When things go sideways...

A couple of week ago I asked my colleague Matt about the football team he manages, and he told me that during the team talk that weekend he’d reminded the team that they would always make mistakes, face challenges, and have problems to overcome, what mattered was how they reacted to them.

It got me thinking about how Active Lincolnshire react to the challenges we face and how we spot things sooner so that we can be agile, responsive and shift to improved positive experiences quicker. For me it stems from taking the time to recognise challenges and mistakes and importantly seeking ways to overcome them.

There are a few ways we do this. The first is personal reflection through an end-of-week logging of challenges and wins, I talk about some of our earlier ones in this blog from May. This kind of real-time capture finds the smaller, immediate frustrations that once solved can easily be forgotten when reviewing a project at the end. By logging them, we make it possible for colleagues to identify small tweaks, potential future challenges and explore options to problem-solve, for example when one of us was struggling for speakers on climate change and sustainability, that nudge on the challenges sheet generated contacts from the wider team. Or when new staff were confused by all the acronyms the glossary was shared and added to.

Then we have a formally structured review of progress. To bring it back to a laboured sport metaphor, it is the obvious moments in time that you review tactics. Whether that is at half-time, post-match or the end of the season.

When designing the Dyson vacuum cleaner, James Dyson went through 5,126 prototypes. He had a vision, he tried something, it failed, he refined and tried again. It was a cycle of test, learn, adapt to get to version 5127 that made it to market.

Our Together Fund programme is similar. After the first month the lead officer and I sat down and mapped the processes. We noted what wasn’t working and we built new methods and mechanisms. Some worked, we kept those, some didn’t and we tried something else. Through this monthly routine we’ve improved the website information, the communication methods, the capacity and distribution of work across colleagues, the flow from stage to stage of the internal processes. In doing this, we’ve acknowledged that meeting monthly isn’t frequent enough to react to the challenges that arise, so we’ve switched to weekly.

A problem shared is a problem halved: Several organisations across Lincolnshire had contacted us about how to finance their varied capital and revenue ideas, they’d each spoken to the most appropriate officer based on their area of focus matched to the organisations primary aim. There were two main problems occurring, firstly an inconsistent experience for the organisation, our staff currently have varying degrees of knowledge, experience and newness to Active Lincolnshire and the national picture. Secondly, wildly varying degrees of information supplied by the external organisations leading to lots of back and forth between them and the allocated Active Lincolnshire lead before we can help.

I'm not sure the problem would have been as quickly identified had the team not felt able to speak up about their lack of knowledge and seek help to answer the questions organisations were asking of them. It's the culture of seeking high performance by vocalising challenges that helped the team identify a challenge, define the parameters and scale of the problem to inform possible solutions and find a preferred option that is simple and efficient, which they are now implementing.

Unlike competitive sports, I believe that we have a duty to share what we learn from applying new and different tactics to triumph over our challenges, so others (colleagues, partners, the wider system) benefit. We can do this best if we do three things as a matter of course, rather than an exception.

1. Define what we want to learn from our work at the beginning. By doing this, we can more easily identify what data we need to collect to evidence the changes that arise. Sharing that will the system to influence the future. In next months blog I will explain how Active Lincolnshire are doing this and what to expect in the future from us.
2. Review as we go. Building in specific points at which we formally review the journey so far. The frequency and depth of this may vary throughout a project lifespan and differ from piece of work to piece of work. For long projects defining learning and reviewing will be an often repeated cycle.
3. Report what we know now with recommendations and tools that others can use to avoid our mistakes, but also share theirs so we, and others learn and improve in turn. No longer will we just report at the end. End of project reports will bring together all the previously released learning and final reflections and recommendations.