What changed between 1990 & 2010?

The rate of change, that’s what.

A lot happened between 1990 and 2010.  The internet happened for a start and brought with it entirely new ways of doing business, building relationships, communicating as well as opening-up a whole new world of easy-to-access information.  This combined with a whole heap of other new technologies meant that the rate of change in the external environment accelerated to a whole new level.  And yet in the same intervening time the ability of our organisations to adapt deteriorated.  And that in spite of the zillions of words written on the subject of how to manage change in a VUCA world.

If the world was speeding up, why were organisations slowing down?

This is the $6M dollar question.  Our research was able to indicate and broadly quantify the slow-down but was not designed to identify the why.  

Based on our observations however, we have a hunch.   In this time organisations seemed to get taller, with more layers of management, and wider with much more functional specialism (i.e. in these two decades procurement became widely professionalised, the ratio of HR people to numbers employed  exploded).  So much more of everyone’s work was done within the constraints of an IT system (great for visibility, efficiency and consistency, not so good for continual improvement and adaptation).    Industrial regulation widened to affect more sectors and deepened in its complexity and implications.  A net result of all of these, and other factors, is that organisations became much more cumbersome, getting things done was rarely straight forward. The risk aversion of leaders also infected the mindset of anyone in the organisation with decision authority . Thus, to “prevent the worst happening”, processes, procedures and rules proliferated, and decisions got slowed by passing them up to the boss.  

Sorry for the loaded question, but what do you think the net effect of all of these factors might be on an organisation’s ability to offer a great employee experience, to be nimble, adaptive and to innovate?

What is bureaucratic drift?

Processes, procedures, rules and authorisation levels all have their place, but have you ever noticed how much more common it is for process and procedure to get added and for rules and authorisation requirements to tighten than it is for them to be removed or relaxed?   In the absence of this removal / relaxation activity, year on year, the level of bureaucracy grows without anybody really noticing, a bit like boiling a frog. So, unless there is a routine and deliberate effort to prune back the ever-expanding bureaucracy, we should expect our organisations to fall into a state that we call bureaucratic drift, becoming more and more bogged down in resource sapping and unrewarding activity which is of questionable value.  

How might we go about the job of pruning? 

When teams in organisations use the Vitality Index, we help them make changes in the form of safe-to-try experiments.  Thanks to the research-based diagnostic capability of the Index, the teams are directed towards specific areas of practice that have the greatest potential for each individual team.   Drawing on the knowledge contained in the Vitality Playbook, and the tacit knowledge in our heads, we offer some ideas to stimulate their own suggestions.  We always encourage the team towards changes that lighten the bureaucratic load, rather than add to it.  Here are some examples:  

• Rather than adding a new report, meeting or agenda item, how about removing something that seems to add no value and see what happens?
• Search for and scrap processes / systems that have become institutionalised – the ones that may have had some value in the past but have outlived their ‘see-by-date’.
• Locate processes that are justified under the name of ‘control’ and check to see what actual control there is.  Or do we just have the ‘illusion of control’ but none in reality?
• Check the ‘earners and spenders’ ratio.  Earners are the people who generate the organisations income and add value to customers.  Spenders do not.  Shift spenders to more added-value roles, especially those that add value to customers.
• Crowd source to find out what is currently most difficult for and frustrating to employees and what they would like to see changed.  And then engage them with the change process, from the why to the what to the how.
• Check to see how time is occupied with routine, repetitive activities – that are a bit like running hard on the spot, but don’t generate forward movement.  Then engage people in stuff that will improvement performance in some way – the one-off tasks and events that will create movement
• Search for opportunities to replace tight, prescriptive rules with broad guidelines – and work out with the people involved what they should be.

Be bold; unlike the work of secateurs, pruning bureaucracy is reversible

“Safe-to-try” is the key here, all changes can be made in some way partial, time bound or reversible, so in way there is nothing to lose and learning is guaranteed.  So no need to be timid, be radical.  Unlike other forms of pruning accidents you wont be left trying to re-graft limbs onto trees or losing the wrong people. 

