What first made me curious about Systems Thinking?

A bit of background

I started my career within the telecommunications industry, as one of the people who took the phonecall when a customer’s internet service failed.

As a team, all we were interested in, because it’s what we were targeted on, was getting through the call as quickly as possible and onto the next.

Having suggested a couple of improvements, and shown a great deal of interest in what I thought at the time was customer service, I was rewarded with a few promotions and soon found myself managing a large team.

Working for an outsourced call centre provider meant that we were very much targeted on standard KPIs such as:

• Time taken to answer call
• Length of time on the call
• Length of after-call work
• Number of calls taken
• Sickness/absence levels

There was no view whatsoever on whether the customer had got the service they required to solve their problem, in this case, restoring their internet connection to full working order.  We never even considered the purpose of the system from our customer’s point of view.

The targets understandably manifested themselves in staff behaviour, including:

What	Why	Other implications
Cutting people off when the timer approached our target call length	To ensure the time spent on each call was below the specified contract target	Repeat calls received (failure demand)
Once a customer had been waiting longer than the contracted target, other calls were prioritised over them	Once a call had taken longer to answer than the target, it counts against you in   percentage terms.  Leaving it longer makes no difference to your performance	Customers would be kept waiting for significant periods of time, while other customers, who had not had to wait, were dealt with first
Completing the after call work for one customer, while talking to the next	To ensure the agreed target for after call work time is not exceeded	Rushed after call work meaning records were not accurate, and added no value when revisted (which they regularly were) Lack of attention on the customer in hand, leading to further failure demand/rework
Taking just enough time off on sick leave so as to remain below the ‘sickness absence policy radar’	By formalising a sickness policy and communicating the triggers, it was made   very clear how the system could be used to ones advantage	Managers no longer had the ability to look at sickness/absence on a case by case basis   and make a sensible decision.  The policy dictated the action with no manager discretion

Of course, I disciplined those in my team that I caught partaking in the above, believing that they were bad staff, but never made the connection with the real reasons why – the targets!

Very little or no attention was given to the measures that would have told the true story about our service, such as:

• End to end time to resolution
• Number of repeat calls (failure demand)
• Customer satisfaction

Furthermore, the contracts we had in place actively discouraged any form of improvement.  By doing what was right for the customer, we would have been penalised under the terms of the contract.  With no incentive to change, very little did.

My view of the world was wrong!  And what was the worst part?  Troughout it all, I believed that I was an excellent manager delivering my service to target, and that my staff were wrong for distorting their behaviour within the system – the system that I was creating for them.

I spent a few subsequent years as a business analyst and project manager, blindly following the same command and control management mentality, redesigning processes from the wrong perspective and missing the point completely.

The pivotal moment

The point at which I became curious about Systems Thinking was not while I was at work, but while I was a customer.

Back in 2007 I was unlucky enough to get flooded.  The result of this was knee-high water in my house for three days and loss of the vast majority of my downstairs items.

During the resulting clean up, we were allocated a loss adjustor, project manager and two contractors.  Of course, in a common sense world the following would happen:

In actual fact, the following was closer to reality;

By the time I’d had contractors shuttle to and from my house a few times, I started to think that there had to be a better way.  Spending a little bit more time and effort getting the job right first time would save on a whole raft of failure demand.

I remember being in my house while the contractors were working one day and their manager stopped by.  He stated to all the workers that he wanted my house finished by the weekend.  Clearly he thought he was doing me a favour by speeding up the work and showing a commitment to a time-bound resolution.  In reality, all that happened was that the workers started to work faster at the expense of quality, and hence, more failure demand ensued.

All in all I made in excess of 200 contacts to various organisations, by phone, letter, email and face to face, to try and get my house fixed.  This included regulators, who were less than useless.  The Financial Ombudsman Service is a great example of how you have to be completely let down, and then wait even longer before you can even make it onto their waiting list.  Needless to say, I had solved my own problem through sheer determination before they got involved.

This was the point at which I really started to see and understand flow.  It also became apparent that each stakeholder had their own de facto purpose as part of a disjointed system, which failed because it was being managed by targets and remote decision making.

I was lucky enough to speak about my woes to a colleague who jumped on the opportunity to make me curious about a better way and introduced me to Systems Thinking.  I was ready to hear it, and it has fascinated me ever since.

It’s all going swimmingly….

