Why has accountability, which is merely a principle of sound managerial practice, gotten such a bad rap? Senior managers have too often invoked it as a way of getting things done that they themselves don’t know how do in our less-than-perfect organizational systems and structures. Sometimes this dubious ploy actually works. After all, when their boss says, “Just get it done!” many people can — through sheer willpower, brute force, and long hours — overcome managerial abdication, systemic dysfunctionality, and structural flaws. But the wear and tear burns people out and suboptimizes the whole.

As a managerial technique, holding people accountable after casually tossing a goal or task to them — without setting the context, securing the necessary resources, and providing the proper structure — is destructive. It generates negative emotions and behaviors and a widespread negative response to the proper and requisite notion of accountability. Nevertheless, accountability leadership is crucial for managers to move forward to more productive ways of doing business.

Rehabilitating Accountability

As a first step in rehabilitating accountability, I give you the following accurate, useful definition of the concept: “Accountability is the obligation of an employee to deliver all elements of the value that he or she is being compensated for delivering, as well as the obligation to deliver on specific output commitments with no surprises.”

The essence of employee accountability becomes clear by comparing the role of an employee with that of an independent contractor. A contractor is accountable for delivering a measurable, usually quantifiable, product, service, or result. Repair the roof. Install a phone system. Collect past due accounts. In the process, the contractor has the absolute right to be paid as long as you receive the value you requested. He is left on his own to create his own processes to secure resources, generate efficiencies, and produce results.

Employees, on the other hand, are accountable for delivering value consistent with the total requirements of their role while coordinating with other company processes and functions. In turn, they have the right to be compensated at a level consistent with the value they contribute. Employees are (by law!) paid every day, come what may. They also typically receive training, development, and benefits. But in order to follow through with their commitments, they need the appropriate resources, support, and guidance about expectations about their performance.

Fixed vs. Relative Accountabilities

Thus, in an organization, the term “accountability” refers to an employee’s obligations, some of which are fixed and some of which are relative. Fixed accountabilities comprise the employee’s obligations to deliver outputs and to use resources and processes precisely as specified by the employer. They are necessary to keep processes in control and can be summarized in two distinct categories:

• Commitment. Employees must fulfill the output commitments exactly, in terms of quantity, quality, and timeparameters, as defined in their assignments, projects, services, and other deliverables — unless the manager agrees to adjust them. Under no circumstances can the employee surprise her manager at the due date with changes.
• Adherence. Employees must simultaneously observe and work within defined resource constraints — that is, the rules and limits established by policies, procedures, contracts, and other managerial guidelines, as well as by law.

Relative accountabilities have to do with the employee’s exercise of judgment to maximize value; they include the following four categories:

• Reach. Employees are expected to add as much value as they can by signing on for ambitious yet achievable targets, rather than hanging back or committing to “low-ball” goals.
• Fit for purpose. Employees must continually strive to ensure the optimal means of producing appropriate outputs that support the purpose for which the outputs were designed in the first place.
• Stewardship. Employees must manage company funds and other resources efficiently and seek ways to continually improve and conserve those resources, wherever possible
• Teamwork. Employees must recognize that it is the concerted effort from and between everyone that generates profit in any organization, rather than isolated efforts to maximize personal output. Therefore, an employee must accommodate other people’s work across the organization to maximize the total organizational value — even if her job becomes more difficult in the process.

Many managers do a poor job of defining, explaining, and gaining commitment to fixed accountabilities with their subordinates and holding them to those commitments (see “Management Terminology”). Even more fail to properly explain relative accountabilities and to accurately assess their subordinates’ effectiveness in delivering on them. For that reason, some managers over-budget expenses so they’ll look good next year; some salespeople sell customers more than they need, just so they’ll reach their sales quota this year; some operating personnel pay too much for materials because it’s easier than shopping around — all are failing to fulfill their relative accountabilities. Clearly articulated relative accountabilities are the antidote to the pursuit of narrow goals, waste of resources, and lack of team play that renders so many employees, and their companies, ineffective.

QQT/R

Managers’ accountabilities include some that are unique to the managerial role. Chief among them is being clear with their subordinates about what (the quantity and quality of output) they are expected to deliver and how much time they have to deliver it. Managers are also accountable for providing the resources employees need to complete their assignments.

In virtually any environment, when I ask employees how clear their managers are about what they are accountable for getting done, most will say, “Not very.” In manufacturing, for instance, a supervisor may specify an increase in quantity but not the acceptable reduction, if any, in quality. Yet statistical process control and just-in-time working require unambiguous clarity about accountabilities and the interaction between quantity, quality, time, and resources.

Many managers assume their subordinates know what they are accountable for, not realizing the tension and anxiety they inadvertently cause by failing to be clear. Typically, a highly responsible subordinate will make her best guess at reading her boss’s mind, hoping to be in the right ballpark. Then, a few months later when she gives him a progress report and he says, “That’s not at all what I wanted,” she ends up feeling frustrated and distrustful.

Management scientist Elliott Jaques has developed a small but powerful tool that can be useful for clarifying fixed accountabilities: QQT/R. The slash in QQT/R does not indicate arithmetic division; it merely separates employees’ output accountabilities (quantity, quality, and time frame) from their resource constraints (see “QQT/R”). This expression is the simplest way for managers to accurately define assignments that they are delegating to their subordinates.

QQT/R creates unequivocal clarity regarding obligations. The formula puts all four variables on the table so managers and subordinates can examine, discuss, adjust, and commit to each one explicitly. The variables are both independent and interdependent, summing up real-world constraints and possibilities and exposing potential tradeoffs among them.

With the tradeoffs out in the open, managers and their subordinates are positioned for a hard-hitting, objective conversation about the manager’s goals and resources and the employee’s ability to meet those goals given current conditions. When this process is ignored or done haphazardly, employees are saddled with their managers’ unrealistic or unfair expectations, and managers delude themselves with their employees’ acquiescent or deceptive commitments to fulfill those expectations. When managers extract so-called stretch commitments from employees that are obviously unobtainable, or when they fail to provide adequate resources for an effort, employees know what’s happening and feel they’ve been taken. Similarly, when employees won’t commit to challenging goals, they are sabotaging their managers and their company.

Some managers fear that tools such as QQT/R inhibit initiative and creativity. But QQT/R does just the opposite, because it inspires employees to figure out how best to deliver on their commitments — not to decide what they are to deliver. The best employees delight in improving processes and conserving resources while hitting their QQT objectives. QQT/R should not be construed as top-down either. It should be the outcome of active, vigorous, two-way discussion between managers and their subordinates.

Other managers initially believe that QQT/R cannot be applied to people in analytical or research positions or other areas of knowledge work. Our clients involved in research, product, technology, and market development, as well as similar functions, don’t use QQT/R just to define results per se. They also use it to mutually define the processes, steps, and resources that must be developed in order to yield the intended results (see “A Technology QQT/R” on page 4).

