Session Information:

Success in the Age of Disruption

The events of 2020 have changed the way we live, socialise and of course work. The way we think about process excellence, digital and business transformation, along with the tools we might need is also changing.

In just 9 short months, the needs of  customers, employees and businesses changed beyond recognition. How we as individuals and organisations respond to these needs, will impact the lives of millions around the globe, never has there been
a greater need for process and operational excellence professionals to step forward and demonstrate the value they bring to their organisations. 

In order to survive and thrive as we prepare for a  “New Normal” organisations of every size, in every industry or service will need to rethink and replan what it takes to succeed. Nothing can be left to chance. Customer expectations, supply chains, production systems, back office systems, front office systems – all need to be rethought and potentially reworked, while reorganising your people. 

In this session Mark will highlight 6 aspects of change that managers in all industry sectors, need to be thinking about and planning for. 

· Reimagining measurement performance systems. 

· Reskilling for a hybrid digital workforce. 

· Rethinking management and motivation for remote workforces. 

· Maintaining a laser focus on real and unimagined journeys. 

· Data collection and management in a remote world. 

· Moving from management to leadership  

Session Transcript:

Good afternoon my name is Martin McGregor and I'm here to share with you this afternoon a little about success in an age of disruption so before we get started of course i want to thank you all for joining us but also call out a special thanks to Brian at Proqis for inviting me to still go ahead and do this vendor neutral um session for you today and my boss Bruce Orcutt at abbey for allowing me to take time to work on this presentation even though I'm not going to be pitching abbey although we might get a few plugs in along the way.

Okay so where should we start well hang on a minute yeah we all know about covid you've been hearing about it I'm sure through lots of presentations particularly talking around the future of work but i think we should get back to the beginning well okay maybe not quite that far back can we bring it forward a little bit okay yeah we had to play people struggling understand what's going on yeah a little bit nearer to uh current time please because yeah okay i know we had the Spanish flu pandemic as well with 500 million infections 20 to 50 million killed okay i give in i understand that actually although we're talking a lot about covid.

We've had these things go on for a very long time but let's have a little look at more related stuff because there must be something that's a little different and a little unusual particularly when we come to the economic impacts oh okay hang on a minute yeah we've had the 2000s recession the 1990s recession the 80s the 70s the 50s the 40s and then all the way back to the 30s okay i give in i accept that although we're talking so much at the moment about covid and the economic impacts that actually it's nothing new we have been there before but most of the audience.

We've got here today is a little technology focus so can we have a little look at something that's a little more to do with technology yeah okay so technological change digital disruption digital transformation or shall we say technology transformation has been going on for a long long time right the way back to landlines automobiles and before that we could even go into electricity the only thing that's really shifting as we can see from this graph is that actually the time between each of these disruptions is getting shorter and shorter and the time from them coming about to becoming mass adoption is rising much much faster than ever before.

So the speed and the pace of some of that disruption maybe maybe something that's a little bit that we're not used to but the one thing we can see is that based on this we're going to get a lot more changes and a lot more things going on as we move forward so the likelihood is of a steady state is pretty slim i mean if we drew it slightly differently we could see that the the treads are becoming shorter and the risers much higher so when we talk about step change step steps and keep going but if we look at all of those quick graphics and just summarize.

It what we can see is that while everything has changed the way we interact the fact that we're doing conferences never mind online but via video such as this is so while everything's changed and their social interactions our family the way that we work actually nothing is really different because working differently moving differently around different social interactions you know tragedy at a personal level for many people the um emotional pressures those are all things that have gone on before but what i find fascinating is over the last eight ten years.

I've talked to a lot of people about making use of something called pestle and there are various forms and I'm sure that some of you have seen different ones with different pieces on there but let me ask you do you actually use something like this are you using it now are you still chasing that new normal I'm sure a lot of people have talked about it through the conference but i wonder is there ever going to be something such as the new normal or is it that we're going to be changing faster and having to keep changing and that you the only thing about new normal is we change faster to which extent.

