Change and engagement, part one

The way we are changing is changing. The predominant approach to change has been to mandate it. An elite, at the top of the organisation, perceive a need for change and direct others to implement it. They will anticipate some resistance and have some strategies ready to overcome it. Often this change will involve some type of restructuring.

There is mounting evidence that this type of change doesn’t work very well and may actually deplete rather than add value. For some organisations, the frequency of this type of change results in a series of self-inflicted, debilitating injuries.

A recent Bain & Company study of 57 major reorganizations found that fewer than one third produced any meaningful improvement in performance. Some actually destroyed value.

Mandated change, bold strokes and long marches

Twenty years ago, in her book The Challenge of Organizational Change, Rosabeth Moss Kanter and her co-authors identified two types of change, bold strokes and long marches. Bold strokes are big strategic moves, such as buying another company, generating a large capital investment, or developing a new product. Bold strokes are usually mandated by the actions of “one or a few people”.

(Tom Peters’ take on mergers)

Long marches are more operational initiatives such as merging departments, transforming quality or customer relationships. According to Rosabeth Moss Kanter, “they require the support of many people and cannot be mandated in practice”

Of course we will continue to need a degree of mandated change, and other stakeholders such as government will mandate external change. We just need to hope that the skill and ability to design and manage change will improve.

Too frequent use of restructuring will come to be seen as the  corporate equivalent of the old medical practice of blood-letting and a sure symptom of dysfunction.

According to Rosabeth Moss Kanter, long march change will have more dependable long term results and is more likely to change culture and habits. She then elaborates on the enduring foundation of sustainable organisational change – decision making.

Every large and complex organisation has many thousands of people who have each day the opportunity, or are literally required, to take action on something. We think of these as “choice points.” For an organisation to succeed in any long-run sense, these millions of choices must be more or less appropriate and constructive day in and day out. But this is an immensely difficult problem, because it requires the ultimate in decentralisation – literally to the individual level – along with centralisation in the sense that those individual choices must be coordinated and coherent.[1]

This same theme is echoed two decades later by Marcia Blenko in the Harvard Business Review:

In reality, a company’s structure results in better performance only if it improves the organisation’s ability to make and execute decisions better and faster than its competitors.[2]

Her she is elaborating on the centrality of decision effectiveness in sustaining effective change.

The engagement connection

Marcia Blenko’s establishes a link between decision effectiveness and employee engagement. Rosabeth Moss Kanter emphasised the importance of “choice points” throughout the organisation. And while the focus is on big business, even small businesses manifest thousands of choice points if we consider all employees and stakeholders.

Embedding a stakeholder ethos (including employee engagement) throughout the organisation will build resilience and adaptive capacity. Over time, it is more likely that those highly engaged staff will be making decisions and choices aligned with the best interests of the company. And over time there will be less need for mandated change.

---

[1] Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Barry Stein and Tod Jick. The Challenge of Organizational Change: How Companies Experience It and Leaders Guide It. New York: Free Press, 1992, page 492, 495

[2] The Decision-Driven Organisation, by Marcia Blenko, Michael Mankins and Paul Rogers In Harvard Business Review June 2010, page 57

Learning as a foundation for engagement, part 3: Tools

Earlier posts in this series introduced organisational learning and explored why the practice hasn’t had much traction in organisations. This post offers tools for learning processes.

1. Suggestion box blog

In this cartoon by Harvey Schwadron – an employee outside the boss’s office drops a suggestion into the suggestion box. Unfortunately, the suggestion box has no bottom and the suggestion falls into the resignation box directly underneath it. In organisations that don’t learn well, suggestions are ignored or, worse, those offering them are treated as troublemakers. Try a suggestion box blog – the blog administrator can receive suggestions and publish them, or enable the person making the suggestion to post directly. If there is an open culture, the blog can be open so others can comment. Responses or contributions from the company’s leader will add to its credibility.

2. After action review

Richard Pascale describes the after action review (AAR) in a HBR article Changing the Way We Change. The practice emerged in the US military and is used after military action or exercises to enable learning. Suspending rank is the key feature of the AAR as it encourages participants to review events in order to learn. The process is based around four questions that can be adapted to any organisation and is especially useful on completion of events or projects.

