Rapid Transformation - Integrating INPACT into Tabrizi’s road-map for fast and successful change

Behnam Tabrizi is a Consulting Professor at Stanford University’s Department of Management Science & Engineering. His 90-day transformation model is based on 10 years research with 500 companies and is accepted as an effective approach to achieving ‘breakthrough’ change in organisations such as Apple, Nissan, GM, HP etc. 

Tabrizi’s Rapid transformation model comprises three main phases, each lasting 30 days, preceded by a  30-90 day Pretransformation stage and followed by a 6-12 months implementation stage.

The pre-Transformation stage is critical. This is where the organisation recognises that it needs to change and takes the first steps to make it happen.

According to Tabrizi, those organisations that have succeeded in their transformation programmes, have done so due to 4 critical success factors:

1. Full, passionate commitment and buy-in
2. Integrative
3. All-encompassing
4. Fast

The first of these needs to be built upon the work undertaken at the Pretransformation stage. It is at this Pretransformation stage that the INPACT models and tools come into their own, offering the means to generate the recognition and sense of urgency among senior managers that is needed for rapid transformation to succeed.

The INPACT Readiness Assessment:

• Assesses the capability of the organisation to accommodate change
• Quantifies the barriers to change and identify actions that would be needed to overcome these
• Uses this data to change senior management thinking.

The assessment would consider such aspects as:

• Management culture
• Process capability maturity
• Trust
• Project complexity

An INPACT assessment requires 1-5 days on-site, depending on the size of the organisation. The data generated would be presented to senior management at a half-day workshop, where we would work to get them to ‘own’ the issues and develop strategies to deal with them.

These strategies would be written up as an Action Plan which would often include preparative work with managers and staff across the organisation to shift perceptions and enable culture and process transformation.

Having created the momentum for change, we would rely on the Tabrizi Rapid Transformation model as a blue-print for how to run the transformation programme.

Integrating INPACT into Tabrizi’s road-map ensures fast and successful change. 

If anyone is interested in exploring this further, please contact me at peterd@imaginist.co.uk   

For more on INPACT, go to www.inpactuk.net

 

Organisations have to think differently before they behave differently

 

I have been looking at the reasons why large and complex organisations have such difficulty in bringing in changes that are designed to improve performance but often fail to do so.

These can be private sector corporates or public sector organisations – the thing they have in common is that they employ a lot of people in a multiplicity of teams, groups, divisions, departments and operational and business units.

The simple conclusion is one that many have come to before us: an organisation cannot improve its performance by simply introducing new systems and processes. The desired benefits don’t come from the new processes, nor do they lie at the door of the project manager, or even the chief executive (although his role is crucial). They come from the changes its people make to the way they work.  

But people have to think differently before they behave differently. The key is how to get people to think differently.

John Seddon, the systems guru, would argue that behaviour is a product of the system you put people in. He says people are not naturally idle and devious, it’s the command-and-control approach to management that assumes they are – and so they become so.

To a great extent I think he is right. You only have to compare organisations which have empowered their people with those that measure and control every aspect of the workflow to notice the fundamental difference in pace, enthusiasm and sense of shared purpose that comes across from the moment you walk into the offices.   

And people in the organisation will only begin to think and behave differently if they are given the leadership and opportunity to do so – in other words, it’s the top management team that has to start thinking differently, before the rest will follow. So to return to the proposition: the key is how to get the top management team to think differently.

Seddon would, at this stage, argue strongly for the introduction of a systems approach, which requires a re-assessment of the whole approach to meeting customer needs and designing processes around that.

As a ‘jobbing’ consultant, proposing such a revolutionary solution to most clients just isn’t feasible. So although we might agree with the power of systems thinking to achieve a real sea-change in customer satisfaction and the organisation’s performance, the reality is that most clients will demand a ‘business as usual’ approach. 

That does not mean we should give up on the key question: how to get people – and specifically the top management team - to think differently.

One approach which I am now using with clients, is to carry out an assessment of the complexity of the project in the context of the organisation’s capability to accommodate change. This uses a Project Readiness Assessment toolkit based based on a methodology we call INPACT (Integrated Process and Culture Transformation).

INPACT addresses the dual core of a change project: processes and people, and uses a set of models and tools to quickly identify the underlying causes of actual or potential failure of a project. The output from this assessment is used to work with senior managers to shift their thinking about how to achieve the benefits they need: efficiency, cost savings, improved quality of service etc.

The first model we use is the Management Culture model, which describes the dominating management style of an organisation (or at least that part of the organisation being assessed).

