Session Information:

Intelligent Business Process Automation: How Great Enduring Organizations Scale People, Technology and Value

In a world disrupted by exponential technologies, how do you build systems and mechanisms where extraordinary performance becomes ordinary? How great enduring organizations consistently deliver exponential leaders, growth, and value creation?

We will explore how the best cross-industry organizations leverage "the right" culture, methods, technologies, and people as the ultimate engine for value creation and sustainable competitive advantage.

Session Transcript:

We're gonna bring you the benchmark of great enduring organizations. We're gonna have a journey through the foundations, The governance, and the principles there are used by organizations that apply technology to accelerate value creation their organization's most effectively and most efficiently. And we're gonna look a bit under the hood of technology. So, some of our sessions are very focused on the technology itself, A process, not mine, you already had a couple of those. I wanna, I wanna get to a higher level now, where we look at organizations from, and governance, and culture that allows for this technologists to be, again, implemented effectively to create the most value in the shortest time and simplest means. So, let's change hats here momentarily, and, as we become connected workers in this journey.

So, um, let me make sure that you are getting my feed wonderful, and, that you already have my presentation showing for you.

And, the and this is about intelligent business process automation. How great, enduring organizations scale their people, their technology, and value creation, for all stakeholders.

So, let's, let's, let's dive into this and let's first set the stage, that none of the things that I'm going to discuss here are theories.

These are, this is 100% based on empirical evidence. And the experimentation done with tremendous organizations for more than 25 years across all industries.

And these organizations are the foundation for the, the, the concepts, the principles, the mechanisms, that we're going to discuss here with you today.

Now it doesn't mean that each one of these organizations is a great enduring organization and it's going to last for a lap forever.

Greatness can be fleeting.

We will talk about the principles that allowed to be them to be great in certain areas, and certain departments, sometimes across the organization, over a period of time.

But greatness is not guarantee. If you do not keep those principles on an ongoing basis, and we're going to be looking at here, is it are those stretches of greatness Where they achieve and sustain that greatness.

And what it look like for our process perspective.

What does it look like from a value creation and innovation perspective?

So, I'm gonna ask you to do a, an exercise, a mental exercise. First. I want you to go back in your own experiences. Several of you have multiple decades of experience across multiple industries. Implementing improvements and innovations at scale.

My question to you is, what do you think that matters most? When you look back at that journey, and you look at the theory? But as the F at the evidence and the results that you have, that you had during that journey. Whether they were good results or bad results, what matter most to you. Go ahead and put it on the questions box right now. Please, type in the questions box, what matter most in that journey of innovation, of improvement, of value creation in your organizations.

Was it about ideas? Wasn't methods was a technologist? Or was it what is it about the people that were part of that journey? So go ahead, type that under the questions box is that Ideas, methods, Technologists, and People.

Now, as as we discuss this, I'm going to go over each one of these components in the journey of this great enduring organizations, and there is the right answer for this, OK?

But I will say that ideas are very, very important, because you need new ideas. You need to have different perspectives or problems. You need fresh ideas in the organization.

You need ideas that create value.

But I will also say that ideas are everywhere. And what really uncommon are people in your organization who are willing to put their reputation behind those ideas.

Then, I'll talk about methods. We have heard about methods already in this conference. Methods are very important, because they provide a discipline framework for execution.

Now, you know, you can talk about Lean, you can talk about six Sigma.

You can talk about Agile, and Scrum, and all different types of methods.

Listen, I have been, for nearly three decades, a certified Lean six Sigma, Master Black Belt, but for most people, that sounds like a dangerous mental condition. It doesn't help them.

So, methods are important, but we have to remember, methods alone do not transform businesses.

People do, OK, OK, I gotta just, as I must be about technologists, right, Because it's a matter of fact, this conference is about process mining, and processing intelligence, and intelligent automation.

So exponential technologies, there are reshaping the way we work and the way we live and ruled, and we all know that the right technologists can you enable our key processes to be better, faster, cheaper.

That's wonderful, create a lot of value, but we also know that the wrong technologies, or the technologies without the right foundation can make stupid happen at the speed of light.

And we don't want that.

So it must be about people than people is the ultimate answer, because people are our most valuable assets, right?

Well, remember, this is not a theoretical exercise, this is the benchmark and evidence of great enduring organizations. And while we actually have seen, is that, why organizations talking out, talk about people, being their most important asset.