• What did we set out to do?
• What actually happened?
• Why was there a difference?
• What activities do we sustain and what activities do we improve?

3. Stupid hour

Learning doesn’t come easy when we take ourselves too seriously, or we are driven by the need to look good. Dorothy Marcic, in her ground-breaking book Managing with the Wisdom of Love, advocates a ”stupid hour” where staff get together, perhaps at the end of the week and ask “what are we doing that is really stupid?”

4. Lean thinking

Lean thinking, modelled on Toyota’s processes, provides scaffolding for learning by creating multifunctional teams to surface opportunities for improvements (OFIs). Here is more detail from a post by Alex Twigg.

5. Incentives

Some years ago Portland Cement near Whangarei changed their remuneration system from an over-time based system to a total remuneration system. Overtime hours were annualised and employees were expected to work up to 51 hours for their annualised salary, but could go home if they finished the work. This changed employee behaviour – under the overtime system, they would welcome breakdowns, as they would have to work longer, and therefore make more money. But under the annualised system, they were incentivised to work more smartly. As an example, loader tyres used to be frequently damaged by limestone rock. Employees wanting to get home quicker, welded wings onto the loader buckets to clear rocks away from the tyres. The employees got to go home earlier and the company saved money. Annualisation effectively opened up avenues for learning.

6. Appreciation

Appreciation is arguably the noblest form of communication. Too often, workplace communication focuses on fault-finding – concentrating on what is wrong, rather than what is right. When people are frequently criticised, over time they cease any meaningful communication with those who are criticising. This creates the antithesis of learning. In an environment of appreciation, people feel safe to make suggestions. Here is a link to an earlier post that elaborates on appreciation.

the communication spectrum

7. Undercover boss

The TV show Undercover Boss features businesses in the U.K., the U.S. and Australia. Across diverse businesses in these three settings, a consistent experience emerges – when the “boss” gets to know the people on the front line, they typically learn to appreciate what the workers do and return to their C.E. role much better for the experience. The C.E.s often enact employee suggestions, or include the employee in a project team. Here is Directv’s C.E. Mike White, talking about his undercover boss experience.

8. Learning from customers with social media

When I wrote this post about social media in February, this year, Stabucks Facebook page had almost 20 million likes. Now, 11 months later it has more than 26 million. Not all will provide useful insights for Starbucks, but any complaints can be quickly identified. Twitter serves the same purpose.

9. Values for learning

As with any other sustainable development in businesses and communities, better learning processes are underpinned by enabling values. Values that align well with learning include openness, honesty, integrity and appreciation. They are also the antidotes for defensiveness. You can probably think of others.

Do you consider your organisation is skilled at organisational learning?

Learning as a foundation for engagement – part two

From part one of this series, it is evident that the concept of organisational learning has been around for decades. But it doesn’t appear to have made much impact. For me there are two primary reasons:

1. embedded defensiveness
2. over-complicated prescriptions

1. Embedded defensiveness

Shooting the messenger is a practice that in earlier days manifest itself in physical violence and persists today, usually in more subtle punishments. In Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, the Egyptian Queen threatens violence to the messenger that informs her of Antony’s wedding.

The space shuttle Challenger exploding

It is notable, however, that death and injury can still be caused by poor engagement and defensiveness. The explosion that destroyed the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 can be attributed to organisational defensiveness and a lack of engagement. The Roger’s Commission found that the issue with the o-rings, that caused the disaster, had been know since 1977. The 1986 launch proceeded, despite the unheeded warnings of those who believed the o-rings might fail due to the unseasonably cold weather.

More recently, and closer to home in New Zealand, the Pike River mining disaster appears to be reveal another example of poor learning through organisational defensiveness. On 19 November 2010, a massive explosion killed 29 miners in the Pike River mine. A year later, testimonies from the resulting Royal Commission of Inquiry are revealing how industry insiders were concerned about conditions in the mine in the weeks before the explosion. A Japanese mining expert, Masaoki Nishioka, told the Royal Commission that he advised the mine’s management of his concern’s about the safety of the mine before leaving the mine on October 20. Bernie Monk, whose son died in the mine has found some consolation in that miners are not not so scared to stand up and raise concerns.