QQT/R is not meant to be a straightjacket or a rigid set of rules. Rather, it is a useful tool for managers and employees to use in developing clearly articulated, mutually agreed upon commitments. It is the most efficient means of ensuring that the output delivered to managers is really the output they wanted. Significantly, QQT/R captures some of the managers’ accountabilities as well as those of employees by defining the resources the manager commits to deliver.

Yet being clear about the QQT/R does not capture all managerial accountabilities. In addition, managers must provide their subordinates the support and working conditions they need to deliver on their accountabilities. This support may include coaching subordinates to enhance their effectiveness and providing constructive feedback. The bottom line is that a manager is accountable for her subordinates’ outputs. She cannot blame her inability to deliver her commitments on her subordinates’ failure to meet their targets. You might say the manager’s credo for the 21st century must be: No excuses about your subordinates’ QQT/Rs! No surprises about your own!

Accountability and Authority

Managers must also be accountable for giving subordinates the authority they need in order to deliver on their obligations. Holding employees accountable for achieving a goal that they haven’t been given the authority to achieve is what I call “managing for fantasy.” Invariably, doing so generates stress, frustration, and resentment in employees. Even when the result is obtained, it is usually at the cost of suboptimizing overall organizational results (see “Managing for Fantasy”).

The reverse of this problem authority without accountability — is also prevalent. For example, an employee may be given authority over processes, people, or other resources but not held accountable for how well he or she manages or what results are achieved. When that happens, the employee eventually becomes self-absorbed and develops a sense of entitlement. In this fantasy culture of undisciplined performance and variable teamwork, one’s attitude is always “me first, productivity second.”

Accountability vs. Responsibility

Another common mistake is confusing accountability with responsibility. In the purest sense, responsibility is what an individual demands of himself or herself. It has to do with one’s conscience, aspirations, and internal standards. Accountability has to do with specific obligations one has to another individual based on mutual commitments each has made to the other. Unfortunately, most organizations use these words interchangeably as a way to make people feel accountable when they don’t actually have the necessary authority.

When employees are unclear about or lack the authority they need to deliver on their accountabilities, they fall back on their own sense of personal responsibility. Because most companies have highly responsible employees, those employees take it upon themselves to get the job done, usually at considerable cost to themselves and their coworkers. As a consequence, they always end up suboptimizing overall organizational effectiveness.

For example, a client of ours in the metal fabricating business asked me to talk with their newly promoted assistant superintendent Sam Travers, a 12-year veteran. Since the promotion, Sam had grown irritable and disruptive. His leadership style included yelling, threatening, cursing, and even kicking cans around. After talking with Sam, I found him to be courteous, reasonable, intelligent, and mature. If anything, he was fully aware of his so-called accountabilities — and chief among them was keeping his area’s machines operating at 80 percent of capacity, or more. However, the machine operators were subordinate to their shift supervisors, not to Sam, and they feared their supervisors would dock their pay, write them up, suspend them, or fire them if a machine broke from being cranked too high. The supervisors, busy fighting fires elsewhere, told Sam to handle the problem himself. Only by screaming at the operators could Sam get them to work faster. He had no managerial authority over the operators yet he felt responsible for getting those machines running at 80 percent or better.

An employee who is working hard but not getting the intended results, or who is achieving results only at considerable cost to coworkers, subordinates, or the larger organization, is probably acting responsibly. With such individuals, you must first review their accountabilities and set them in the context of overall company goals. The next crucial step is to ascertain whether the person has both the commensurate authority and the resources to get the job done. Gaps in the accountability-authority equation may be resolved simply or may require rethinking the alignments in your structures and processes.

LEAD People to Accountability

So what is the solution to this accountability crisis? How can we build accountability leadership in our organizations? The four cornerstones of accountability leadership are “LEAD” — leverage, engagement, alignment, and development. LEAD represents a systemic way of thinking and acting that greatly increases a manager’s effectiveness. It starts with the concept that managers exist to leverage people’s potential so that they can achieve more than they could alone. To get this leverage, managers must engage their employees’ enthusiastic commitment and ensure that they are in alignment with the organization and one another. To maintain leverage over the long term, managers must develop their people’s capabilities so they can apply their full potential to the work of the organization.

Let’s look more closely at each element of the system:

Leverage. In an accountability framework, managers are hired to leverage the creative capabilities of their people to make the total result of their contributions greater than the sum of the parts. A lever is a simple tool that enables someone to lift a heavy object higher than he could on his own. Similarly, leadership, when properly practiced using the levers of engagement, alignment, and development, enables people in a company, department, or team to accomplish something that would not otherwise be possible.

To help employees exercise judgment, the most important leadership practice a manager can deploy is setting context.

The key for managers to become effective leaders is to understand what they are leveraging. They’re not leveraging employees’ fixed accountabilities — the defined assignments and the rules of engagement surrounding the assignment — but rather their relative accountabilities — the value added by their application of judgment and discretion. In other words, managers must fully leverage the collective mental force of their people in order to elevate the whole organization’s ability to deliver value to the customer and, ultimately, to the shareholder.

To help their employees exercise their judgment, the most important leadership practice a manager can deploy is setting context. Doing so consists of including your subordinate in your own thinking and in your manager’s thinking, and then incorporating your subordinate’s thinking into your own. This approach improves upon the quality of a manager’s plan and it helps a subordinate to think, plan, and make adjustments intelligently — that is, in a way that best supports the bigger picture.

Engagement. Effective managers engage commitment by understanding what goes into a healthy “psychological contract,” a term coined by Harry Levinson in the 1950s to describe how managers understand and create the conditions necessary for people to feel supported and successful. This contract represents an implicit — often unspoken — understanding and agreement on what the company will provide, and what the employee will provide, to make the relationship work. It is not to be confused with an employment contract, a legal device detailing what employers and employees owe each other. Rather, the psychological contract rests upon a foundation of mutual commitment to each other’s success.

Negotiating strong, mutual, and reciprocal contracts requires that managers attend to what their employees value, how they define success, and what demonstrates to them that the organization supports their pursuit of success. As a general rule, employees perceive their companies as being committed to their success when they provide:

• A safe, healthy work environment
• Respectful, trustworthy relationships
• Regular opportunities for providing input to the organization, its goals, and one’s own assignments
• Valuable, personally meaningful, and challenging work
• The resources and authorities necessary to meet accountabilities
• Assistance in reaching one’s full potential within the organization
• Recognition and appreciation of one’s contribution
• Fair compensation
• A commitment to organizational success and perpetuation

If an employee — or your entire workforce — fails to demonstrate the level of engagement sought, use the preceding list as a diagnostic checklist. Invariably, at least one and usually more of these elements will be missing. This shortcoming is your clue to remedial actions that you might take.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that context setting and QQT/Rs are part of the psychological contract. Employees prefer clarity, not vagueness. The very process of jointly defining intentions and ambitious and attainable QQT/Rs creates engagement.

