A couple of weeks ago group of us HR professionals sat in a room and listened to Ibrar Hussain from Vanguard Consulting, a global firm started in the UK (www.vanguard-method.com) passionately tell us we’re doing the wrong stuff! I’m not sure we agreed but it was thought provoking!
So here’s a bit of a summary of what he had to say – now to be fair I’ve never really looked at systems thinking in any detail at all, so this is all my interpretation!
Ibrar was talking about systems thinking which has as one of its key concepts that performance is made up of 5% people and 95% systems. By people he means individual variation in performance. By systems he means the way roles are set up, work is designed and managed and organisational design. His assertion was that performance is affected by variation in the system not in individual performance so to improve business results you need to tackle the system! He’s not advocating ignoring people at all – they need coaching, development, their work managed, recognition and feedback. What I think he was saying was we might think we’re HR rock stars but we’re only impacting 5% of what we could!
Incentives, appraisals, processes – you’re doing it all wrong was his message. He did it politely and he did admit that this thinking is all counter-intuitive, or as one of my colleagues said as I was explaining it, “it all sounds a bit disingenuous”. However, even though I don’t agree that we only impact 5% and his ideas made a lot of us uncomfortable, I did start to wonder, is this the reason that HR really doesn’t make the impact we all know it could? We often blame it on being under-resourced or misunderstood. But are we limiting ourselves to the individual people issues and ignoring the systems and how work is managed? But no I thought, we all know that culture makes a difference and we spend a lot of time rolling out culture initiatives, so we are working on the system – aren’t we? Well according to Ibrar we’re not! We’re working on the symptoms not on the real causes of why the culture is working – and the reasons are usually that we don’t understand what our customers want and spend a lot of our time dealing with what he called “failure demand” (in Kaizen terms this is called Waste). Fixing up mistakes or delivering the wrong thing! He believes culture change is free if you adopt systems thinking (which of course he would as this is what he does for a job – and he’s moved thousands of miles from the UK to Melbourne he’s so passionate about it).
He used a company called AVIVA from the UK to illustrate. They’ve used systems thinking for several years and their culture is described as:
- Customer Centric – customers buy what they need the company doesn’t sell the product that they want to sell that week
- Multi-disciplinary – employees are up-skilled so that they can solve issues and deal with customer needs right the first time – no handing off to other departments and the customer getting lost in the “ether”
- Measures customer satisfaction not targets – yes that’s right it’s a call centre with no Average Handling Time and Call Targets – and it’s successful!
- They elicit ideas from the team to improve how they work and eliminate waste from the processes and systems – meaning highly engaged employees and continuous improvement
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWhXViQBXmE for a quick overview.
He talked about how we manage people and I realised in the last 50 years what we think about in terms of family composition and how we live has transformed, the way we manage people in organisations hasn’t! Sure we’ve added some modern takes but is it really that different? We’re still using the old control and command model with the carrot and stick as our key motivator. Our focus on structure and rigid process means we’re not able to adapt to variety and in fact we dehumanise work (you just need to work in a call centre to know it’s all about scripts and following an exact process and keeping to the average call time and hitting your call target – the stats might look good but are the customers getting what they need and are the staff happy?).
We’re hearing a lot about managing generations in the workplace and the Gen Y and the Millennials need to know about the WHY not just what they are doing. With systems thinking it all starts with the WHY – why are you in business and why are you adding value for your customers. Then systems and work is organised to deliver that why. It might sound simple but it’s incredibly hard – don’t have incentives rather reward people on contribution? What – how do you even start to think about that and how you might measure contribution? Focus on creating a well-oiled humane system – again what do you mean? Processes right? Not as we know it! According to systems thinking processes are about knowledge and learning not having a pre-conceived plan! Yeah right! That would be chaos. What about people – they need to be managed! Is it people or is it work that needs to be managed systems thinking would challenge us with. Sure people need development, coaching, feedback and recognition but people’s behaviour is a result of the system not the people. What? Now your brain is spinning – how are we meant to deal with that?
So what has this got to do with HR Continuous Improvement? Everything – if we want to step up and lead our organisations in improvement we need to look to other disciplines, other industries and thought leaders who just might seem a little crazy right now – open our minds and look for ideas and create improvements that we haven’t yet even conceived! Are you up for the challenge?
HR Continuous Improvement 