In both the cases of the Challenger and Pike River Mine, a common element is the decision makers not wanting to hear news that would impede the progress of their plans.

These are the extreme and public cases of defensiveness. But it manifests itself in many organisations and is the main impediment to better learning. When manifested as the “I know best” attitude, defensiveness suppresses beneficial ideas from the organisation’s rank and file that might reduce costs or spawn innovations. The MacLeod Report, Engaging for Success articulates the link between innovation and engagement:

Gallup indicate that higher levels of engagement are strongly related to higher levels of innovation. Fifty-nine per cent of engaged employees say that their job brings out their most creative ideas against only three per cent of disengaged employees. (page 12)

the downside of defensiveness and the upside of learning and engagement

Over-complicated prescriptions for learning

Many books have been written about organisational learning, typically offering complex tools and methods to achieve learning. Professional development efforts to implement these ideas are first invested in senior staff, and often the initiatives fail to gain traction further down the hierarchy. Perhaps the tyranny of defensiveness sabotages efforts?  Harvard’s Amy Edmondson comments on this phenomena in this excellent video:

First, many of the early discussions of the learning organization were abstract and without concrete prescriptions for action. Second, the concept is really aimed at the CEO, or other C-level executives, rather than local leaders who are leading focussed work … in the organisation itself – where the real critical work of the organization is done…

It appears that Japanese companies learned to democratise learning decades ago, while Western companies are still struggling to embed learning processes. The diagram below reveals the extent that learning is embedded in Japanese automobile assembly plants. Note that the suggestions generated by Japanese workers far exceed those from Americans and Europeans. (click on the image for a larger version)

Practical tools for engendering learning will be explored in the next post in this series. I would love to hear examples of how defensiveness or over-complication has impeded learning in organisations you are familiar with.

Learning as a foundation for engagement (part one)

Four organisational capabilities support internal and external stakeholder engagement – leadership, organisational learning, communication and adaptive capacity (or change). This post examines the strong links between organisational learning and engagement.

The discipline of organisational learning has been around for a long time, but does not appear to have gained much traction. I suspect, as engagement practices become more mainstream, organisational learning will receive renewed interest.

The emergence of organisational learning

Bob Garratt, in his book The Learning Organisation provides a “personal history of the development of the learning organisation concept“. He traces its beginnings back to thinkers such as Reg Revans, Fritz Schumacher (author of Small is Beautiful) and Jacob Bronowski (author of the BBC Series The Ascent of Man) at the end of the Second World War. Bob Garratt positions organisational learning as part of the softer side of management theory, paralleling the more hard-edged analytical management theory. 

(image of Bob Garratt from http://geniusmethods.com/about/panel-of-specialists)

The concept of organisational learning is hard to pin down, but should never be over-complicated. I regard it as the ability of an organisation to create a culture to enable it to learn from its stakeholders.

Key ideas

Learning about organisational learning theory in the absence of practical application can make it unnecessarily complex. So here, we will look at a few more key ideas about the learning organisation. These will make more sense as you apply them to your experience. The ideas here are adapted from Bob Garratt’s The Learning Organisation. Note that he first wrote this in 1987. I am impressed that the ideas he expressed align nicely with Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s research described in Supercorps (more about this later).

1. Organisations are complex adaptive human systems – not mindless machines. 

“It is first essential to break the predominant managerial and directorial mindset that human organisations are rational emotionless data-logic driven machines which stay resolutely on carefully planned and pre-determined tracks regardless of the changing environment…” (page 12)

While the physical sciences accepted Einstein’s relativism as representing a more complete picture of our universe, the management mindset seems to stick with a more clockwork Newtonian view of the world. Perhaps it is because rational systems are easier to manage than human dynamics. Bob Garratt refers to biology’s complex adaptive systems as a guide for working with people and organisations. Peter Senge reinforces this, stating that we need to “stop thinking like mechanics and start acting like gardeners”.