Alignment. Employees are aligned when they understand the relationship between their activities and goals and those of their organization, managers, and coworkers — and then act on that understanding. Alignment enables employees to best use their judgment to craft, with others, the day-to-day, often minute-to-minute adjustments that will best support management’s thinking in light of changing conditions.

Alignment ensures that employees are not only accountable for accomplishing their own individual missions — the QQT/Rs — but that they deliver their accountabilities in such a way that ensures they fit into, and support, the whole. With that framework, employees can be expected to chart and continually adjust a course to reach optimal solutions — together. So by setting context, a manager brightens the light on the areas where employees should focus and dims it on areas where they do not need to do so.

To be most useful, context must be translated into a fully articulated decision-making framework within which subordinates can make optimal trade-offs. This framework guides subordinates when they must make decisions involving key dimensions such as revenue, costs, profits, quality, quantity, timeliness, customer satisfaction, or an objective such as winning a new market. Within such a framework, employees not only understand the context in terms of their manager’s thinking and intentions, but they also understand the umbrella of alternative logic within which they must operate.

Development. Employee development, as a continual, career long process, represents the surest path to a workforce that functions with enthusiastic commitment at its full potential. If there truly is a talent gap and companies cannot find and retain enough high performers, then senior executives need to start taking employee development seriously. This means understanding what development entails, creating a talent-pool development system, and holding each manager accountable for effectively developing her own employees — both in role and in careers.

To fully develop an employee’s potential, you need to have a good idea of what that potential is. The purest handle you can get on an employee’s potential involves assessing his ability to handle complexity. This point is quite important, because position levels in organizations are closely related to the complexity of the tasks and the kind of judgment involved in the work of those positions.

Broadly, the tasks of employee development fall into two areas: developing subordinates in their current positions (through coaching) and developing subordinates to improve their fit for higher-level positions in the future (through mentoring). In other words, managers must be accountable for coaching their immediate subordinates and for mentoring their subordinates’ subordinates.

What It Takes to LEAD

The system that I have labeled LEAD lacks the iron-fist approach of the old command-and-control style of management, as well as its paternalism and its limited view of employee potential. LEAD also eschews the passive approach associated with employee empowerment, self-directed work groups, and similar laissez-faire reactions to command and control.

Instead, LEAD begins with a clear mandate for managers to leverage their people to their highest levels of achievement, as individuals and as a group. LEAD recognizes that managers will draw forth employees’ best efforts not by the unilateral issuing of orders, but by enthusiastically engaging their employees’ commitment in their work. Furthermore, LEAD aligns those efforts when managers construct with their subordinates a powerful context — conveying management’s thinking and intentions — as well as practical decision-making frameworks. And finally, LEAD looks to the long-term value of the individual and the organization by holding managers accountable for effectively developing their employees to their fullest potential.

To implement LEAD, you need a clear view of your managerial role, the flexibility to adopt new viewpoints, and the patience and intelligence to learn new skills. You also need the energy and commitment to work with yourself and your people, to try and fail and try again until the system becomes part of your everyday managerial-leadership practice. In addition, you need the courage to establish LEAD as an accountability for every manager and to assess each manager’s value — and right to remain a manager — against this standard. Implementing accountability leadership does require hard work, but I fervently believe that business leaders and managers who undertake it can use LEAD to their competitive advantage.

The post Accountability Leadership appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

At Boeing, a major aerospace company, a team leader and his R&D group recently found themselves in uncharted territory as they faced a new project. They needed to create a leadership infrastructure to bridge the learning that happens in the workplace with more structured classroom learning. The framework would span multiple organizations, missions, locations, and personnel. The temptation to leap into action was hard to resist. But the project team realized that taking the time to develop an implementation strategy would help them to be more effective in the long run. In order to do so in a systematic way, they chose to develop an Operational Strategy Map to guide their efforts.

The Operational Mapping Methodology

Developing a map of strategy isn’t a new idea. Most organizational improvement methodologies (such as total quality management, reengineering, and the balanced scorecard) recommend some form of mapping in order to facilitate understanding of an organization and its processes. All mapping methodologies have benefits as well as limitations. Because maps are necessarily a representation of reality — and not the reality itself — it’s important to choose a framework that captures the essence of the system in a way that helps the organization most effectively navigate through the unfolding strategy.

The Operational Strategy Mapping (OSM) framework synthesizes elements from three disciplines — system dynamics, skilled facilitation, and balanced scorecard—to create a process and product that can enhance the creation and implementation of organizational change efforts (see “Operational Strategy Mapping”). Using OSM, a strategic planning and implementation team clearly articulates what the strategy should accomplish, how it works, and what unintended consequences might result. In the process of developing the map, team members generate understanding of, and commitment to, the overall plan.

System Dynamics. OSM uses system dynamics mapping and its underlying paradigm of the world. System dynamics incorporates two different visual languages: causal loop diagrams and stock and flow maps. In order to quickly get up to speed on the terminology and launch into the mapping process, groups may begin with causal loop diagrams. Causal loops can be extremely useful for eliciting important interdependencies that will impact and be impacted by the strategy.

Because OSM requires exploring questions such as “How does/will it work?” the strategy team will eventually need to build stock and flow maps to generate this “operational” focus. Although doing so may initially require a little more effort than creating causal loops, the value derived from this additional effort of differentiating between conditions and activities that change those conditions will dramatically increase the rigor and quality of any strategy discussions. Using stock and flow maps, groups can look at the factors inherent in the strategy that may contribute to unintended consequences during implementation.

OPERATIONAL STRATEGY MAPPING

The Operational Strategy Mapping (OSM) framework synthesizes elements from three disciplines — system dynamics, skilled facilitation, and balanced scorecard—to create a process and product that can enhance the creation and implementation of organizational change efforts.

The paradigm of system dynamics asks us to move from thinking about our organizations in terms of one-time events and isolated functions to considering them in terms of continuous, dynamic, integrated processes. To implement OSM, a team needs to look at the strategy as something that will unfold over time, with natural ebbs and flows, and will likely require adjusting in terms of the magnitude and timing of different elements. The system dynamics approach also suggests the need to identify forces that might slow or impede implementation. It offers guidance in predicting natural delays in the system; knowing about these delays is vital to generating an effective implementation plan.

Skilled Facilitation. Skilled facilitation, based on the work of Roger Schwarz, provides the framework for the process of building OSMs. It offers tools for assessing if the appropriate stakeholders are involved, how effective the group dynamics are, and how to facilitate conversations around building and testing the usefulness of the map. Because skilled facilitation applies an explicit approach to developing shared mental models (both about the content of the project and the group’s process), it is a natural fit with the system dynamics approach to mapping.