When there is a crisis, the Asset's typically stay there, and the people go.

So, it's not a romantic view of people. It's a practical, honest view of people in the organization, and the reality is that all people matter.

But there are the right people in your organization that matter most.

Because those, right people, they scale value creation for the organization.

Yeah, They scale the values of the organization, the principles of the organization that allow the organization to prosper and grow. So it's about finding the right people in your organization that will allow you to scale excellence, to scale innovation, to scale value creation for you in this journey.

So this is very confusing because everything that I've said so far seems like one big contradiction.

Well, the world of greatness is filled with contradictions, Forces that pull in very different directions.

We will talk about the importance of purpose and discipline.

We'll talk about the importance of this explanation of technologists.

And human values, and collaboration and vulnerability and leadership.

And we'll talk about the need for excellence and innovation, because a very common mistake that organizations do is that they think that they have, they should choose one over the other mediocre organizations.

They believe that they have to make this choices.

Great, enduring organizations realize that the world of greatness is an and the world with forces pulling in different directions. And the best solutions are often in the intelligent blending of these forces that pull in very different directions. They don't spent endless hours between choosing between one or the other, they realize it's often the the blend of both that create greater endurance gradient during performance.

So when it comes to excellence and innovation, let go of the feeling of the thought or feeling that, you know, I gotta be most excellent.

Because if, if you do that, you may be good, but never great.

Because if you're just excellent and that you set high performance standards and you meet, and even exceed those performance standards.

If you're, if you develop, just excellence without innovation, over time, you will become obsolete no matter what industry you're on.

The flip side is also true.

The most innovative organizations in the world are not the dominant organizations in their industry and the great enduring organizations in their industries, because they tend to fall in love of innovation and technology for its own sake.

And they are not consistent with their purpose over time.

So, the most excellent innovations will never be great. The most innovative organizations will never be great. Alas.

They are able to scale their innovation better than their competitors scan.

And the way the great enduring organizations to scale their innovation is by applying the principles of excellence. So the innovation that they create. So, keep this in mind.

Great, enduring organizations have the intelligent blend of excellence and innovation that's appropriate for their business models to have great, enduring performance.

Now, it's very interesting that I talk to you about the benchmark of 100 plus organizations across all these different industries.

But it's even more interesting when I can share you some insights that come from being a leader of excellence, innovation, acceleration, withing large corporations, And I'll briefly share the lessons from each one of these corporations, in times over which they were, they were great.

It doesn't mean that they're great should they or they will be great in the future, because greatness is not captive greatness needs. You have to maintain those principles throughout your organization, which is incredibly hard.

The ultimate definition of discipline in any organization is consistency with your purpose.

And unfortunately, organizations have attention, cronic, Attention Deficit Disorder, and they lose focus on their purpose.

They lose the, the directional guidance that's created by their purpose, quite often, for many different reasons that we're not going to address here.

But I want to encapsulate this by saying that the ultimate definition of discipline is consistence with purpose. And you must consistency with purpose.

And you must be consistent with your purpose to be successful in this journey. So snapshots of success from each one of those organizations where I led this journey for a period of time started my career at Sony as Sony Electronics, both in the United States and Japan.

The lesson from Sony was very simple: join Sonya and a time where they were the technology leaders in the world.

And the lesson from that, from that period of greatness, is very simple.

Real innovators in your organization, the real leaders of intelligent automation and process mining in your organization are not typically who you think they should be, because, listen, anybody can do a process mining application here, save a million dollars there.

I'm talking about doing this over a period of 5, 10 years, delivery, not millions of dollars, but billions in value creation, in financially validated value creation, Creating a system that is scales innovation at a very large levels.

Now, the lesson from Sun is very simple.

The people who you think are the innovators and the scholars of innovation in your organization, they can only be identified by the test of innovation execution.

Which means that no innovation doesn't care about your gender, your race, your ethnicity, or how many certificates you have hanging on the I love myself wall.

When it comes to real innovation for value creation, there are four traits that show up in this individuals in the organization, And this four traits, you don't find them on resumes. You don't find them on diplomas. You find them on the on the meritocracy of ideas with clear execution mechanisms. And they are revealed by the test of innovation execution.

So the traits there are revealed by the test of innovation execution. The real innovators have this four traits. They have purpose, alignment.

Whatever it is that they do are lines of the purpose of the organization that they work for.