2. Organisations driven more by processes than structures. 

The hierarchical structures developed to facilitate production in the industrial age often hinder information age companies. Departmental structures often become silos that hinder necessary organisational processes, especially flows of communication and knowledge.

3. Learn from your learning and understand our learning processes

Often we are so busy that we fail to integrate reflection and learning into the process. Managers that do this often implement knee-jerk actions in their desperation to fix things. Another trap that organisations fall into is making universal changes, that, of necessity, require a huge investment in their success. Bob Garratt advocates taking small steps and learning from those actions. This is the basis of “action learning” – we will look at that in more depth later. As with other organisational learning writer’s, Bob Garratt acknowledges the importance of double loop learning articulated by Chris Argyris. This website provides a clear explanation of the concept.

4. Creating a learning culture 

In a culture that encourages learning, people feel safe about sharing information, confident there will not be unfair retaliation. And it goes further than that – people know that their ideas are valued, and they, when they make suggestions, they are truly heard, not just being patronised. The culture has specific practices to foster learning and to guard against undue defensiveness.

5. External adaptation

Edgar Schein identifies that how organisations adapt to the external environment, shapes the culture. Organisations that learn effectively are highly adaptive and rather than develop a siege mentality, are actively engaged with stakeholders. Thus, threats can quickly be reframed as opportunities.

6. Embracing lifelong learning 

Learning has to be encultured at all levels of the organisation, from new hires right through to the board. Bob Garratt (also the author of The Fish Rots From the Head) emphasises the need for board members to engage in learning, rather than seeing themselves as a “completed work”. A “humble posture of learning” is required at all levels.

The link between organisational learning and stakeholder engagement

By now, the link between organisational learning and stakeholder engagement will be very clear to you. Contrast an organisation who has a defensive leader, who even struggles to trust his closest advisers, to an organisation that strives to have clear lines of communication from its “central nervous system” out to an ever-expanding network of stakeholders. A metaphor might be the difference between a fence post in the ground (treated with chemicals to resist decomposing organisms, and, on the other hand, the root system of a vigorously growing tree, whose rootlets are weaving its way ever-more deeply and broadly into the soil (see the post Fence post or tree – a metaphor for engagement).

The concepts of organisational learning, first articulated over half a century ago, diverge beautifully with many other aspirations for effective organisations that honour their stakeholders. Organisational learning therefore, shouldn’t be regarded as a narrow discipline, but rather, should be regarded as a set of principles that integrate into expressions of good practice.

To conclude this topic, here is a video of Rosabeth Moss Kanter, talking about her book Supercorp. While it does not specifically talk about organisational learning, how do you think it relates to some of the concepts discussed here?

Peter Bruce

Engagement and change: part 2 – lean thinking

This post by guest blogger Alex Twigg is the second part of a two-part post.

Much of the change in workplaces over the last few decades has been predicated on notions of economic efficiency and have been known variously as “downsizing”, “rightsizing”, “outsourcing” and more recently as “mergers and acquisitions” – and as the Kotter and McKinsey studies mentioned in part one shows – not much of it successful. In the February / March edition of the Harvard Business Review, an article on mergers and acquisitions quotes the following – “Companies spend more than $2 trillion on acquisitions every year, yet the M&A failure rate is between 70% and 90%.”

By contrast, an alternative model of change – one that is intrinsically engaging of employees, that is about “learning to do things with others” is a workplace transformation process known as Lean Thinking – a western lens on the Toyota Production System.

The ‘lean” or “less” of Lean Thinking is often misunderstood. It is not about cost cutting (the old traditional focus of change) and it is certainly not about retrenching – i.e. less staff. Rather Lean Thinking is based on two values: continuous improvement and respect for people. The system of “lean thinking” is the mutual reinforcing of these twin values through a structured process of principles and actions – that in its essence is fundamentally engaging of employees.

Reducing waste

Lean Thinking is not premised on the assumptions of “economies of scale” and its twin “resource optimisation” – the assumptions that shape traditional approaches to organisational change. Rather it focuses on a notion called “flow” and the removal of waste. It is primarily focussed on process efficiency rather than economic efficiency.