The Balanced Scorecard. The third discipline built into the OSM methodology, Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard (BSC), has become popular for helping businesses and public-policy organizations build and revise visual strategic “bubble maps” as part of an ongoing, iterative learning process. The BSC’s four quadrant perspective — Financial, Customer, Internal Processes, and Learning — provides a useful guide for ensuring that the strategy map covers the organization’s different facets. (Although not all OSMs cover the four quadrants, groups should be conscious about choosing to eliminate one or more quadrants from the map.) However, the stock and flow language is better able to depict how processes work than “bubble maps” and can serve as the basis for computer simulation at a point in the future if the team finds this additional step helpful.

The steps for building an OSM are the same as those described for the BSC. In their book, The Strategy Focused Organization (Harvard Business School Press, 2000), Kaplan and Norton describe strategy management as following four principles:

1. Translate the Strategy to Operational Terms
2. Align the Organization to the Strategy
3. Make Strategy Everyone’s Everyday Job
4. Make Strategy a Continual Process

As you’ll see, the distributed learning team at The Boeing Company followed these steps as they developed and used an OSM.

Building an OSM at Boeing

The Boeing Company is an organization widely distributed across geographies, business segments, and product lines; it also includes several engineering disciplines. The decision to sponsor a leadership initiative in the company reflected an understanding that, although the culture focused primarily on formal learning events, more than 80 percent of learning and leadership development occurred on the job. The “Workplace Leadership Initiative” would integrate formal and informal learning and would support participants in pursuing their individual learning agendas on their own time. In turn, employees would contribute their own content/expertise through a personalized web site and a community space that would be integrated into the leadership program’s learning experience. Putting together the various pieces of the program was a challenging opportunity. The development team decided to create an Operational Strategy Map to help them “mentally simulate” how they might execute the initiative.

Translating the Strategy to Operational Terms. The first phase of developing the OSM was to get background information on the project and develop a “strawman” map of the strategy. Getting background information usually requires phone interviews with a few stakeholders/experts. This interviewing process serves two purposes: (1) Gathering information from throughout the system of interest, and

(2) Generating understanding and commitment from the stakeholders for the process and subsequent map.

For this project, the team leader possessed the knowledge to provide enough input for the initial map.

The team leader was concerned about the following areas of execution: creating the initial workplace leadership system, generating enthusiasm among potential users, and building support among senior managers (who might not be users, but who would likely encourage or discourage the use of the system among their staff). He had several hypotheses about how the system might work, but felt that the OSM process would force him to better articulate those assumptions, integrate the team’s assumptions more effectively, test the accuracy of the combined assumptions, and ultimately communicate them to management.

Based on initial conversations, the group chose to focus the core structure of the map on the system’s end users. In this case, the core structure (often referred to as the spinal cord or main chain of the model) assumes that users can move from being Unaware of the WL (abbreviation for “Workplace Leadership System”) to being Aware of and May Use WL. (See the section labeled “Core Structure” in the diagram “A Virtuous Cycle” on p. 4.) After experiencing the Workplace Leadership System, they might become an Advocate for WL — or they might become Resistant to WL.

The stocks and flows visually represent the movement of people from one state to another. The stocks (boxes) are the accumulation of people (how many in each state at any point in time), and the flows (circles) are the processes that advance people through the various stocks. The initiative would need to carefully manage the movement from Unaware to Aware and then ensure Advocates were generated while simultaneously limiting the flow into Resistant to WL. The team spent hours further defining attributes associated with the stocks: What type of person was in each stock? Is there a better name for the stock? Is there anything missing in the main chain?

After focusing on the stocks, the team was ready to begin thinking through strategic implications by analyzing what might drive each of the flows. They quickly realized that they couldn’t directly affect the stocks — they needed to design policies directed toward the processes that move people from one state to another. The group determined that they could have a direct impact on awareness by having focus groups and other public relations-type events. People would move into the Advocates stock through word-of-mouth; their experience with the WL system would influence the level of Advocates and Resistant folks, because the more positive the experience, the faster the rate of acquiring new Advocates.

As always happens, the team identified weaknesses in the draft map’s assumptions. Foremost among these was the map’s aggregation of the learning initiative’s attributes into a single stock. The team suggested three categories of attributes: Useful Content, Features, and Ease of Use. The discussion around the development of these features was heated. Through it, the team found an appreciation for the level of precision that OSMs bring to what’s often a fuzzy process.

As a result of the conversations to improve the assumptions in the map, the team identified a virtuous cycle they wanted to set in motion. An important element of the Workplace Leadership System is users’ ability to add their own content, wisdom, and expertise—and Advocates would likely contribute the most. The greater the content that the program has to offer, the greater participants’ overall satisfaction will be (the team called this the “Wow!” effect). High levels of satisfaction in turn create more Advocates. A nice loop to get going! The team realized, however, that a limit to growth for this loop would be the ease of use. If it’s not easy to add content, then Advocates probably will not do so, making it difficult to set the cycle into motion.

The team found that the mapping process surfaced a dark side of implementation that they hadn’t consciously discussed before: the buildup of folks resistant to the initiative. At first, the group was dismayed to think about the potential for Resisters to develop in

A VIRTUOUS CYCLE

An important element of the Workplace Leadership System is users’ ability to add their own content, wisdom, and expertise. The greater the content that the program has to offer, the greater participants’ overall satisfaction will be. High levels of satisfaction in turn will create more Advocates.

the organization. But after some discussion, they realized that because they now knew the possibility existed, they could look out for it.

Further, they decided that if budding Resisters were identified early enough and were listened to, two things would happen. First, they would likely have feedback that would improve the overall system. More importantly, they might move over into the stock of Advocates. The team believed that people who cared enough to be Resisters could become strong Advocates — the energy would just be directed differently. The team referred to this as an aikido approach to resistance: Rather than push directly back against critical feedback (the natural tendency of a design team), they would redirect the energy behind the criticism — and apply it to improving the product. The team also strongly believed that the process of listening would generate Advocates.

The group developed a large wall hanging with crisp high-resolution graphics. Over the course of a couple of weeks, they used the map in their meetings and presented it to managers and other stakeholder groups within Boeing. In discussions and presentations, team members were able to walk up to the map, point directly at the area of strategy they were describing, and quickly get everyone’s reactions.

As a result of these meetings, the map was modified slightly — yet the core structure remained the same. The team found they could present the map without the aid of the project consultant. In that sense, they owned the map, its assumptions, and the implications it had for their strategy — it provided a common framework that guided their discussions.

Aligning the Organization to the Strategy. The second step in the process is to align the organization to the strategy. The team did so by using the map to develop a team project plan. They focused on the flows in the map and assigned tasks to different individuals. Although the group could have used sophisticated project planning software, for this effort they imported snapshots of map segments into Excel worksheets and added roles and responsibilities (see “The Project Plan”).

