.  To get from A to B you need both (or AND), it’s not one being better than the other.

What I find hardest is those who feel the complexity of the world isn’t there at all.  For things that involve human behaviours, whether clients wants and needs, or our team’s approach to delivering services, some people want to plan their way through the whole change.  Deadlines and milestones for these people can trump learning and adapting.  Which feels completely unrealistic in a complex human world of emotions, and divergent ways of being and doing.  Full disclosure, my natural bias is towards the human centred approach to change rather than a results driven one.

Which is not to say deadlines don’t matter.  But if you’re doing something genuinely creative and innovative, it’s impossible to say exactly how long it’s going to take.  The more innovative the task, the harder prediction becomes.  But then again, lots in our world isn’t that complex because the processes evolve quite slowly – Hymans works in pensions after all.  A planning mindset can be very effective in bringing order when we know what we need to know to deliver.

The final word will be a perspective from the book, Toyota Kata again.  A sign of a healthy organisation is a continually improving and adapting one.  Because our world, our markets, our teams, our clients all keep changing. So, our processes and services will inevitably degrade.  That is unavoidable.  If we see ourselves having regular “projects” or “change efforts” to catch up with best practice we’re in a bad place.  This is not how we’ll give our best to our clients.  It’s continuous improvement, aligned around a clear vision of what our clients need, that is the only way we can really do our best.  And doing our best for our clients, and their members, is a purpose that to me at least is really worth striving for.