The model is based on the realisation that there is an underlying tension between the individual and the organisation which affects every aspect of the way that organisation works; its management culture and its capability to introduce - and take advantage of - change. The nature of this tension needs to be understood, brought out and dealt with, if we want to change the way the people in the organisation think and behave – and be successful in bringing about change and improvement.

Seddon’s systems approach sensibly looks at the workflow from outside-in and gives far more responsibility to the people closest to the customer (internal or extrernal) for management of the variety of decisions that need to be made to achieve high customer satisfaction first time around. But he doesn’t focus directly on the people, their needs and aspirations, their attitudes and motivation, which is the purpose of the Management Culture model. If you do that, it is easy to spot misalignment and disempowerment – two indicators of potential barriers to success when implementing a change project.

Consider, in your own organisation, your responses to the following three statements:

 

1)       My team works:	Score
Totally without my intervention – they will come to me if they need me	1
Without my intervention under normal circumstances, for routine work	2
I need to keep my eye on them	3
Unless I am on them constantly, nothing gets done	4

 

2)       My manager represents my interests well, consults me when necessary and keeps me fully informed about any changes that might affect me, my job or my area of responsibility
a)       Totally	1
b)       Mostly	2
c)       Not too confident about this	3
d)       Not at all – I have to find this out through the grapevine	4

 

3)       I have a good relationship with my peer group - other managers at my level in the organisation. We share information and ideas and they keep me informed about any changes that might affect me, my job or my area of responsibility
a)       Totally	1
b)       Mostly	2
c)       Not too confident about this	3
d)       Not at all – I have to find this out through the grapevine	4

If you scored more than 6 out of a total of 12, you may need to pay attention to the culture barriers that will operate to slow down any project that seeks to introduce changes to the way people work in your organisation. A score of 12 indicates a significant problem which could stop a change project in its tracks!

This set of questions is only one of the inputs that we feed into the Management Culture model to help us understand where the barriers to change will lie. The model also points to the approach to take in order to shift the way people think and behave.

But looking at management culture is only the starting point. We also need to look at the capability of the organisation to manage its processes.

Brett Champlin and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University developed a generic 5-step Capability Maturity Model to describe process management capability, which allows us to map this very effectively. An organisation with a low level of process capability is unlikely to be disciplined enough to be able to  standardise processes across the organisation effectively.

The interesting finding is that an organisation’s management culture and its process capability maturity correlate quite closely in many organisations.

In this sense, Seddon is absolutely right: the behaviour of people is a product of the system you put them in. An organisation which has an aligned and empowered workforce is likely also to have introduced standardised and efficient processes, which are being used consistently by everyone to achieve high levels of customer satisfaction. By contrast, if the organisation is inward-looking and bureaucratic, its people will be focused on meeting imposed performance targets, rather than working together to meet the needs of their customers.

Changing this behaviour must start with a change in how the organisation manages both its people and its processes. And that means that senior level managers have to start to think differently and involve their people in planning, implementing and ‘owning the changes. This is not revolutionary, but it is transformational. And we regard most change projects of any size as transformational – and not simple.

Which brings us to the third key model in the INPACT toolkit, which looks at the  complexity of the project. We measure this and map it against the organisation’s management culture and process capability to come up with an indication of how successful we think the project will be in coming in on time and within budget, and how well it will deliver the planned benefits.

Typically, a project will be more complex than anticipated by its sponsors, will exceed the capability of the organisation to bring in standardised systems and processes and to achieve the necessary changes in people’s behaviour. However, with the insights that INPACT can bring, senior managers can put in place the actions needed to overcome the barriers to success, whether they are more appropriate resourcing, better benefits realisation planning, greater involvement of customer-facing people in the design and implementation of the changes, or even (as has been the case on a number of occasions) a parallel initiative to develop a more mature, knowledge-sharing and empowered management culture.   

Or in other words, start thinking differently.

 

The INPACT models are described in more detail on our website at: www.inpactuk.net

Peter Duschinsky can be contacted at: peterd@imaginist.co.uk

Mapping an organisation’s management culture - the key to successful change

Summary:  There is an underlying tension between the individual and the organisation which affects every aspect of the way that organisation works, its management culture and its capability to introduce - and take advantage of - change. The nature of this tension needs to be understood, brought out and dealt with, if we want to be successful in bringing change into an organisation.

Although the primary focus for most managers involved in delivering change and transformation is on the project or programme, in practice how well they plan and implement it may not be what dictates how successful the project turns out to be in delivering the desired benefits. Often it rests as much on the capability of the organisation to cope with change and take advantage of new systems, particularly where these cut across its traditional structural and cultural boundaries.