Results from the Initiative

The project is still underway, but the team has already reaped several benefits from developing the OSM. The most significant impact is that the team focused their early effort on a seven-day process to set in motion a virtuous cycle around the project. The goal of this experiment was to learn as quickly as possible about potential Advocates and Resisters. The team tested the initiative’s ease of use, features, and useful content in order to assess the “Wow!” factor, identify the number of individuals in various categories, and analyze the quality of their experience in moving to being an Advocate or a Resister.

As a result of this exploration, the team reconceptualized the project’s web interface. If they hadn’t learned from this experiment with setting a virtuous cycle in motion, they might have wasted a large portion of their 2005 budget in trying to implement a system without thoughtful consideration of Advocates and Resisters.

The team was pleased to find that the map was still valid even after the shift in emphasis. This process confirmed that the level of aggregation was sufficiently useful, that is, it allowed them to examine the implications of their implementation strategy at a high level, without becoming so specific that they needed to modify the map every time they made minor modifications to the actual program.

Making Strategy Everyone’s Everyday Job. Another result of the OSM process was that the team developed a shared language. This terminology improved the quality of conversations, because it made implicit assumptions about the strategy explicit. It created an environment for making

THE PROJECT PLAN

The team developed a project plan by focusing on the flows in the map and assigning tasks to different individuals. They imported snapshots of map segments into Excel worksheets and added roles and responsibilities.

strategy everyone’s everyday job. When people pointed to a piece of the map to describe the impact of a certain proposal, everyone understood what they were referring to. Having a shared language also had the unintended benefit of increasing camaraderie.

In most cases of strategy development, management knows the underlying assumptions, but the implementation team is left in the dark. The OSM process integrates assumptions from the entire team. The group as a whole owns the strategy, the implementation, and of course, the results. Talk about empowerment!

Another benefit of the process was that the team found it easier to be brutally honest during implementation. For example, as word of the Workplace Leadership Initiative spread during the development of the map, the team not only heard from folks with a favorable impression of the project but also from those with an unfavorable view. In other circumstances, the group might have filtered out the negative input. But because the map suggested that they pay attention to potential resisters, and that by doing so they could generate a positive trend, the team accepted the early criticism and incorporated some of the constructive comments in their implementation plan.

Making Strategy a Continual Process. As part of continual learning, the Boeing team may choose to go into more detail in some areas of the map. They are exploring the potential benefits of developing simulation models of certain aspects. Further, the group may build additional maps or revise the current one. Even so, they will continue to use the OSM they’ve developed in building and implementing strategy for months to come.

Using the Methodology in Your Organization

If you’d like to use an Operational Strategy Map to help guide your strategic planning and implementation, here are a few things we’ve learned:

• You won’t get the map perfect the first time. The process of building the map is where the learning is. Create a prototype (what we’ve called the “strawman map”) as quickly as you can. Then let the strategy development team critique, modify, and ultimately own it. The process of their owning it will make it better. Trust us!
• Identify as quickly as possible the “main chain” of the map. Use the main chain to ask questions about how the system in question works and what might be some unintended consequences of any activities.
• Focus on analyzing the major dynamics in the map. In the case described here, the team focused on the major virtuous cycle for a week. They asked questions about it, tested its usefulness and likelihood of occurrence — and in the end, they developed a whole new approach to the overall project.
• Fit the map on one page if you can. The Boeing team struggled on occasion as it tried to add nuances to the map that added complexity. The understanding generated from these incremental add-ons was usually minimal. You can always create separate maps of more detailed processes at a later date.
• Once the strawman map has been developed, modify it only in the presence of the whole team. Otherwise, you will not have the buy in needed to implement any new insights. Plus, you’ll likely miss something important when making the change.
• Develop simulation models only to the point where doing so provides an adequate return for the time and money invested. The process of simulation modeling is often a laborious one; it may take months to develop a reasonably sophisticated computer model of the strategy. The siren call of “We’ll find the answer” often tempts teams to try to develop the Mother of All Models. But this quest can become a journey of diminishing returns, in that simulation modeling may not generate enough additional insight to be worth the investment. The team in this article will develop a few small models to deepen and refine their understanding of implementation dynamics.

The OSM methodology holds potential for all organizations. The process of developing a simple, one page stock and flow map of the organization’s strategy generates strategic insight and commitment to implementation. If your organization has been struggling to execute its strategy — or even to develop a good one — you will find building an OSM useful. It’s a perfect tool to get everyone on the same page so that when you come to a fork in the road, you’ll be more likely to take the better path.

Chris Soderquist (chris.soderquist@pontifexconsulting.com) is the founder of Pontifex Consulting. He consults to organizations and communities in order to build their capacity to create and implement sustainable, high-leverage solutions to their most strategic challenges. Mark Shimada (mark.s.shimada@boeing.com) is a program manager in The Boeing Company’s Leadership Development and Functional Excellence Group. He supports his peers to accelerate business results through extraordinary leadership development programs.

The post Operational Strategy Mapping: Learning and Executing at The Boeing Company appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Holistic Alignment: Three Elements in Balance

But aligning strategy, structure, systems, and so forth isn’t enough. Organizational change efforts often overlook the need for another kind of alignment as well — that among the work we do, the reasons we do it, and the meaning it has for us. This more comprehensive, “holistic” form of alignment extends from an organization’s market and business strategies right down to the individual level. It encompasses three elements that we might broadly refer to as goal, role, and soul.

Goal: What Do We Want? Goals are the most evident and accessible focus of our efforts. What are we trying to accomplish? How will we proceed? How will we know when we get there? Tangible or not, goals provide the substance and aim for our planning, monitoring, and assessment of change. Most business models, like the McKinsey 7S framework, focus on alignment around goals.

Role: What Do We Contribute? Roles are how we see ourselves — our identity as we play a part in the change process. Alignment must include explicit consideration of the personal implications of change. How does this change affect how I see myself? How does it affect my status in the organization? My range of activity? My reporting relationships? We actively or passively thwart changes that are personally threatening. Intentional management of these personal issues is an overlooked prerequisite for success.

Organizational change efforts often overlook the need for another kind of alignment as well — that among the work we do, the reasons we do it, and the meaning it has for us.

Soul: How Do We Relate? Soul refers to the myriad human connections that bind us as families, teams, and organizations. These links provide the emotional content of our human systems. Am I safe? Liked? Respected? Fulfilled? Our organizations are made of human beings who have emotions as well as the skills and intelligence we usually attend to in our capacity as managers.

Alignment Parallels in Business Models

In one form or another, goal, role, and soul are present in many widely recognized analytic frameworks.