The traditional approaches to change and Lean Thinking depend on very different primary sources of data to inform change. In the former the data derives from an abstraction of the productive process – namely the organisation’s statements of account. The primary question in this approach is “how do we make the economic equation of this organisation work?” This is the question that has shaped all the “”downsizing” “rightsizing and “mergers and acquisitions” activity of the past. In “lean” the primary source of data for change is from the organisation’s productive processes themselves – through the identification and removal of waste to answer the primary question of “how do we make value flow?”

Lean Thinking identifies 7 forms of waste, namely motion, waiting, transportation, storage, defect waste, over producing and excessive processing. Space precludes a discussion of each of them me so for present purposes a description of the first will have to suffice as a sense of the thinking behind waste generally.

Motion waste consists of all unnecessary movement and searching. Searching is the biggest form of motion waste – searching for information, looking for the correct person, tool or document. It is estimated that between 20 – 50% of time in a physical workplace is spent looking for people, tools, specifications, patient information … and in an office environment, some 15% of our time is spent looking for information that is within an arm’s length! In addition to searching, motion waste includes all unnecessary bending, lifting, reaching and walking. 

To systematically remove waste from an organisation’s processes requires the active involvement of the employees who are uniquely positioned to see the waste. Managers cannot see deep enough into the processes to really identify the waste that the employees see and experience daily.

This creates a dilemma for organisations – managers have the authority to effect change but not the complete awareness required on which to base this change; and employees by contrast have the awareness but not the authority.

The employee engagement strategy to Lean Thinking is to structure a process that seeks to resolve this dilemma. It requires 2 guarantees to give it meaning – one procedural, namely participation by all in identifying waste – the other substantive – no redundancies as a result of lean initiatives. The former is essential to identify and remove waste. And the latter is required otherwise employees won’t participate. Clearly no-one will participate in identifying waste if their jobs are put on the line as a result – and flow cannot be improved if employees do not participate in identifying waste.

The central component of a change process premised on employee engagement is a closed loop feedback system for responding to and implementing employee generated suggestions for improvement based on identifying and reducing waste. This is nothing like the good old suggestion box though on the surface it may appear similar.

This system is built on a structured process of organisational learning that teaches the organisation the following:

• value stream mapping skills that allows everyone to see the organisation’s current end to end process to providing its services or manufacturing its goods, as well as imagine an improved future state. This creates a framework for employees to think about and identify the effects of waste that they experience everyday at work.
• root cause analysis skills that allows everyone to identify the causes behind the effects of waste that they experience everyday at work as frustrations, irritations, inefficiencies etc.
• developing the systems and processes – the architecture if you will – of this transparent, closed loop system that allows people to see that the individual opportunities for improvement they have raised have been captured, and how and who is able to participate in addressing them.

Removing waste reduces lead time enabling more resources to be
dedicated to adding value

When this process is introduced in workplaces it results in literally hundreds of employee identified “Opportunities for Improvement” or OFIs.

If one is looking for a measure of employee engagement, how good is this one? Surely this is a direct expression of an employee’s commitment to an organisation? And very importantly it is a measure that arises directly from every employees work – i.e. their involvement in the organisation’s processes rather than arising indirectly – i.e. from something external to their everyday work – like completing a survey that creates a new bureaucratic structure that adds little or nothing to either the flow of goods and services through an organisation or the flow of problem solving in the organisation.

Lean thinking is an example of the sort of workplace improvement strategy that the Department of Labour is supporting through its High Performance Working Initiative.  You can find out more about this at www.dol.govt.nz/er/bestpractice/hpwi/index.asp

Guest blogger: Alex Twigg

Alex Twigg presented at the recent HRINZ National Conference in 2011. He has extensive experience in employment relations (ER) in a variety of roles including mediation, arbitration, advocacy, facilitator and process consultant. Over the last four years he shifted from operational to strategic ER – focusing on the link between people, process and organisational performance.