This is a major source for, for employee dissatisfaction organizations because most people don't have aligned purpose of their organizations. They are making a living summed up most often, but they are not aligned with the purpose of the organization because it's either unclear or their own purposes unclear. And there is a misalignment between their purpose and the purpose of the organization.

So there's a natural alignment in those individuals between their purpose individually in the purpose of the organization, but that's not enough. That has to be there. They are fueled by tremendous levels of passion for what they do and this passion is a lot more like an arranged marriage than romanticized love.

It is about working our face off on something, becoming good at it, and developing a passion for it over time.

They have purpose, they have passion, they have discipline to follow up on that passion. And discipline, again, is not falling a regiment, a set of rules. Discipline is consistency with your purpose.

And most, and follow that passion and discipline, with tremendous levels of resilience, and resilience is not being stubborn. And never giving up.

Resilience is about understanding the challenges, having a purpose that's worthwhile, and overcoming those challenges collaboratively.

It means that you engage with your resistance. You collaborate with your resistance to overcome the challenges. And only if you're not able to collaboratively overcome the challenges that you then pivot and take the longer road.

And you need to be resilient one to go on that longer longer road towards your, towards your purpose, towards your directional guidance. So remember this, the traits that you're looking, for, professionals, to scale, intelligent automation for value creation, your organization, are different from what most people think.

They are purpose, alignment, passion, discipline, and resilience. You're not interested on someone who wants to become the chief digital officer in the organization.

You're interested in someone who wants to see this as a journey that never ends for them. That they have this passion, discipline resilience around intelligent automation, Your organization, and they'll do this forever. They, if they happen to become the CEO on that journey, that's fine.

But that's an outcome. That's not the goal.

It's about innovation and intelligent automation for value creation journey that they are really immersed on. Now, when I left Sony, I join a startup in the Semiconductor industry that changed the World ..., develop laser technologies that allow Moore's Law to exist today in the semiconductor industry, which means that we double the number of circuits per unit area. In a semiconductor wafer, every 18 months or so this has allowed all other technologists to grow exponentially. It's the baseline technology and semiconductors that allow everything else in tech knowledge to happen today and into the future.

Now, this company was a very successful startup, but it was very unsuccessful to start with, why? Because they got the most intelligent people in the world, in the same room.

And they spent all their time trying to prove to each other that, who was the smartest guy or girl in the room?

They do not have concepts and techniques for collaborative leadership.

And collaborative leadership is the lesson that I want to share with you here.

You must. It's not enough to just get the most intelligent people in the room to do this applications. This people, they can do 1 or 2 or 3, or maybe 10 or 20. They cannot be a thousand or 2000 per year.

Because you need, they need to collaborate effectively towards a common purpose.

And the hallmark of collaborative leadership is that you have to surround yourself with people, with very different perspectives.

And you have to and they have to feel comfortable to disagree with you as a leader without fear of retaliation.

That's a hallmark of collaborative leadership. There are methods and techniques that go with that, but you must, for you to be a great, enduring organization and leader, you must develop and refine your collaborative leadership skills. And this is a discipline. Is not just wish you wash. Consensus, building, we get along. It's much more than that. There is a discipline of collaborative leadership that's not well understood. That you must understand to develop, in your organization, and in your leadership, personal leadership style, in your organizational leadership development.

Now to accelerate this, and Nestle. This became the application of a lot of this principles now. You're an organization with 350,000 employees, 585 business units around the world. How do you accelerate innovation on an ecosystem like that?

And I answer is simple, one word. Culture.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast, excellence and innovation, intelligent automation, process mining, are just side dishes.

They're gonna get chewed up by Joseph Culture and they're gonna get spit up.

Nobody cares about your initiative, if it is not aligned with the culture of your organization.

So, you must be empathetic to the culture of your organization, mitat where it's at.

Identify the key influencers in your organization that will help you move, make the changes that are necessary over time.

And over a long period of time, you're going to be able to shift that culture by engaging the key influencers in the organization.

And by creating value to everyone involved, it's a simple recipe, It's very hard to execute, and you have to execute this over a long period of time consistently with your purpose, and that is discipline.

Now, at Black and Veatch, an organization with more than 12,000 engineers across 110 countries, developing this incredibly complex infrastructure projects in energy, in water in telecommunications.

How how do you accelerate excellence and innovation in an ecosystem like that?