Be bold, explore, experiment, have fun and whatever you do, don’t drift into a place you don’t want to be.

This post was written by Ben, he likes nothing more than helping with teams as they bushwhack their way through the bureaucratic entanglements that frustrate them and stifle the organisations’ performance. 

And who should make the changes?

Another key question to help with those design decisions: is the report something that is ‘done to people’ or is it something that helps the employees themselves to identify and address the issues that need attention?  If the target audience is only managers (or even worse only select managers) don’t expect a lot of improvement action.  The ‘iceberg of ignorance’[1] will strike here.  As a generalisation, managers do not know what the key, operational issues are in their organisations – and they will know even less about the causes of those issues.  More of which later.

Then there is the risk of the report’s existence becoming an end in itself – another box ticked every year or two.  And the longer and more glossy the report is, the less likely that action will result.  Managers are busy people – however pretty the report may be, if it is long, there is little chance that it will be read and studied – and even less that it will stimulate improvement action.  And if the report does not result in some sort of improvement, then what is the point of the report?

[1]     The “iceberg of ignorance” is a concept popularized by a 1989 study by Sidney Yoshida. It posited that front line workers were aware of 100% of the floor problems faced by an organisation, supervisors were aware of only 74%, middle managers were aware of only 9%, and senior executives were aware of only 4% of the problems.

The presenting problem is rarely the one that needs to be fixed…

Symptoms of problems may be useful, in that they may help identify a cause or causes, but in themselves the have little value.  And the one thing that is for sure is that tackling symptoms alone is never going to solve the problem.  Try giving aspirin to someone suffering with a headache.  The symptoms may be controlled, but the person may die because of a much more serious ailment, the symptoms of which were being covered up by the aspirin treatment.

Employee engagement surveys will seldom produce any really valuable insights into causes, which are generally hidden from view.  In the absence if any diagnostic capability, they produce a description of the current state as it is experienced by the employees – but they are just symptoms.  Part of the issue here is the nature of the questions used in the surveys.  Generally, they are questions calling for some sort of judgement.  And direct, judgemental questions may identify symptoms but will never identify causes.  And so valid improvement action becomes an impossibility.  They also invite conscious and unconscious bias….

The opportunities to improve reside in your organisation, not anyone else’s

Finally, how does anyone know what constitutes a good result?  Comparisons with other organisations or aggregated statistics showing norms are not going to help identify whether or not the organisation is a good performer, against a researched model of what good looks like – except in merely relative terms.  “We are better than the average”.  Is the average itself good?  Or rubbish?  “OK, so the average is getting better and so are we”  Does that mean approaching close to perfection?  Or climbing out of the pit of ‘deplorable’?  (Whatever that might mean.)

What are the research data being used to identify an external standard for ‘good’?  If there is one, to what degree does the research identify individual management practices that can make the difference between success and non-success?  Back to symptoms and causes! 

What if we enabled our people to lead the change?

What if there were an alternative approach?  A very different means of generating data, one capable of providing insights into both symptoms and causes.  What if that diagnostic processes also identified top priority, key causes, with no need for long reports.  What if those insights were specific to each and every team in the organisation, thus bypassing the ‘iceberg’ problems.  What if those teams were supported by external facilitators to define their own safe-to-try improvements, to improve the climate in their own team.

Moreover, high levels of diversity and psychological safety in decision-making groups guarantee high levels of inclusion.   These groups always generate higher quality decisions and improvement where it is needed most – that is, where the problems are.  And guess what happens to levels of engagement?

Enabling each and every team in the organisation to work on those areas of practice that will have greatest benefit to their Employee Engagement is the essence of The Vitality Index. You can read more about it here.

If you are curious about shifting the approach to improving Employee Engagement or if you can’t bear the thought of commissioning another report or if you’d just like a thinking partner to help you nail that purpose statement, then we’d love to help.

This post was written by Denis Bourne, co-founder or Organisational Vitality.  Denis ran the research that the Vitality Index diagnostic is based upon.   He has over 40 years’ experience helping organisations become more autonomous, innovative, and change enabled, and, as a happy consequence, also enjoying fantastic employee experience.