When you're looking to respond either personally or within your organizations the question to ask yourself is are you building for change or just building for some so-called steady state getting ready to leap to the next crisis you know if you always do what you've always done you'll always get what you've always got it's time to do something differently if you want to stop yourself and your organizations moving from crisis to crisis whether there's 2000 to 2008 2008 to covid and and and whatever comes next then we need to think a completely different way about how we create and respond to change now.

You know a lot of people that have used bits of pestle are very focused on the technology and maybe a little bit more over the last few years on some of the environmental changes or maybe they've looked from a regulatory point of view of making sure they've got the legal but interestingly enough relatively few organizations have actually focused on looking at the social economic and political implications and as the last three years.

Whether in the us or in Europe have shown keeping an eye on that political landscape has a significant impact because it also bleeds into the economic aspects of where we can do trade how we can do trade supply chains being disrupted through political maneuvers as much as anything else and then we look at where we are now and think actually there's a great social change going on people think differently about work people think differently about that work-life balance are you going to be an organization.

That actually takes into account these things and tries to build and create an environment within which your customers want to do business with you your employees want to work with you and you serve society as a whole or are you just going to focus on saying the best way of responding is to cut costs lay off people automate whatever's left and I can assure you that that's not a recipe for long-term success so as we look to that doing things differently i thought that today what i really wanted to share with you is just a few thoughts that I've been having of just some of the aspects of change where i think perhaps you can think a little differently.

I'm not going to be espousing anything that I think you have to do or you've got to do or anything like that what I'd like to do is to get you thinking differently about some of these things and to ask yourselves whether you can make changes whether you need to or whether there's a different way of approaching it so the key thoughts that um I wanted to talk about were a little bit around reimagining performance measurement systems re-skilling for a hybrid digital workforce focusing on real and unimagined journeys a bit about data collection and management in quite frankly what is a remote world a bit about management and motivation for remote workforces and some ideas and thoughts around shifting from that management to leadership so let's jump into the first one reimagining performance measurement systems so is a graphic.

That I grabbed and I'm sure many of you have seen something similar around the concept of performance management you know we look at our balance scorecards we look at priorities we're focused on efficiency we've got goals we put monitoring in place of one kind or another and we're monitoring the scope and hopefully getting some improvements while we're managing time whether that's time for activity etc. but as I look at these frameworks a lot of this performance management is all centered around.

How we're going to manage people or manage work we're not really thinking about the customer our processes our systems and increasingly now our robots because the goals that we want to be aiming at are the customers goals we want to be efficient from the customer's perspective we want to monitor that we're delivering on the customer's perspective making sure that any improvements that we make are focused around those priorities but also when we come to improving processes we have to look at it from two different lenses.

There's one where we look at it from transforming and completely doing something differently and the second one is even when we put it in place now whether that's a process inside or outside our systems we still need to find ways of improving it and often it's been hard to improve a process after we've embedded it in a system or passed on the task to a robot taken people out of the equation and the knowledge is gone and yet still we have the same challenge because sometimes if we're just doing the same things faster cheaper better faster cheaper better.

We're not likely to survive you know it's not related specifically to this point but think about how with the various lockdowns how many retailers are having to move to doing more of their business online in the hope of not being swept up by certain giants but ask yourself the question from a customer point of view do you want the same thing from an online store as you do from a physical store well the fact is you probably want something somewhere in between no matter how much effort you put into fixing your processes in a bricks and mortar retail store.

That's not going to help you become a great retailer so the processes and systems and indeed the customer outcomes are going to be different so if you want to manage performance then you need to think about those things differently and the same thing goes when we think about people particularly at the moment you know with so many people working from home that have never worked from home before and you know we've always got that famous the most famous quote excuse me you know you're on mute.

I think it's probably the de facto vocabulary now um we've got kids running around we've got dogs cats all sorts of distractions and it's causing amusement but when we look at performance management are you still managing your employees by the number of hours they sit at their desk or are you thinking about switching to measuring by outcomes so if an employee chooses to work a completely different set of hours to fit in with child care and all the other challenges you relax it's not about managing whether they're sitting at their desk for most employees.