So like, you just show some evidence and some data to back up this concepts and principles, because I always find interesting when people talk about, Oh, we're applying this in our organization, and they never really show me what the results look like, and everybody can get results in six months to one year. I want to see where it tenure results look like. When you do this. And I think you should demand that for anybody who comes to you and says, OK, I want to do a new initiative for you. I want to help you with this technology. OK, wonderful. Jeff helped me out here, but I want to see what your track record is for the last 10 years.

Lot of people don't have much to show on that, because they are doing hypothesis testing of your organization. They don't know how it really works out. There are using our our organization to experiment their theory, which is fine if you're willing to pay for their development. They should ask for more than that.

So, over a 10 year period, what does it look like on some of this great, enduring organizations, and, specifically, Black and Veatch for a six year veered? We engage the organization with methodology with their ideas. We had lots of new ideas coming up.

And we're getting value creation, OK, over a six year period. What you see there on the bars is the actual earnings, the millions of dollars that were being derived by this projects and the organization.

And the green highlight on top of that bar represents the number of people who are engaged in this effort.

And we did it, typically. How do we do this wave into HR and senior leaders in your organization, asked them, So, what do you think are the leaders for, you know, intelligent automation and our business? Or for Innovation, for value creation? And what they did, they pick the list of the chosen people, right? That's what organizations do.

Your HR has a high performance list of people there, that was worked with the senior leaders, But the question is, do they really know?

I think they have a pretty good desk, just start with, but they don't really know, and a lot of those people are not the right people.

You have to find who are the right people, and the right, people are only revealed by the tasks of innovation, excellence, and innovation execution.

So, but we didn't know who the right people wore.

And I didn't have the capital reputation with the senior leaders in the organization to tell them what to do. So what I did is took a form, OK.

We implemented kind of a Lean six Sigma program world-class, and we're getting good results.

And we got your six, which is a lot than most of anybody who isn't a skull, whoever experience in their career.

Because what the data shows to us is that more than 50% of organizations that embark on the journey of improvement and innovation as a discipline, after three years, between 18 months and three years, it's gone.

Whatever happened, leadership changes, you know, lost. You are not really showing benefits. You became a bunch of bureaucrats because you know, methodology, but you don't know how to create value for the organization.

The communication was not good.

A whole long host off of a list of issues that happen.

So, that is that the three year mark, at the five year mark, 99% of the organizations that has started an initiative, like no improvement innovation, or intelligent automation for value creation, It's over. It's gone.

And, worse, yet, they restart with a new name, or they restart with a new leadership, and what's gonna happen to that three years later? Gone again.

So, we see this over and over again, and we got 3 or 6. We should be celebrating. We're part of the 1% Club. But we didn't celebrate what we said. It was the following, OK?

OK, we're doing very well. I know our senior leaders are very happy, but I've been here for six years now. You know what, I'm gonna push against my seal. And I'm gonna say that. Listen Seal.

I believe that we should not focused on ideas, mattos anymore, they are important. They exist, They are part of the system, but we need to find the right people in the organization.

So who are those right people, then the people with purpose, passion, discipline, or resilience To find the right people We must create a meritocracy of ideas with clear execution mechanisms.

And when you do that in a systematic way, and it's real, people will be tentative to start.

So the question is, how can we create a system that creates the most of that in the shortest time and simplest means by identifying the right opportunities in the business and you open that up for everybody.

You'll make you volunteer, voluntary, so that anybody can participate and they don't have to do anything.

So what you see is what we experience is that people are a little skeptical in the beginning, Well, I'm not sure if I'm going to engage on this because I don't know, it's kinda how it's gonna work out now that I don't have to do it.

Well, over time, what you've seen is that you're attracting the right people. People with purpose, alignment, people, fashion, people with discipline. People have resilience.

And what we experienced was an exponential growth in value creation and equally important, in voluntary engagement across the world.

We went from 500 people to over 5500 liters of excellence and innovation on a voluntary basis.

We we increase value creation, eightfold and we started helping over 100 organizations across all industries, should do the same, over what is now, a two decade period.

So, the question, OK, well, this is interesting of that, but maybe that was just specific to that organization. Right. Right. Let's look at that from a different organization. Let's look at in Denver.

Fortune 100 energy organization that wanted to go for extraordinary.

So, OK, what does this extraordinary it looks like. Well, it didn't look very good in 2010.

When this journey started, This company was a $2 billion enterprise in its market value.

