The Magnificent Seven: Strategies for Successful Change

publication date: Nov 20, 2006

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author/source: David Ollerhead (November 2006)

Part II

David Ollerhead is a director of Decision Focus, a professional services consultancy that specialises in rapidly delivering performance improvement through process

In Part 1, last month, David set the scene by evoking the movie The Magnificent Seven, where a besieged village seeks outside help to rid itself from bandits. It winds up being helped by seven talented gunslingers, each with a different reason for responding to the villagers’ urgent call. Business organisations, besieged from all sides by competitive pressures can sometimes seem a lot like that village. But what your organisation needs is not seven magnificent sharpshooters but rather seven magnificent strategies for success. Once you have them in place, you can start drawing way ahead of your competition.

Here, I’ve boiled down your game-plan into these Magnificent Seven Strategies for Success. Implementing them will give your organisation a superb chance of becoming the world-beating organisation you want it to be.

In Part I last month, David looked at embracing change, engaging stakeholders, and putting your customers first. In this article, the theme is continued to its finale with the four remaining elements.

The Fourth Magnificent Strategy – prioritise your effort

An important fundamental matrix that plots an organisation’s gain from change against its pain in delivering the change, meaning the potential benefits the organisation could obtain from the change process. These would typically relate to the benefits the organisation reaps in terms of better serving the customers’ agenda. These must be related to the performance objective that you set for the change. A good starting point is to think of the three vital issues of Quality, Cost and Time from the perspective of your customers. In other words:

How can you improve the quality of what you deliver to your customers?

How can you deliver it to them in a way that is more cost-efficient for you, and more cost-effective for them?

How can you deliver it to them sooner?

The gains would therefore relate to the same three variables of quality, cost and time, but focused around which is the most important to you.

 Again, it’s all about giving the customer a better deal. The leading international clothing company Benetton has such efficient and flexible processes in place at its factories that it can literally modify colours of its clothing on a week-by-week basis to respond to essentially unpredictable changes in customer demand. This shows the calibre of customer focus that can be achieved. Even if you are not in the fashion business, there is a lesson to be learnt here.

The ‘pain’ consists essentially of the difficulties of effecting the changes in the process in question.

How can you assess gain and pain in advance?

It would be misleading to suggest doing so is easy; it isn’t. The way to do it is to work hard and thoughtfully with the project team. Look hard at the organisation from both a tactical and strategic perspective. Try to take every step that can be taken to understand where the gains and pains will arise. Make practical use of all the information you harvest, and keep on harvesting it.

It is highly logical – indeed it is essential – for an organisation to start a process of change directed at maximising potential by focusing on areas where the organisation will enjoy a high gain and a low pain. Changes here are by definition the easiest ones to achieve and in essence amount to low-hanging fruit that can easily be picked. This type of change often tends to be evolutionary as it is an evolution of what you are currently doing.

In practice, however, quite often the highest benefits can be obtained from ‘high gain/high pain’. This is because the very fact that achieving these gains will cause pain in the organisation may have been preventing the gains from being won in the past and such gains may often be of vital importance to the organisation.

To achieve changes here, the changes often have to be more revolutionary and will consequently contain far more risk.

The Fifth Magnificent Strategy – work together

In practice, it’s very often the case that what is preventing an organisation achieving its potential is the fact that individual departments get more preoccupied with their own agendas than with giving their best to the organisation’s customers.

This will usually manifest itself in communication problems between different departments that have the negative consequence of giving a worse service to customers than would ideally be the case. The solution is to ensure that each department knows precisely what deliverables are expected of them from the other. Departments must also be encouraged to communicate with each other and to take vigorous efforts to understand one another’s problems and not strive to run themselves as feudal empires in complete isolation from one another.

There are sometimes personal factors here that militate against departments giving their best to the organisation and playing their full role in contributing to the benefits the customer derives. Individual managers in departments may, again, be accustomed to doing things in a certain way, with this certain way being more related to the agenda of those individual managers rather than customers.

Another problem is that organisations tend to be structured vertically in silos: ensuring that different departments’ priorities and time-frames mesh satisfactorily may be far from easy.
 Always remember that customers want (and are entitled to expect) instant results and they also want to experience a service level that is plainly focused around their own needs. Why shouldn’t they? After all, they are spending their money. Departments that respond sluggishly to customer requirements are unlikely to contribute much to the organisation fulfilling itself.

The Sixth Magnificent Strategy – devise a road map for change

You’d be mad to get in a car to take your family away on holiday without a map showing you where you’re going. You need a road map for the changes you want to engineer at your organisation, too.

How do you start drawing up this road map? Experience shows that you need to start by focusing on your organisation’s processes.

A process at an organisation can be defined as a series of activities that produce a deliverable to meet one or more needs of the process customer.

Why is it so important to focus on processes when you are setting out to engineer change? Because, for one thing, your organisation’s processes are, by definition, at the very heart of what you are about as an organisation. For another thing, there is a refreshing objectivity about processes. They can usually be investigated, looked at and refined without people feeling that they themselves are personally being told to change or in some way criticised. Business processes are independent of emotions, or at least should be, and if you find that someone is clinging on to a particular part of a process and being possessive and emotional about it, that person just might have something to hide.

You need an objective, non-emotional roadmap for change, to ensure that your organisational family arrives at its destination safe and in good health.

You create a road map for change out of your business processes by investigating those existing processes carefully and drawing up details of how they can be improved – or if necessary discarded. People do sometimes get irrationally attached to processes, and you are entitled to be on your guard whenever you find someone who is.

People too often see a process as an end in itself rather than a means to an end. Don’t let them. Remember that processes exist purely to enable your organisation to deliver something of a certain quality and at a certain cost (ie. to you and to your customer and at a certain time). These three factors – quality, cost and time – are all variables and are therefore all susceptible to improvement.

No process deserves to be made sacred and sacrosanct. People may well revere a process that allows them to continue ploughing a furrow of mediocre or only average performance, when instead what they need to do is to rethink both the design of the plough and the depth and direction of the furrow.

The Seventh Magnificent Strategy – remember that it’s people who make change happen

A key message of the movie The Magnificent Seven is that, as things turn out, the gunslingers are essentially a means to an end. The villagers only truly win liberation when they are banded together and work in unison.

In much the same way, change in organisations can only happen when the other strategies are used to mobilise the people in the organisation to change. Organisations are, clearly, composed of far more things than just people. But while those things – such as buildings, ships, airplanes, chemical plants, international communication networks and so on – are the obvious visible assets of organisations, it’s the people operating them who really matter.

 The only real catalyst for change is people. Mobilise your people. Give them positive, solid and constructive reasons to change the way they do things. Make them want to make change happen. Make them want to be on your side. If you can do this, the sky really is the limit.
David Ollerhead is a director of Decision Focus, a professional services consultancy that specialises in rapidly delivering performance improvement through process. Decision Focus was founded in 1995 and has carried out significant projects for a wide range of organisations across the private and public sectors.

Email: dollerhead@decisionfocus.co.uk www.decisionfocus.co.uk Tel: 020 7242 7127