It's about asking are they getting the work that you need to get done done is it outcome based do you have that flexibility do your employees feel that they have that flexibility or do they feel trapped so i think you need to have a little bit of a think about the way that you monitor and manage performance and ask whether you're still trying to apply the same things when people were sitting in their desks in their offices from eight or five nine till six whatever it is and ask whether.

That's the appropriate way both for getting the best for your organization but also in terms of as we're talking about later motivating people to give of their best so have a think about it what have you done in your new normal re-normal rethinking reshaping your business to reshape performance management from all aspects and in particular with regard to customers and processes so the next point that I wanted to talk a little bit about was reskilling for a hybrid digital workforce i think few of us would argue that increasingly with robotic process automation more systemization even physical robots in production.

We're really moving to a point where we're going to wind up with a hybrid workforce and by thinking of it as a hybrid I guess taking a lesson from carl's then we assume that there's a coexistence we're building for coexistence we're not separating the robots from the people and then causing challenges we're getting them working together so the goal is harmony now one of the things that I've talked about in other presentations at other times is hr for robots because i know it sounds kind of strange and maybe counter-intuitive but a lot of people are talking about how to take on robots to put robots into place some hiring robots but robots are just a technology just like our iPhone or android phones or other technologies they're going to go out of date so the fact is that we're going to need to hire fire and retire robots just as we do our human workforces.

We also need to train the robots and by the way robots need a far more detailed job description than many people when we talk about automation i wonder how much we're thinking about automation assistance working with our people and asking them how we can provide technology to help them achieve their goals not us deciding that you know we've run some monitoring and we've decided that a robot can do this better and we're going to impose this on you excuse me and i would also say that just as a side issue that i think rpa is insulting robots.

What do I mean by that well if you think about the robot lawn mowers or robot vacuum cleaners you know they roll around your lawn or they roll around the room and they work out where the edges are and then they don't bump into things they learn there's an element of learning to them and sometimes we forget that although we talk about it as robotic process automation.

They're not really learning the robots that we use today are employing today don't learn and change yes there's a lot of AI and machine learning coming along but rarely do we see that coming in rpa RPA is still about putting in some sort of task automation that's going to sit there and repeat repetitive tasks it will make the same mistake over and over and over again regardless of what you think so with a hybrid workforce.

What we should be looking at doing is saying this is an amazing opportunity to increase productivity able to achieve new heights delivering better customer service greater employee satisfaction greater ability for our people to really serve the other stakeholders the customers their colleagues etc. and to achieve new heights by building in the concept of the hybrid nature such that we can then apply newer technology in newer ways and the people want to do it for themselves and we've seen this a lot with some of the new moves from Microsoft but i think that one other thing is that we're not really focused on how these kinds of technologies and how this hybrid workforce is going to be able to deliver.

New experiences new experiences for customers for problems that we hadn't even realized could be solved that's when we're really achieving that's what a hybrid workforce can do and of course you know a quote that's often put out to one of Richard Branson's.

Here you know clients don't come first employees come first if you take care of your employees they'll take care of the clients well of course we can all argue that actually customers should come first but i think the sentiment of what he's saying here is really important even when we're looking at the technologies and how to deploy we do need to think about taking care of our employees they aren't the robots we're going to have robots but our employees are not so let's not treat them in that way okay so focusing on real and unimagined journeys.

What on earth do i mean by this so just grabbed an example of a customer journey map this one happens to be a mock-up of one for the us government it doesn't really matter what it is but what i'm looking at is that a lot of people now are looking to automate the customer journey mapping or modeling and the lots of definitive ways of creating this type of diagram but the challenge is they do a couple of things one people think that when they're tracking you from clicking here to clicking there that they click excuse me collecting a customer journey.