Which was right after the financial crisis of 2008, and really, the company wasn't very poor shape, even though it was a $2 billion market value, that was less than the book value of the company at that time.

And if bath was not good.

So there was a new leadership that came into the company that understood the principles of greatness and look at the company and say, Hey, I'm not so sure what our competitive advantage is.

So the ultimate competitive advantage that we can develop here, in this very mature business, is really revitalizing our culture along our core values, but you have to choose the right values, and you have to choose for a culture of value creation.

No matter what values you, you bring as a foundation to that, You need to develop a culture of value creation, OK. Wonderful. So what this organization did, not over 1 or 2 years, but consistently over multiple years, is to establish a meritocracy of ideas with clear execution mechanisms accessible to all in the organization.

Foster collaborative leadership leadership development across all areas of the organization as a discipline by 2018, 8 years into this journey.

This organization was identifying, prioritizing, and implementing, on an annual basis, more than 2000 innovations for value creation. These are not ideas.

These are implementations of ideas that create value, was over a billion dollars in financially validated IBA, though, for the organization.

And, and, OK, this sounds interesting, you can start debating the savings here, whether it's true or not, let the market judge by 2018, 8 years into this journey of excellence and innovation acceleration.

The company's market value was at $35 billion.

This is public information.

This is, this is what the market assessed on the growth that was happening in his organization, at the top line, and at the bottom line, by building a culture of excellence and innovation, focusing on the right people and following this four bullets that you see here now.

So the message here is very simple.

We can talk about ideas. We can talk about methodologies. We can talk about technologists all day long.

For you to achieve enduring greatness.

You must unleash the power of your people to go for extraordinary.

If you're to zoom mean in each one of those pictures, you'd see me with hundreds of professionals that grow around the world in this organization.

Having the same discussion that we're having right now, and many more discussions over days, over months, but we're not playing the short game, we're playing the long game.

Now, I'm gonna wrap this up by showing you some of the fundamentals behind this. And I'm very fast mode on purpose. Because this first portion is actually more important than the second portion. Even though for you who are like to focus on tactics, you're gonna enjoy the second portion.

But I haven't got to tell you if you don't get the culture side right.

If you don't get to a meritocracy of ideas of clear execution mechanisms, collaborative leadership development skills, innovation, execution skills, none of the other stuff is going to matter.

So let's go into the other stuff now.

We are setting up intelligent business process management as a foundation.

I'm not going to read what it is. You can do that yourself.

But it's identifying the governance four, and two and process development and ownership in your organizations.

It's about understanding the maturity levels of processes.

And understanding that you don't want all of your processes to be optimized, You want all you, most of the processes that you have, you probably shouldn't even have them, because they don't really matter.

You want to find your critical processes, and you want to focus on them.

And on those critical processes, at a very minimal, you must have them defined.

And then you must have them make a decision on whether or not you need to elevate their maturity to manage and optimize, depending on the value creation return that you got from them.

So, you have to be a value, creation, leader, above all. You're not a process leader. You're a value creation leader.

Now, you also need to understand that as you innovate in your process maturity, there are multiple levels of innovation that you need to address.

You have innovation at the core. You have adjacent innovations.

We are extensions of the core, and you have disruptive innovations, which are disruptions to the business model.

You must understand what type of innovation you're bringing into your processes, or products, or systems, or any area of your organization. And, the ratio that I share here with you, is, from the most innovative and successful organizations in the world, that's typically the ratio between core adjacent and disruptive innovations that they identify in their organization.

Now, what are the pillars of success? When you look at this intelligent business process for value creation.

When you look at that, as organizations, have three things that separate them, from the, from the rest.

They have clear governance, with defined roles, and the structure for, for intelligent business process management value creation. They have methods, they have laying, they have six sigma, they have agile, they have a scrum, they have pro side, they have a car.

They can have a multitude of methods, but here's what they, the successful ones have.

They have 1 or 2 methods that they focused on.

And those methods become a proven methodology, and the and the and the guide for clear execution and execution mechanisms, and they become a common language for your organization.

And the third one here, is incredibly important.

They have widely developed collaborative leadership skills, and innovation execution skills for value creation.

And what you do is, that on each one of this, you know, simply summarize form, you're going to have governance. That's gonna look like governance in most good process improvement and innovation type of settings, where you're going to have a ownership, establish, You're going to have collaborative leadership, establish. You're going to have coaching for the teams. You're going to have a champion for those teams, and you're going to have a steering committee that's going to be guiding the program for your organization.