• Each source of competitive differentiation in Treacy and Wiersema’s Discipline of Market Leaders (Addison Wesley, 1995) addresses a different element in our model. Operational Efficiency focuses on the goal of creating shareholder value. Product Innovation focuses on the role of the firm’s distinctive capabilities and market identity. Customer Intimacy focuses on the soul of the firm’s often emotional connection with its customers.
• In Ulrich and Lake’s Organizational Capability (John Wiley & Sons, 1990), Financial Capability addresses the firm’s ability to create value cost-effectively and aligns with the goal element in our framework. Technological Capability centers on how the firm differs from other firms in what it can do, a role function. And Market Capability, focusing on connections between the organization and its customers, represents the organization’s soul.The fourth element in Ulrich and Lake’s framework, Organization Capability, is an integrative component. Bridging the three other elements, Organization Capability is analogous in our model to the individual, group, or structure of relationships that seeks to align goal, role, and soul.
• Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard (Harvard Business School Press, 1996) is a four-element model like Ulrich and Lake’s. In the Scorecard, Financial indicators track performance against shareholder value-driven targets (goal). Operational indicators track the performance of technology and processes (role). Customer indicators track relationship elements (soul). Finally, the Organization and Learning indicators, like Ulrich and Lake’s Organization Capability, track the health of the integrating elements, the people on whom the organization’s performance and success rest.

What’s the implication when so many of the management frameworks we use differ more in vocabulary than in content? We might infer that, whether we are considering the interaction between two individuals or between two organizations, the under-lying dynamics and requirements for success are similar. One of the clearer articulations of the requirements for successful alignment comes from the Harvard Negotiation Project. Two HNP out growths, Fisher and Ury’s Getting to Yes(Houghton Mifflin, 1981)and Stone, Patton, and Heen’s Difficult Conversations(Viking, 1999), base successful interactions on attending to multiple levels in the “conversation” the facts of the situation (goal), the power and identity elements inherent in the process (role), and the emotional content (soul).

Operating from this perspective, participants strive to create “win-win” opportunities and to strengthen their relationships in the course of the conversation or negotiation. Alignment is more than ensuring all parties agree on the goal or “ends.” The “means,” both in terms of roles in the process and the emotional importance of the change, become crucial alignment considerations. In some sense, Machiavelli got it backwards—rather than the ends justifying the means, the means enable the ends.

Dialogue As a Change Process

At Genuity, we face tremendous challenges in helping our company navigate through relentless and accelerating market changes. As an e-business network provider, Genuity’s business must change at, or in advance of, the pace of change in the Internet market. We’re using dialogue around goal, role, and soul to help management teams reorient after particularly wrenching changes, such as reorganizations.

Dialogue Around Soul. First, we attend to the emotional implications of the change by explicitly discussing the positive and negative emotions team members have experienced during a recent large-scale reorganization. This catharsis serves to establish the common emotional experience team members share, both in surviving the disruption of personal relationships and in appreciating the grace with which many people handled the reorganization despite its personal impact.

Dialogue Around Role. Then, we detail the changes in the way work will occur. Here, William Bridge’s Transitions Management model is particularly effective. As team members describe their new responsibilities, they explicitly note what former roles and responsibilities are no longer part of their work, what they are carrying forward into the new organization, and what new areas of responsibility they are assuming. This discussion serves both to educate the group on the changes in their overall focus and to allow individual team members to honor the valuable work they no longer perform, validate roles they continue to perform, and accept new roles.

Dialogue Around Goal. Finally, we turn our attention to the future and our vision of the organization we want to become. A simple brainstorming exercise about the attributes of the organization in two or three years provides the basis for this work. The team sorts the attributes into four categories: strategy, people, customers, and process. Then, team members “tell a story” about the connection between strategy and people and between customers and process. The strategy/people story is a, “recruiting pitch” to a fictional prospective hire describing how Genuity connects its people to its strategy. The customers/process story is a “sales pitch” to a crucial prospective account about how our processes drive customer value. Further work focuses on building the organization’s strengths to grow the business toward the vision.

Explicitly attending to the needs of goal, role, and soul through this relatively simple three-phased approach helps teams adapt more quickly and completely to large-scale changes. We’ve seen teams rapidly establish productive working relationships after undergoing fundamental structural and staffing changes. But this process is not a magic bullet. For groups to continue to work productively, they will need to continually attend to and reinforce the alignment of all three elements.

Managing the Whole Change Process

To a significant degree, all business activity is about managing change. Some changes are on a large scale and are formally recognized as requiring change management. But all business activities involve transformations in one form or another, turning inputs into outputs. Consequently, effective managers must attend to all three elements in change and continually work to create alignment both systemically and interpersonally.

We all bring our whole being to the workplace. The choice is not whether we can engage the whole person at work, but how we manage the inevitable engagement. The connection can be generative or degenerative — the direction is jointly determined by both the individual and the organization. Engagement is a dialogue, and parties can be adept or inept at that dialogue.

Alignment required for organizational change must consider all aspects of the business model, the process for the change, and the “codicils” of the emotional contract between the organization and the individual. By consciously attending to our needs on the levels of goals, roles, and souls, we more effectively and holistically reinvent our organizations in the ongoing change process that is both business and life.

The post Holistic Change: Creating Organizational and Individual Alignment at Genuity appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

The assumption implicit in this tactic is that change is done to the organization, not by it. People must be convinced of the need for working differently and, if management does not clearly communicate the reasons for it, they will resist it. This model may work in situations where the shift involves introducing systems and processes that do not require a fundamental transformation of people’s attitudes, ways of seeing the world, and modes of working.

FAILING TO CHANGE

Leadership teams often rely on “telling and selling” large-scale change initiatives to the organization (B1). While this approach may initially seem successful, over the longer run, it undermines employees’ commitment to the change process (R2). The more successful tact would be to include employees from the beginning, what we might call the “engage and shape” approach (B3).

But unfortunately, as shown in “Failing to Change,” when instituting large transformational change initiatives, organizations often fall prey to a “Fixes That Fail” archetype. It begins when the leadership team uses the “tell and sell” approach to introduce a wholesale change of the way the organization does business (B1). They often promote these changes using newsletters, handy reference cards, posters, coffee mugs, and perhaps even a video. Workers initially seem enthusiastic, but over the longer term, fail to fully embrace the new routines (R2). In response, management looks for ways to strong-arm employees into adopting the change, an approach that usually dooms the initiative to failure.

So, is the instinct to communicate that underlies the “tell and sell” approach wrong? Of course not— how else can we achieve our goals except by passionately sharing them with others? But gaining employees’ genuine commitment requires a more authentic, interactive way of speaking and listening than we’ve practiced in the past. As shown in “Failing to Change,” the fundamental solution is for leaders to change how they communicate and what they communicate about (B3). They must work with employees to build a shared vision of the organization, its opportunities, and its challenges, as well as to plan a set of purposeful actions for creating the organization’s future. Only when employees have been included in the process and feel their ideas have been heard and respected will they embrace and contribute to the change. We might call this approach the “engage and shape” philosophy.