It’s all going swimmingly….

A few days ago I had to rebook my daughter’s swimming lessons.  This happens every 10 weeks and is triggered when my daughter receives a ‘slip’ from her swimming teacher, the result of her assessment.  Of course, when the assessment reaches me it more resembles a ball of papier-mâché; the obvious outcome when a piece of paper is handed to a child with wet hands, which they tend to have after exiting a swimming pool.

I’ve been through this process many times before and it looks a little something like this.

However, this time something was different.  A temporary ‘swimming booking’ desk was set up behind the circular reception desk.  My curiosity was captured.  How was this going to work?

As anticipated, the slip was received and I strolled casually toward the ‘swimming booking’ desk.  After queuing for a few minutes I finally made it to the front and handed over my papier-mâché ball to which the receptionist responded “have you paid?”, “No” I replied as I went to hand over my debit card.  “You can’t pay here” the receptionist said, “You have to pay at the reception desk and then bring your receipt over here”.

When I enquired as to the reason for this I was told that only the reception desk could take payments.  When I asked why they didn’t just book the lessons as well I was told that having the ‘lesson booking’ desk with dedicated staff would make the process faster.  Strangely enough, it wasn’t feeling much faster to me.

Off I toddled to the reception desk to queue some more.  While in the queue the phone rang.  The receptionist answered and from the half of the conversation I heard, it was clear that someone had phoned up in an attempt to rebook swimming lessons.  Having phoned myself before for this purpose, I had nothing but sympathy for the caller when I heard those all too familiar words… “Sorry, we’re a bit busy at the moment so we can’t take bookings over the phone.  Can you come in?”  This of course throws up the obvious question:

• What is achieved by getting the caller to come in to the leisure centre, rather than just dealing with the demand as it is presented by phone?  From experience, the time commitment from staff is broadly the same regardless of whether the demand is dealt with face to face or over the phone.

It seems to me that this course of action succeeds only in causing an unnecessary journey and a waste of time and increased frustration for the customer, undoubtedly compounded by the fact that staff will happily spend longer telling customers why they can’t book lessons over the phone than it would take to actually book the lessons.  In fact, you end up with a process that looks like this:

Instead of this:

Anyway, I digress.  I made it to the front of the queue, paid the bill and obtained a receipt before returning to the queue again for the ‘swimming booking’ desk.  Once at the front of the queue, I handed over my papier-mâché ball again, this time accompanied by my receipt.  At this point I was allowed to progress to lesson booking.  The process for me looked a little like this.

What the managers and leaders of this system have failed to realise is that economy (and in fact frustration) is locked within flow.  Having a dedicated desk for booking lessons may feel faster and in fact seems perfectly plausible, however, it breaks the flow of the work, feels considerably worse from the customer’s point of view, and I’m betting ends up costing more too.

The value steps of ‘Pay’ and ‘Book’ take somewhere in the region of two minutes to complete, yet the end to end time for the whole process ran to nearer 20 minutes.  I dread to think how long resolution took for the poor telephone caller.

The final question that sticks in my head centres on what would happen if there was not an appropriate lesson time available to book after you’d paid?  You’ll notice a subtle change in the order of things above meaning that you now pay before seeing the timetable and available sessions.  Would this poor individual then have to go and queue again at the reception desk for a refund?  I speculate, but will report back if I manage to observe this scenario.

Finally, if you liked this blog, please see Simon Guilfoyle’s blog on (mostly) Systems Thinking: http://inspguilfoyle.wordpress.com/.

We’re all the same in being different

This blog is not so much about Systems Thinking, but more about how, as human beings, our one commonality is how different we are.

On one of our many family day trips out over the summer holidays I found myself enjoying the delights of yet another adventure playground.  I am, of course, talking about watching the behaviour of others because as you’ll well know, regardless of your age, you just have to have a go!

Most of you will have seen the new style of see-saw, sometimes with seats for four people that pivot at the top.  They look more like a set of scales than a see-saw but they are fun none the less.  Having positioned ourselves on a bench close to one such device to consume our picnic, I had chance to observe a few people using one.

Firstly a group of four young people consisting of two girls and two boys wandered up.  I would estimate their age at very late teens/early 20s.  They took a seat each, starting with the girls, who sat opposite each other.  Now, assuming that the see-saw was correctly assembled, the fulcrum was perfectly in the centre and the two sides were of equal weight, what you end up with is a game of ‘Who’s the heaviest?’