Now, if you don't have this, all this other stuff that you're doing is going to fall apart. Yeah, you can do 2 or 3 projects, and that's it. It's going to die a slow death.

You need to build the golf, a basic governance structure, that takes into account each one of those roles. Most of you are very experienced and know what those roles are supposed to do, Make sure you're following them, make sure you have them in place.

Now, you also need to have methods for disciplined execution like we discuss, we're gonna look at innovation as a discipline. You want to look at your end to end process ownership.

In your business process management, you want to implement Lean to increase speed, and eliminate waste, and you'll want to use six Sigma to reduce variation satisfy customers. Those are all wonderful, and there are other methods that you can use. Those are the four most common methods that I see in your organizations that do a successfully over a long period of time.

But I also wanted to remind you that methods alone do not transform businesses.

The end game here is collaborative value creation and collaborative value creation, leadership.

That's the, that's what you're mining for in your organization.

Because what you're going to see is that there is a maturity scale that organizations go through.

And your organization can have like value creation done at the At the entrepreneur level, OK? You can have some really smart person who can come up with a multi-million dollar business, and you should be glad that if you're around those people because they already have built-in passion, discipline, resilience for whatever it is that they're doing.

And these people, they can create multi-million dollar businesses. There are wonderful entrepreneurs.

Now, if you want to have a multi billion dollar business, that's usually not enough. You now need to scale the individual brilliance of the intrapreneur, our entrepreneur.

And you and you scale that individual brilliance in larger organizations by implementing systems and mechanisms that scale that individual brilliance. And the systems and mechanisms require governance, require a basic structure with clear roles and responsibilities and may make use of growth and technology accelerators, where you're experimenting with RPA and process and mining, and the AI, and drones, and blockchain, and whatever all the exponential technology that you think can you scale your business, credit score, adjacent, says, or in disruptive ways.

But even those organizations, there are successful and become multi-billion dollar organizations, which are now a much smaller group.

There will never be multi trillion dollar organizations if they're not able to take the next step.

And the next step in the step that multi trillion dollar organization, stake, is that they realize that for mutually scale, innovation, for value creation, L, unprecedented levels.

I must have, I must develop, wide, collaborative leadership skills, and innovation, execution skills.

Those are the ultimate skills for the multi trillion dollar organizations.

And they are built on a clear purpose, and a culture that has a strong set of core values that supports that purpose.

This is easier said than done.

This is the ultimate definition of discipline, consistency with your purpose. So please glean the learn from this amazing organizations and and adapt this principles to where you are today with your organization. Start small in scale, because even the biggest multi-trillion organization today started very small in scale.

That is your journey. Not until your career is over. I would say that if you have ... alignment, it's until the day you die.

That's your journey. There is no retirement here. There are only two stages in life, You're growing, and you're dying.

So, choose the journey that will give you growth until the very end.

With that, let's look at one specific application. Since I don't have Q&A on this on purpose, I want to go show you some specific examples to wrap up.

This is intelligent business process management on the energy infrastructure as an example.

How do you start this thing, where you get your senior leaders, you get them in the room for a couple of days, and you and you talk to them about what are the key value creation processes in our organization.

And you got them to agree on them on that, so that they develop a common mental model of our organization, and how we serve our customers. And the green highlighted areas there are the very high level stuff, OK? And the blue stuff is supporting processes, and the, as maybe purple in that picture, Maybe blue to the left are the strategic processes.

But the point here is that you're creating a high level mental model of your organization on the processes that is, that you use, is to create value for your customers.

Your leaders need to be part of this.

And as you develop this, if you're a leader, you're going to realize you're going to have hundreds of sub processes, of course, on that behind each one of these high level processes.

But you need to start the journey with your senior leaders and get them to understand this. And then you'll go to the next level.

And as you note this, in the organizations, you're not process driven. You may be project driven. So how does that Oregon happen? How do I structure intelligent business process if my organization's project driven?

Well, very good question. You need to, that's key for intelligent business process management. You need to realize that the project teams there, they receive and apply the process knowledge.

But, they are riding on this train, going 100 miles an hour, they do not want to redesign this, this train as they're going down the track to 100 miles an hour. It will not be a good idea.

So, you, and I mean, your process owners, and the teams, are looking across all the projects.

They are identifying, what are the best practices? They're A brand. identifying new technologies. They're identifying what's going to create the most value in the shortest time.