“Engage and Shape” Philosophy

As Gary Hamel points out in his work on strategy creation and core competencies, the way to unlock new ideas about an organization is to create conversations across boundaries that involve distinct experiential, technical, and philosophical perspectives. Through engaged conversation comes shared meaning. From shared meaning comes alignment of purpose and fundamental buy-in.

How can leaders effectively engage the workforce in sharing, exploring, and aligning their unique perspectives in order to contribute to the enterprise’s larger vision? The “engage and shape” philosophy offers a framework for understanding what is involved in the process. It starts with the following assumptions:

• Developing visioning skills throughout the organization is more effective than imposing a vision on the organization from above.
• Leaders can’t and shouldn’t have all the answers up front. But they must create the overall direction and allow employees to take the initiative forward in their own way.
• No one can predict the outcome of engaging employees and asking them to shape the future. Leaders will have to relinquish some control over the direction the change initiative takes if they wish to move from merely consulting employees (, “telling and selling”) to capturing their hearts and minds (, “engaging and shaping”).
• Change involves a long journey. We can have some idea about and therefore plan for the first leg of the journey, but it’s difficult to know what might be behind the first or second or fiftieth hill! The implication of this fact is that the planning process has to allow for emergence, agility, and course correction.
• Formal project management involves breaking down projects into components that can then be managed. But dynamic organizational and cultural change takes place in the complex interplay of components. Therefore, leaders need to adopt a holistic and systemic approach to managing that takes into account the complex whole.

Having productive conversations around organizational change is a key process in the “engage and shape” approach, but many managers do not have the patience or interest to develop skills in the discipline of dialogue. Nevertheless, the kind of conversation needed to effect transformational change doesn’t happen by magic. Good conversation involves a set of talking practices and people who can facilitate these conversations. It requires enough time to ensure sufficient alignment around why we need to change, what we should change into in order to secure certain outcomes, how we will go about achieving the change, and how we will handle the inevitable surprises and miscues that might come up during the process.

To make the shift to “engage and shape,” groups can follow a series of four conversational practices that guide the change process and serve as an entry point to a more comprehensive use of dialogue (see “Four Conversational Practices”). These practices provide hard-pressed, action-oriented, and outcome-focused managers with a way to manage conversations in the context of open-ended, less tightly planned but ultimately more transforming ways of achieving change.

FOUR CONVERSATIONAL PRACTICES

A series of four conversational practices can guide the change process and serve as an entry point to a more comprehensive use of dialogue. These practices provide hard-pressed, action-oriented, and outcome-focused managers with a way to manage conversations in the context of open-ended, less tightly planned but ultimately more transforming ways of achieving change.

Just recently, the Ministry of Defence in the United Kingdom used these practices to create high-performing integrated project teams for the acquisition and in-service support of military equipment. The team leaders became skilled practitioners in these tools and techniques, despite initial misgivings that this was “yet another change program that will surely go the way of all the others nowhere.” In a short time, they were able to show immediate benefits in terms of creating a new quality of involvement in and buy-in for the new process among staff members. The group ultimately achieved a series of stretch goals that might not have been possible otherwise.

Managing the Four Conversations

The key to achieving employee engagement in actively shaping change is to iteratively manage and follow a sequence of conversational steps. Before beginning, the group should discuss and decide on what kind of listening would be appropriate (see “Automatic vs. Generated Listening” on p. 4). At the same time, participants should agree to other, more familiar ground rules, such as every contribution is valid, let the speaker finish, suspend assumptions, and so forth.

Overall, the group will seek to explore and build on contributions rather than broadcast their own views in an unconnected way. When people compete to secure airtime, the resulting conversation remains superficial and does not build an evolving meaning. It is particularly important for more senior managers to listen to junior managers rather than correct them or talk over them. Likewise, the kind of decision-making that emerges should be consensual and inclusive.

Note that, when managing conversations about change in organizations, it’s important to clearly distinguish among the past, present, and future. If people are unable to see how their actions in the present are driven by their perceptions, and that their perceptions are created by their past experiences, they will be unable to create a distinctive future that is different from the past!

Conversation for Engagement and Alignment

Once the ground rules have been established, the first step in the change process is to identify and build shared commitment among team members by ensuring that everyone is mentally “in the same place.” Most important is to find out what people are currently committed to regarding the issue, purpose, or objective. In this instance, a commitment means a deeply held belief, an expectation about what should happen, or an explicit aim or purpose located in the future. Failing to openly discuss and acknowledge people’s current commitments means that they will emerge at a later stage and possibly undermine the progress made.

To conduct a conversation for engagement:

• Begin by encouraging participants to say what is on their minds, be it related to the issue at hand or something else. This activity is a way of getting people present in the room and encouraging everyone to speak.
• Surface everyone’s individual concerns in relation to the issue being addressed. Capture these on a flipchart to reexamine later in light of any joint commitment developed by the group to see how well it encompasses individual concerns. Take care to ensure that participants do not simply complain. If they do, try to bring to the surface the underlying causal expectation that the symptomatic complaint is based upon. Another caution is to avoid blame. Blame is based in the past, and any engagement or alignment must be founded on a commitment based in the future.
• Explore people’s commitments and capture them on a flipchart. Rarely do concerns or complaints exist without an underlying commitment to something; for example, complaints about a new change initiative may reveal team members’ underlying desire for senior leaders to recognize innovations already happening in the organization. The best way to begin to understand the differences and similarities in people’s perspectives, and to move to alignment, is to ask them to describe what the future outcome would be if the commitment were realized.
• Once all people’s current commitments have been surfaced, come to agreement on an overall commitment with regard to the issue. This process can be challenging. A helpful way of achieving alignment around what the group wants to achieve is to simply focus on the outcome, benefits, or value that they will create, ideally in measurable terms.

Managers often skip this phase because they don’t deem it “action oriented.” They also often believe that everyone already knows what the problem is; they just need to sort it out. But limiting the time spent or the quality of conversation will only restrict the achievement of the end result. Without engagement and alignment around an overall purpose, the group’s effort to explore possibilities for the future, evaluate their feasibility, and enact any plans will be half-hearted.

A conversation for engagement and alignment will often lead to a clear commitment to producing something that the group doesn’t have the faintest idea of how they will go about achieving. This is a healthy sign! The term given to this sort of commitment is “generating a stand.” A stand is a commitment to building a future that is demonstrated through everyday actions:

• It provides stability during turbulence.
• It allows the group to declare “breakdowns,” that is, instances when people’s words and actions are not based on realizing the stand. Team members should be free to point out to colleagues or their managers when they observe a “breakdown” that is not in service of the goal.
• It provides the basis for coaching and being coached.
• It represents a breakthrough from the past.