One of the most important secrets of success to delivering a transformation project is paying attention to the way that people interact with the organisation – the management culture of the organisation. This paper will describe the model that has been developed by the Imaginist Company to bring out the fundamental principles underpinning any management culture and understand the dynamics of the interaction between the individual and the organisation. It will then describe some of the ways to use this model to help you shift the dominant management culture and implement change. 

Any two organisations working in the same field and delivering similar goods or services to the same customers will have their own way of doing things, their own unique culture, which, if ignored, will undermine any attempt to implement change and modernisation.

The reason? Different groups of managers and staff develop different approaches, different ways of thinking, different values – a different management culture. The stronger this culture, the more difficult it will be to effect change. 

Underlying this cultural landscape are two potentially conflicting forces:

• the individual and his/her needs and aspirations
• the organisation and how it operates.

A long while back, a management consultant named Warren Kinston created a model to describe the evolution of management cultures, from dysfunctional to highly effective and identified the tension between the individual and the organisation as a fundamental factor. He noted that the effectiveness of an organisation depended on the extent to which it was able to bring these forces into alignment.

(This tension between the individual and the organisation is inherent in the TQM continuous improvement model and many of the change management models in use over the years, but none of them have brought it out as a fundamental underlying principle, which it is.)

This model has been adapted to enable us to map the management culture of an organisation.

The Management Culture model provides a framework for us to identify the dominant management style and indicate how well the organisation will cope with change.

The model is based on an evolutionary spiral, with each style building on the previous styles, as described below. As you read through the descriptions, consider which description or descriptions most accurately describes your organisation (or the part of the organisation where you may be implementing a change project).

1.  Pragmatic/ Anarchic  -  In your organisation, it’s the results that count. Management is arms-length and rewards success, so individual members of the team are left to do more or less what they like, as long as they achieve results. There are some laid-down procedures, but people only follow them or take up a new initiative if they see benefits for themselves in doing so.

2.  Structuralist  - Rules and procedures govern how your organisation works. This may have allowed the organisation to become over-bureaucratic, with ‘silo working’ hindering the sharing of ideas and knowledge across the organisation - sometimes this even extends to Board level. Change is slow and decisions are often passed down, with formal but inadequate consultation.

3.  Dialectic  - The culture in your organisation puts value on sharing knowledge, as opposed to having (and protecting) knowledge. Managers and staff are encouraged to network and exchange ideas and information and, as a result, silo working is not a significant barrier to change, which is undertaken consultatively. 

4. Aligned   -  As a result of strong leadership and a good level of dialogue between people, the values and aspirations of the staff in your organisation are in line with its policies and strategic direction. People feel valued and understand how they fit into the scheme of things, so are more motivated to accept change that will benefit the organisation, even if it doesn’t reduce their workload.  

5.  Pragmatic/ Aligned  -  Managers in your organisation trust their staff to act in the best interests of the organisation, so decisions are made close to the customer, quickly and effectively.

6.  Empiricist   -  Information about the ‘real world’ is important to your organisation and flows across departments as well as up and down the management hierarchy. Because it does not suffer delays or distortion from passing through departmental silos, the information is timely and accurate, which means that management decisions are well-informed and effective. 

7.  Imaginist  -  Because your organisation is working well, senior managers are not focused on short-term fire-fighting and intervention, allowing them the time to concentrate on longer-term planning and more important issues. They are operating with timely and accurate information, which means they can make intuitive, high quality and far-reaching decisions - and that means the organisation is able to cope well with change.  

8.  Systemist   -  Your CEO makes him/herself visible and available, and is vocal in championing changes and issues that are critical to the organisation’s success, but his/her leadership style is to steer from behind and build longer-term change, rather than intervening in operational issues. This works because the organisation has a strong and effective Board and an aligned and empowered workforce.

9.  Pragmatic/Empowered   -  You are working in an organisation that has set itself the challenge of being the best in class. You are fully empowered to plan and manage your own workload, within a supportive management culture.  This includes working collaboratively in teams and leading and participating in change projects, to continually improve the effectiveness of the organisation to meet its customers’ needs.  

Did you recognise your organisation?

If you want to find out how to use this model and why it works, get in touch: peterd@imaginist.co.uk   

 

 

KM Capability Maturity - How does one create a knowledge-sharing culture in an organisation and bring it to maturity quickly?