In the simplest, means across all the different projects that we're executing, and that interface is what intelligent business process management is about in a project driven organization.

So, we must, you must understand that, you must understand that execution, excellence is connected to your process excellence through this interface, where you have clear process ownership of the end to end processes. That is, that is supporting execution, excellence across the enterprise.

There's an important point to make here, because quite often, organizations get confused. Because they say we're not a process driven organization. We're a project driven organization where iron dri driven organization.

Everything that we do is a process.

So if you don't like the word process eliminate, it's use something else.

But the reality is that you need to make this connection of your execution with your, with your end to end processes through this intelligent business process management approach. And then you need to bring a huge dose of simplification to everything that you do.

Because when you get super smart people to solve problems, it's a disaster, Because what do you all can do is the following. You have a really complex problem, and what you do is that you've rapid this complex solution around it. Oh, let's use process mining on everything now. Well, that's not going to help you.

You need intelligence, Really. It's not about intelligence.

It is about division to create positive change. And then the principles for creating plus positive change. And what those require require you to look at the complex process or issue.

And not wrap a complex solution around it, but understand the essence of that complexity in that issue.

And addressed that with a simple solution. Which is easier said than done. Because the world is complex, we are surrounded by complexity on everything that you do.

But if you're a good, you sit, there, wonder what needs to be added on my new findings on the financial reports.

So that can be great, but I want you to remind you that Grace has not achieved by adding things to systems.

Greatness is only achieved when there is nothing left to take out, because when you're at that level, you know, now what the essence of the issue is, you know, what the essence of complexity is.

And if you focus on that, you're now going to have great the path to greatness clear for you.

Now, I BPM innovations, They require us to collaborate. They require us to eliminate. They require us to reduce.

And only after we do those three things, we think about automation, please be very careful with this, especially on this conference, is about intelligent automation.

So, although we want to do is that oceanus that tell me how to do this API so that I can automate my procurement process, the procurement, your paperwork, you know, process. I mean, those applications are the technology applications are trivial.

Compare to the requirements for real collaboration with those players in those processes.

And then a mindset of elimination, first, reduction, AXT, and only when you have the simplified essence of your process, you're going to automate that.

And I will show an example that if you don't do that in that order, it's a disaster.

He is an very tactical example that I want to share with you.

Multi-billion dollar organization, doing multi-billion power plants around the world and they have this for one of their key processes is valve control station design and construction on this very large power plant facilities, this is $1 billion dollars power plants and even every one of them.

You have to design procure and build 100 different types of unique and complex valve control stations.

So what did we do, what did someone doing this organization? They came up to this has only have 120 different unique complex valve control stations. Here's what we're gonna do, let's give it to IT, and they're gonna automate the process. Yeah, we're gonna save a lot of money.

three years later, IT did not have this process automated.

Why? Because it incredibly complex.

It sounds, really, it looks really simple when you look at the high level diagram, like this picture, here, and we can sit down and say, oh, we have 120 designs for, 20 designs for project. So, let's go ahead and follow this process and automate the process.

The devil is in the details. The process is executed differently by 120 different design teams in a single project.

You're not going to, it's going to take forever to, to wrap up that complex IT solution around this complex problem. So you don't automate that?

What do you do? You start by collaborating. You bring the people who are collaborating around this process. In this case, there were key influencers in the organization, in this process area.

You bring them together and you say, hey, friends Have 120 of that different designs for each valve station on this project.

Do you think we could come up with a standardized design?

And you know what happens? Everybody's gonna say? yeah, yeah, very quickly.

There'll be tamped people around the table who will nod their heads and say, Yeah, we can standardize the design, but in their little heads, they're saying, it's going to be my way, it's going to be my standard.

And that relies the challenge.

That's why collaborative leadership skills are so important, because now you have to work with this group, show that you don't have 10 different standard designs that you have, the fiori standard designs.

You go for 122 fewer than that, but that they all can agree and buy in, because those 10 different designs nobody would agree on in the long term, and they will sabotage it.

We need to find the number that is right for that group that they can agree on. And what they found out in that group is that there were six designs.

There were six designs that they could agree on tolerate and live with.

And when they did that, now, a lot of the steps go away because in the six standard designs, I can do 80% of design on a standardized approach, which is pre-built. And then I spent the other 20% doing the customizations.