In our experience at the Ministry of Defence, the most successful teams were those that had strong alignment around a compelling stand. All other elements then tended to fall into place naturally. Typically, the stand would include high-level stretch targets as opposed to hard targets. Participants believed hard targets to be tough but achievable. Stretch targets, on the other hand, were deemed “over the horizon.” Their purpose was to provoke out-of-the-box thinking and unprecedented action.

In the Ministry of Defence, such stretch targets focused on the performance, time, and cost elements of procuring military equipment; for instance, procuring a new frigate and bringing it into service in half the time, for the same cost, but with greater capability than the current version. Even if a stretch target is not achieved, more often than not, committing to it ensures outcomes that are far greater than merely committing to a hard target. But in order to really commit to such a goal, employees need to participate in the planning process and trust that they won’t be penalized for falling short of what is a highly ambitious objective.

Conversation for Shaping the Future

This second conversational practice on the road toward breakthrough change involves imagining what things could be like in the future. When I worked with a client in the financial services industry, the aim was to transform the role of human resources into that of a true business partner. When the HR managers engaged in a conversation for shaping the future, they imagined a tomorrow in which the HR function genuinely influenced business results.

A key tool for this conversation, borrowed from Soft Systems Methodology, is the construction of a “root definition” for the activity that needs to be changed or addressed. A root definition is a structured description of a system that clearly spells out the activities that take place (or might take place) in the system being studied. It has three parts: what, how, and why. The “what” is the immediate aim of the system, the “how” is the means of achieving that aim, and the “why” is the longer-term aim of the purposeful activity.

Root definitions follow this format:

A system to ………………………… by ………………………… in order to ………………………….

For example, a root definition for creating breakthrough procurement performance at the Ministry of Defence might look like this:

In this root definition,

• The what is “to procure military equipment”;
• The how is “by using integrated project team processes and ways of working”; and
• The why is “to deliver the equipment within the budgets and time frames established at the outset of the project, ensuring enhanced capability to the military end users.”

This is one of many root definition that could be constructed for the activity of military procurement. The root definition should be internally consistent; for example, the “how” must describe a process which will (or should) result in the “what,” and so on. A common mistake is to include more than one purposeful activity in a single root definition.

Participants must also talk and think about the various roles that individuals and groups take on in the system. The categories (abbreviated as “CATWOE”) are:

• C (Customer): Who would be the victims/beneficiaries of the purposeful activity?
• A (Actors): Who would do the activities?
• T (Transformation Process): What would happen?
• W (Weltanschauung): A German word loosely meaning “worldview,” what view of the world makes this definition meaningful?
• O (Owner): Who could stop this activity?
• E (Environmental Constraints): What constraints in its environment does this system take as given?

For the root definition given above, the following is a possible “CATWOE”:

• C: Military end users
• A: Integrated project team (IPT)
• T: IPT processes and ways of working
• W: That multi-functional teams will be better at procuring military equipment than the current silo-based structure
• O: The Ministry of Defence
• E: The performance, time, and cost parameters set out at the start of the procurement

The process of trying out different transformation processes (T) and worldviews (W) in the discussion often promotes innovation. Ultimately, the task is to conclude this conversation with an agreement on one or two root definitions that can be taken forward into the next conversation.

Conversation for Feasibility

This step involves testing the possibilities and ideas developed in the conversation for shaping the future against key criteria, including:

• The original stand
• The feasibility of implementing the new ideas (how do the ideas compare with the current real world and what value will be created by implementing them?)
• The things that need to be in place in order to reach the stretch targets
• Initial plans for the early stages of the breakthrough journey and outline plans for the whole journey
• The projected return on investment

A useful technique in this conversation is to draw a conceptual model of the root definition on a big whiteboard. A conceptual model is a simple diagram showing the links between components of the designed future based on the ideas in the root definition (see “Conceptual Models” on p. 6). It is not a causal loop diagram in the conventional sense, because it is a representation of the future arising from the commitments and ideas flowing from the conversation.

The diagram shows the key activities described in the root definition and how they link together as a coherent system. Playing with different options and comparing them with the current reality helps to identify the benefits that might be derived from implementing the ideas captured in the root definition. Once again, this conversation is most effective when the previous conversations have been thoroughly explored and when participants:

• Listen generously and explore each others’ points of view
• Bring to the surface and challenge their assumptions
• Constantly check back to their original commitments and stands
• Are focused on the outcomes sought
• Try not to recreate the past

CONCEPTUAL MODEL

Conversation for Action

The aim of the conversation for action is to bring to life the conceptual model identified in the previous conversation. This step is critical; unfortunately, managers seldom conduct these conversations well. The principles behind a conversation for action fall into two categories:

1. Participants must make requests of other people.

Here it’s important to be explicit about who is having the request made of them, what is being requested, and by when. The individuals who are having requests made of them have three possible responses:

• Accept the request.
• Reject the request.
• Make a counterproposal, that is, undertake the requested action but on a different timetable or propose a different action.

2. Participants can choose to make promises to other people by offering to do something specific by a particular date.

Although this process seems simple and straightforward, think back to management meetings that have failed to result in meaningful actions. Nearly always, people fail to follow up because team members haven’t rigorously handled conversations for action. This oversight often occurs because the group suffers from a lack of commitment, honesty, or trust. For instance, people may attend meetings because they do not want to miss out on anything, but when the group agrees to do something, no one assumes responsibility for taking it forward.

This conversational discipline brings clarity to the “something” as well as a genuine commitment to taking it forward. The final step is to identify accountability for different tasks. Participants will have developed high levels of trust because they have all been involved in the rigor of the previous conversational steps. The will all be on the same page regarding what they want the outcome to be. If any or all of the previous three stages have been handled in an incomplete way, the conceptual model will remain just that, conceptual.

Application of the Disciplines

At the Ministry of Defence, breakthrough change has been achieved in an environment that had previously been hostile to innovations. One hundred and fifty integrated project teams (IPTs), employing some 5,000 staff members, were established over an 18-month period. This process in itself was seen as a major success, particularly in light of team members’ alignment around robust plans. Many IPTs have already achieved their hard targets, and a significant number have made good progress toward their stretch targets. The UK National Audit Office has highlighted this case as an example of successful change.

Leading change is about adding value to the business by engaging people in finding new ways to operate. The only effective way to draw people into the process is to improve the quality of our speaking and listening. It is through improved conversation that aligned action takes place. In this sense, language is indeed the house of being and doing. The techniques described here are a good way to start improving the quality of our conversations for business benefit.

Robert Bolton is a director of Atos Origin Consulting, formerly KPMG Consulting in the United Kingdom. He specializes in transformational change in the UK public sector, particularly in the area of defense. He is also a visiting lecturer in strategic change at the University of Bristol.

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