It’ll come as no great surprise that the girl who was uplifted had a smile on her face and the girl who sank exclaimed the words “I can’t believe I’m heavier than you!”  Furthermore, when the boys clambered on, the result was the exact opposite.  The smile was on the face of the chap who was the heaviest, who clearly linked weight to toughness with some of the comments that followed.

After this group had had their fun, two different males who I’d estimate to be around 35-40 sat opposite each other.  Interestingly enough their reaction was more like the earlier girls, with one of the males kicking off the ground and encouraging his wife to take their photograph when he was at the highest point, thus making it look like his playmate was heavier.  He tried this three times before giving up and becoming resigned to the fact that the photograph would not lie this time.

So, what am I trying to say?  That people are different?  Yes, that’s part of it.  We are all different, but my point here is that our perception of what good looks like in light of those differences is more important.  Heavy is not success.  Light is not success.  Success is down to each individual person’s nominal value and we must all be mindful of that when designing systems.  Designing a ‘one size fits all’system to deliver against our opinion of what success looks like will never be as powerful as designing a system that can absorb the demand placed on it by the customer and deliver their view of success (okay, it was about systems thinking after all!).

One more time on the merry-go-round

And there it was again. Those words that can either excite or destroy depending on the situation and context. We’re having a review. The strap line for the review is ‘A different way of working’. Great I thought, hopefully a review that will link the organisation to purpose and put the customer squarely back at the centre of what we do. Maybe all that curiosity I have been generating has finally paid off…

How wrong I was.

My mood quickly changed upon reading the initial information as it basically suggests that we recycle a collection of old ideas that have failed many times before. You know the sort of things:

• Replace paper process with all-singing all-dancing IT (because this will mean less people are required to do the work, doesn’t it?)
• Self service (because this will lower the transaction cost, wont it?)
• Joined up working (because simply throwing things together will make it more efficient, won’t it?)
• Etc etc etc…

What’s missing from the review is getting any sort of knowledge about how we currently do the work, the type and frequency of demand, the causes of failure, and how we might redesign that work against demand, customer purpose, and to only perform the value steps.

Because the approach and scope have been produced by consultants, and furthermore, those people within the organisation responsible for improvement and change have been excluded from any and all conversations, that means it must all be true and achievable, doesn’t it?

There will be a shiny new Business Case that has taken 12 weeks to produce. The Business Case will look professional and plausible and will be headed with the name of a large consultancy. It will more than likely be accompanied by a rather large invoice, but that is speculation as we’re not allowed to know such things. Unfortunately, it will be full of pre-determined solutions to problems we don’t have.

In true consultative style, we have been asked what we think of the review. With little detail to consider, and the historical knowledge that commenting on previous reviews has made little or no difference, one can only assume that this ticks a box for someone, somewhere. Staff view taken into account – check!

Sharing is good!

I teach my children that sharing is good. This philosophy holds when considering toys, bags of sweets and amusing anecdotes we share in our daily games of ‘What did you do today?’.

Where this philosophy falls down is when it is applied to the plausible yet flawed idea that simply putting things together will save money. You know the logic…

‘We deliver this service, and they deliver this service, so if we standardise the approach and deliver it together, it will be cheaper’ – Economies of scale.

In fact, more evidence exists that not putting things together and instead considering how the service is designed will yield a much better return. Economy is locked within flow and it doesn’t matter how many teams doing the same work you push together, it will not be cheaper unless you improve the method by which the work is done. Without this you may break even, but it may well be more expensive.

So, where do we go from here?

I will have my say, and I will be lobbying leaders and managers not to fall into the same old pitfalls we’ve clambered out of so many times before. There is a better way, but it takes time, patience and persistence to help others to become curious.

Scream if you want to go faster!

The first post

As a local government worker, I’ve spent the last few years working in a regime of fear and compliance.

I am also a customer.  I regularly have interactions with service organisations and those interactions regularly make me frustrated and angry.  Sometimes they delight me, but not very often.

Did I mention?  I am also a systems thinker.

This blog will act as a mechanism for me to anonymously share my views, both as a local government worker, and also more generally as a customer.

My posts and comments are my own, and are intended to inform, possibly shock and definitely stimulate debate.