Alexander is currently employed by the Department of Labour’s Partnership Resource Centre.  He works with unionised workplaces helping the parties improve their workplace relationships and then help them put those relationships to work using frameworks such as ‘Lean Thinking’ to help both parties achieve their mutual and separate interests.

Building capacity for employee engagement

The great thing about building engagement capability is the broad range of benefits. Engagement reshapes the nature of the relationship the organisation has with its stakeholders, be they customers, suppliers, owners, employees or the community. Reshaping the relationship with employees appears to have significant potential.

It doesn’t take long to find a damming array of reports revealing that, in most cases, employee engagement is woeful. Without labouring the point, here are some examples:

• The 2011 BlessingWhite Employee Engagement Report reveals that 31% are engaged and 17% disengaged, with the remainder somewhere between.
• A Korn/Ferry Whitehead Mann UK Survey found that “employee engagement is lacking” with just one in five respondents rating their boss as a good communicator.
• A 2003 report in the Gallup Management Journal estimated that disengaged employees cost Singapore $4.9 billion.

Employee engagement by region, from the
2011 BlessingWhite Employee Engagement Report 

The good news is that there appears plenty of scope to improve engagement. The even better news is, that the capabilities required to improve engagement with employees will be beneficial in other stakeholder relationships.

I may be biased, but engagement capability needs to be at the epicentre of organisational development.

Think of it this way; What action would you take if only a third of your vehicle fleet operated reliably, or your core systems rarely achieved their potential? I am sure you would focus your attention on it. So why is it that many organisations are unable to more fully engage their employees?

Engagement capabilities

Some organisations survey employees to learn more about engagement, but these surveys can actually further erode engagement if employees perceive that there is no follow up. Further analysis is probably not useful. Fortunately, the essence of engagement is in one-to-one relationships between people, and therefore capability for engagement can only be enhanced when individuals work on their engagement skills and develop those aspects of character that support engagement. These include integrity and trust. The Korn/Ferry Whitehead Mann UK Survey found a clear deficit of these qualities where there was poor engagement.

The engagement spiral

The popular TV series ‘Undercover Boss” week after week demonstrates what happens when company leaders take time to get to know their employees. Typically their employees respond strongly when their boss acknowledges the effort they invest in the company. And as they get to know something of the private lives of their employees, empathy increases.

Of course organisational leaders do not have the time to engage with all employees, but all employees should have the opportunity to engage with someone with a leadership role. A sense of belonging and connection with the wider social group, including its leaders, is a fundamental human drive.

Developing engagement capability

The skills of engagement are simply communication skills, including listening, acknowledging and empathy. These are supported by qualities of character such as integrity and trust. Formally, these skills can be fostered in organisational development programmes in communication, leadership, change and organisational learning. And given the critical role that engagement has in 21^st century organisations, they must be regarded as core skills for performance management purposes.

In earlier series of posts I identified engagement as one segment of the communication spectrum. Understanding the distinctive nature of engagement helps us to be more discerning about how we communicate, and helps us aspire to higher expressions of communication.

The tools needed to improve engagement are simple and close at hand. There are no quick fixes – the journey to improving engagement requires constant vigilance, but the returns promise to be significant.  Understanding the communication spectrum is a good place to start.

Sustainability – what’s real?

There are a belwildering array of sustainability ratings – but what do we believe? How do we know they are measuring and evaluating the right things?

In their Rate the Raters documents, SustainAbility identified over 50 sustainability rating agencies. SustainAbility will offer insights into how credible each rating system is, but I suspect that many imponderables will remain.  For example, in part two of the study, the Dow Jones Sustainability Index was ranked highest in credibility by the study’s participants. But in his article titled,When Pigs Fly, RP Siegal noted with incredulity that Haliburton is now listed in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index.

Here are two reasons that determining a company’s sustainability will remain problematic:

• the bureaucratisation and commercialisation of quality processes
• determining sustainability

 The bureaucratisation and commercialisation of quality processes

In the galaxy of organisation endeavour, sustainability reporting can be regarded as a quality measure. For example, while the ISO 9000 series deals with operational quality matters, the ISO 14000 series deals with environmental management. While ISO 14,000 may not be classified as sustainability reporting, it serves the same purpose, in that it provides third party assurance of a quality measure.