What they're actually doing is collecting the customers journey through your systems very useful but let's not confuse it with the customer journey and now it's not just a case of saying this was the traditional customer journey you know when we take that retail scenario that we've just talked about do i go to the store do i use click and clicks do i just order online is there a way of trying things online there are some unimaginable journeys.

That we can create for our customers which are really gonna amaze them and if we use that as a starting point there's a lot we can do to reshape re-change and completely rethink the way that we do business such that we can keep doing business but the key in doing this is to make sure that we're building for change not assuming that this new way of working is going to last forever so don't just think about the journeys your customers take today think about the journeys.

They might take tomorrow next week next year however long you want to go into the future and ask whether you're building in the adaptability the other thing i just wanted to mention on journey maps is that um a lot of people are reusing the phrase customer journey and that's great because i love them i really do i think they're an amazingly powerful technique to identify not just poor not just touch points to excite but also poor business rules that get in the way of new business and a whole bunch of other things but journey mapping is a technique.

That we can use in a number of different ways we can as I say do customers we can do employee journey mapping you know the hire to retire what's the journey what's the journey of being on boarded we can do patient journeys we can do citizens journeys and we can do user journeys through a system now that user could be a customer or an employee and there are great examples of how this way of thinking can really change things and for example I was talking with an exec at a ge company a few years ago and they were explaining that.

They were already struggling to put in a usap system and they mapped out all the requirements and they worked everything through but it was meeting resistance every time they tried to roll it out but when they changed and sat down and actually said well actually let's map the user's journey they suddenly realize that once they looked at the system through the eyes of a user and how a user enacted and carried out their work it was very easy to see why the system they were building wasn't meeting the needs so creating user journey maps a lot of people do it in agile but they call it a customer journey.

I suggest that it's much much smarter to actually call it the user journey it makes it a lot easier for everyone to understand if we all use the same vocabulary meaning something different then all we do is add confusion so you know side lesson let's let's remove the confusion and use a more precise language wherever we can then I want to talk a little about data collection and management in the remote world because some of the things that we've been doing are going to be different now to do that if we look at the top left hand corner I purposely picked a workshop with post-it notes and a whole bunch of people going around and I've picked that because i get really frustrated even though I'm now involved in marketing process mining.

When process mining advocates vendors proponents whatever language you want to use tell me how process mining replaces the workshop it doesn't process mining does something differently just imagine if ever you've been in one of those workshops it doesn't actually matter to a certain extent what the post-its are saying on the wall the fact that groups of people who may not have known each other or understood what other people do are coming together to create a common representation can never be underestimated.

I think sometimes when we come at it from that engineering analytical or scientific perspective we think it's just about the post-it notes and say well that looks chaos we don't think about the human aspects the psychological aspects the emotional aspects the human interconnection so it's my sincere hope that workshops and post-it notes will never go away i also happen to think that in many cases what's being mapped is at a far higher level remember process mining can only mine information that's already in the system many process mining vendors talk about digital transformation well.

I've got news for you you've already digitalized because if you haven't already digitalized then process mining is not going to help you now it can help and it can supplement and complement and in particular i just wanted to look if we take a look at the top right hand side now it's not very easy to see but trust me um what we're seeing there are lots of timelines so whether that's mortgage mortgage applications or whether that's claims processing.

This is the journey that claims or mortgage applications are taking through a system or systems but it can also not just be the journey of a system this can be and is in the case of the way that it works with navy also the journey model so you can take that journey that a customer goes or prospect goes through all the way from HubSpot through salesforce through sap or whatever other system and you can capture it along the way and these are really useful.

If you like micro level customer journeys now unless you're running a pure electronic business where you everything comes in from a click and everything's delivered electronically paid for electronically with no other interaction then you may catch most of the customer journey but you still won't catch it all because the chances are the customer will be doing some things outside of your systems but nonetheless you can get a really good picture and identify very easily where a lot of the frustration for customers comes in you can identify dropouts.