Over the past year, Imaginist has been developing a new methodology which integrates people and process transformation to improve the success rate of complex change programmes in large public sector organisations: INPACT An important part of this is focused on assessing an organisation’s capability maturity:- the capability of an organisation to align and empower their workforce, to achieve compliance to new ways of working and to bring in standardised, managed processes across the organisation.

But capability maturity can be measured in another way, too.

We have been leading a Knowledge Management audit exercise for a public sector organisation which is in the middle of restructuring and re-inventing itself. One of the main findings was that there had been no official recognition of the degree to which knowledge lay in people’s heads and of the huge importance of social and peer-group networks to enable this knowledge to be shared and disseminated in the original organisation. Consequently no action had been taken to avoid the wholesale corporate memory loss and the dispersal of these trusted informal channels for knowledge-sharing, as people changed jobs and the organisation underwent its transformation.

The original networks had grown organically over time and depended heavily on people knowing other people and having the motivation to share knowledge with them. In some cases the incentive to share would come from an enquiry: “Who do you know who can help me with this?” The trust relationship would thus be extended. In other cases the exchange of ideas and information would be casual and opportunistic - a conversation at a meeting or over lunch or coffee.

The new organisation cannot afford to wait for these trusted networks to form spontaneously, but there is plenty of evidence to show that imposing a Knowledge Management strategy and structured system is also not the answer. As we saw, the success of the orginal networks was the willingness of people to share knowledge - not a feature one finds typically in a newly-formed, complex organisation with many people focused on learning their new roles and others brought in for the first time.

How can one instigate a knowledge-sharing culture and bring it to maturity in a relatively short time?

Well, by insisting that everyone takes responsiblity for the sharing of knowledge and giving this clear priority. That means focusing attention on discussion and exchange of ideas, involving eveyone from the CEO to clerical assistants, and including all functions from customer-facing staff (who typically do not comunicate internally) to IT boffins (who tend not to commuicate at all!).

Networks need to be sponsored and encouraged. The time and space needs to be allocated to this - it won’t happen otherwise (so its not good enough to rely on keen participants gathering in the pub on Friday nights!). Participation needs to be a key performance criteria for staff and manager appraisals and the importance of tacit vs explicit knowledge has to be central to the organisation’s approach to achieving its objectives.

Upskilling people and giving them the motivation is only one part of the task. The other is providing some simple but crucial tools - a people directory (with pictures) and an Intranet that everyone can access, search and input to, as a natural part of their job. (It almost doesn’t matter how the intranet is structured - what is vital is a good search facility.)

Of course one can go further - David Snowdon at Cognitive Edge has developed powerful tagging and analysis tools to enable unstructured knowledge (like this blog) to be searched and included in the knowledge base.

I’d be interested in hearing from others who have developed approaches that have worked successfully to transform an organisation’s capability to manage its knowledge effectively.

PeterD

Understanding the impact of distrust in KM programmes

I have been struck by the impact of distrust between members of an organisation on their attempts to set up and run knowledge management programmes. Having developed a model for quantifying distrust and applied it within our INPACT (Integrated Process and Culture Transformation) methodology, I have been experimenting with using it within a KM programme.The model started life as a series of scribbles while reading a Steven Covey book: ‘The Speed of Trust‘. The book sets out the clear relationship between a manager’s ability to gain trust and his/her effectiveness as a leader and change agent. But it fell short of quantifying this relationship - surely, I thought, one could develop a model to do this? So I did - and it works.

It’s simple really - all the best models are! Ask a manager 3 questions, each measured against a 4 point scale (poor-excellent).
The 3 questions relate :
1. senior managers
2. staff
3. managers in an equivalent position in other parts of the organisation with whom he/she interacts.
(If you want to know the questions we use, come and ask!).
Put the scores together and convert the result into a %. This is your distrust factor.

How does it impact on change and knowledge management? Well, think about it…

If I ask you for some information or to make a change to a process and you trust me, you’ll probably do it. If you don’t, you probably won’t! In exteme cases, where there is real distrust between us, I may have to ask several times, then escalate it to my boss to involve his opposite number and finally get the information or the change late and/or not at all. And the amount of time and effort I need to expend rises in direct proportion to the level of distrust.

So in a change project I can apply the distrust factor to the planned cost and timescales and come up with an estimate of the extra work and delay likely to be incurred unless the root cause is dealt with.

Similarly in a KM programme, I can assess the degree to which I should assume knowledge sharing and effectiveness of any KM strategy across the organisation.

If you are interested in trying this out in your own organisation, contact me

PeterD