And when I did that, we eliminate or reduce the complexity. We agree on six standard designs with the team. We implemented the six designs. We now have the flow, even at the high level of those six designs, and they can be done 20 times faster.

Because now, IT was able to implement an automated solution for that simpler process in three months.

And now we're going 25 times faster, 20 times faster.

Remember, please do not automate, collaborate, eliminate, reduce, and then think about automation.

Now, automation is kind of a romantic, **** solution to problems, but it's not the right solution.

In most cases, remember, it's not about ideas. Not about math is not about technologists, is about the right people.

The right people in your organization are people with purpose, passion, discipline, and resilience.

And you have to teach them the right principles of excellence, The right principles of innovation, For value creation.

And they you need to teach them collaborative leadership skills. You need to teach them innovation execution as a discipline.

And what you're going to find out is that everybody in the organization wants to point fingers, but nobody really wants to do anything because it's too risky for them to step out.

And your job is to create a meritocracy of ideas with clear execution mechanisms that say, hey, you, anybody here can make a difference. Here is our meritocracy of ideas. Here is our method. Here's our execution mechanisms.

And what you're going to find out is that a few people with courage will step up, and I say, Hey, I'm interested.

Can I learn more about this? Yes.

Hey, Bill, come join us. We're gonna teach you to solve problems in a different way. We're going to teach you to take different perspectives that problems, because in the mind of the expert, there's only one way in the mind of the novice. There are many ways and we're going to combine and blend the mind of the expert with the mind of the novice. And we're going to teach a collaborative leadership skills and innovation execution skills, but you know what?

You still must have courage, and every one of you, in this conference right now, you must have courage to lead, because the road ahead or the river ahead is dangerous and scary.

You must mitigate and manage risks, but you still must display courage and lead.

And your job, if you're a senior leader, is to create an environment where great people, and great ideas, can connect.

And, I allow people to step up lower the risk in fear level in the organization, so that their courage, whatever level it is, is enough for them to get started.

Start small in a scale, because none of us can predict the future. Only two types of people predict the future. Those who don't know. And those who don't know that they don't know.

When you look at great enduring organizations, what they do is that they build their culture as their ultimate competitive advantage. And their culture is a blend of excellence and innovation that is built with consistent purpose.

Not over 1 or 2 years, over 5, 10 plus years.

And when you have that, now, you're on your path to greatness is not an easy path but it's a very rewarding path, not just for your profession but for your life, because I believe that when you find that path, you don't want to do anything else.

Now, as we continue on this session on this on the conference, and as we continue interacting, multiple outposts, you can see my journey until the day I die on LinkedIn across hundreds of organizations around the world. And I hope that you can join us in that journey. And then you'll find the purpose that's meaningful to you, and then you align that with the purpose on your own journey. So we'll be wrapping up now. Everybody's going to be taking a break.

I am going to stop sharing my presentation.

for now, I'm going to change my hatchback to the hats off facilitator and a proud host of the conference.

And as we do that, I want to set up our next speaker and our next speaker is going to be fantastic. I'm talking about Caitlin Harris, who is Director of Controls and Automation Engineering at Staples.

And the challenge is going to share with us the journey that he has gone through his own journey of excellence and innovation. And the use of process mining, he started the title of his session, is Identifying Business Opportunities with Process Mining, and Successfully Translating that into Business Value. So, again, thank you, everyone for for the participation. In this session, I look forward to seeing you on the top of the on the top of this hour with Kalam Harris and his journey at Staples.

About the Author

José Pires,
CEO, Global Excellence & Innovation,
Global Excellence & Innovation.

José Pires serves as the Global Excellence & Innovation (E&I) Leader for Andeavor Corporation, where he oversees the global identification, prioritization and execution of mission critical business improvements and innovations that add value to the company, business partners and external clients in multiple markets.

Prior to his current role, Pires held Excellence and Innovation leadership positions in large, global companies in the electronics (Sony), semiconductor (Cymer-ASML), food (Nestlé) and infrastructure (Black & Veatch) industries. Throughout his career, Pires developed and refined E&I as an award winning program for innovation, leadership development, strategy execution and value creation globally.

Pires is an advisory board leader and keynote speaker for several global conferences on innovation, operational excellence, leadership development, strategy execution, business transformation, customer engagement and growth acceleration.

He holds a Bachelor in Engineering Physics from the University of Kansas and a Master in Business Administration focused in Investment Banking and Entrepreneurship from the University of San Diego.