You can identify good behaviors bad behaviors there's a whole bunch of really useful things and then if we look directly on the below on the right hand side then you know the process mining can also help us from an improvement point of view in collecting that information from the system so when we're talking about now with our remote workforce well they're still inputting for the most part information into systems so we can still check on compliance conformance and a whole bunch of those other things now where we can't have the workshops but we still want to understand what people are doing from a systems point of view then on the bottom left then.

There's some new stuff that that's out there on the market now task mining um and indeed it's one of the things that havi's just released which gives us the ability to run desktop recorders on a user's desktop so to have the user decide that yes they want it or to negotiate with the groups well we can actually now capture that so if we're working remotely and we can't have a workshop or we're in a situation where system requirements or system interactions.

That we're looking to understand then we can actually now start to understand without actually having to have people physically together it doesn't solve the same problem but it's supplements and complements so that we can capture information so we can still move forward on all those necessary changes improvements and transformations and the technology can help but as I say it doesn't replace it complements one of the other areas that i think we really do have to rethink and change is management motivation because a lot of organizations or a lot of people that I talk to within other organizations and I wrote a lot about some of these areas of motivation management some months ago.

When we were going into the first lockdown have not really changed you know we're still working in a place where we're using a lot of indirect motivation so playing on the emotional side of things hey yes economic if you don't get your job done then you could be at risk we're making changes and there's an inertia you've got to make stuff happen you've got to make stuff happen and this creates a real emotional stress level and I would suggest that when you look a lot of the surveys about the emotional challenges.

That people having a lot of it is because actually they're being pushed on indirect motive so a bit of a stick and less of the carrot but we get a lot more done than we want to do more for our organizations if we feel that work isn't working it's played we really are able to explore and grow as individuals that we feel there's a purpose to what we're doing and not only to the work but it helps you as an individual fulfill your purpose of achieving something and making something and being someone and if that work is arranged in such a way.

That you feel that you can grow and achieve your full potential and as i was researching this i came by a quote um or a line from zappos i mean zappos has talked about a lot as we know prior to acquisition in terms of some of the things that they do but so much are zappos focused on saying hey we want the right people who are motivated.

If you like by those direct motives and not just uh I come to work to earn money to get paid and move on they want someone with more than that so they put them through the week of training then assuming that everything goes well they offer them a job but if they feel that zappos isn't right for them because you don't fear culturally they'd rather the company pays them two thousand dollars and lets them go with no hard feelings i wonder how many of our organizations think you know we can actually reward people for saying you know this isn't really for me as opposed to something I've got to cling on got to cling on so there's a different way and i would ask you to think about as i said I'm not casting anything but does your culture motivate or demotivate yourself.

So switching from management to leadership is crucial in overcoming change challenges influencing motivating inspiring creating mentoring how much of your time are you doing this or are you still focused on planning organizing coordinating controlling and a great quote I think from mary barra if we win the hearts and minds of employees we're going to have better business success and ultimately that's what you want to achieve better business success.

So just have a look and think even if you can't switch entirely from the left to the right ask yourself can i do more and am i doing enough so that's just a fast run through some ideas i hope sincerely that you can look at it as things to think about and question what could you do better now as a final thought i wanted to share with you a couple of quotes or two congruents from a book.

I wrote with Ian gotz back in 2010 we're at a turning point where the technology we create needs to focus more on enabling us to do things that we haven't even thought of rather than simply automating what we already do it's the former that will lead our business forward with renewed prosperity and the latter we'll see is continuing to spiral down to the point of non-existence we like you are people too we share similar hopes fears and emotions all any of us want at a very personal level is to be able to feed and care for our families and friends to live happy healthy lives.

So as you go on in your own transformation journey we ask that you think about the impact of the changes you're making on the lives of others and how through your life and your own work you can focus on enriching your life and the lives of those around you hard to believe that we wrote that over 10 years ago but it would become even more prophetic today.

Than it was at that time we talk a lot about transformation changes new normal digital robots etc. but at the end of the day it comes down to people and the way that we treat others and hopefully we do treat them as we'd like to be treated ourselves thank you very much have a great day bye.