I like Tom Peters perspective on quality. He quotes Richard Buetow, a Motorola executive.

With ISO 9000 you can still have terrible processes and products. You can certify a manufacturer that makes life jackets from concrete, as long as those jackets are made according to the documented procedures and the company provides next of kin with instructions on how to complain about defects. That’s absurd.

Where quality processes are formalised, they can divert resources from the product or service itself. Any product or service will justify a finite amount of resource input, so ideally, any quality process will add value equal to or greater than its cost. Too often, compliance-driven quality processes militate against quality as they divert resources away from product or service delivery. This is a big issue in service delivery sectors such as education and health. When teachers spend more time on quality assurance processes, they spend less time on preparation for delivery. It may be that, unless there is a compelling reason to get third party assurance, that resource is best invested in enacting sustainability aspirations, rather than measuring them.

I’m not arguing against quality processes – but I am stressing that they have to add value. Sustainability reporting processes will add value to the economic bottom line where there are game-changing benefits. For example:

• a supplier demonstrating conformance with a client’s ESG (environmental, social, governance) standards to ensure continuance of business
• securing a listing in a sustainability index
• remediating reputation losses.

But unless there are clear benefits from quality process third party assurance, why bother?

BP’s gulf oil spill illustrates this issue. Along with Shell, BP scored consistently highly in GRI (Global Reporting Initative) reports, and I believe the company’s leaders had, and have, genuine sustainability aspirations. BP invested a lot in rebranding as “beyond petroleum.” But the gulf oil spill incident has undone a lot of the energy BP had invested in sustainability initiatives. What the GRI couldn’t assess, were complex embedded processes, such as the quality of engagement between BP and its suppliers, and the impact of budgets and deadlines on safety and operations. (This video recounts BP’s PR problems)

Commercialisation

No doubt ratings agencies are also well motivated, but budget pressures will typically create pressure to grow the business and perhaps make processes than they need be. SustainAbility’s Rating the Raters cites commercial pressures as an impediment to more transparent report, partly because the raters are paid by those being rated.

Determining sustainability

Part two of this blog will explore what sustainability means in different industries, and from whose perspective.

Engagement stories – Mäori Health Services

Just decades ago, the gulf between health practitioners and the many Mäori (the indigenous people of New Zealand), impacted on the quality of health outcomes for Mäori. Bridging this gap is an engagement process.

This is the first of my engagement stories and it is close to home. My wife, Huria works as an educator for Te Poutokomanawa (Mäori Health Services) at Whangarei Hospital in northern New Zealand.

The enlightenment crossroad

My ancestors were European, Huria’s were Mäori and Polynesian. They both shared a world-view that accommodated both the material and spiritual. Both the spiritual and material influenced health practice. For example, monasteries often included a pharmacy. Both cultures relied heavily on herbal treatments.

the Maori herb kawakawa and European herb rosemary

When Europe entered the Age of Enlightenment in the 18^th Century science displaced tradition. Scientific truth became synonymous with progress. Like teenagers discovering new capabilities, the followers of science viewed traditional medical knowledge as something to leave behind. Science became increasingly reductionist, and the only thing that mattered was what could be measured. Hopefully the “teenagers” will come to appreciate the wisdom of their elders.

Clash of cultures

Even as a Pakeha (New Zealander of European origins) the medical world seemed unwelcoming and sterile. I still avoid hospitals and medical clinics. Doctors seemed to treat people as objects rather than people, and some still do. To those from an indigenous tradition, the gulf is much wider. Medical practices were alien. People were separated from whanau (family), and hospital culture (individualism, medical jargon, cold and impersonal, command- control practices) clashed directly with Mäori cultural practice. Medical language was even less understandable than English for native Mäori speakers.

Legislative change

Prompted by poor health outcomes for Mäori, the government passed legislation in 1993 and 2000 to ensure that Mäori could, among other things,  “contribute to decision-making on, and to participate in the delivery of health and disability services”. The two main changes were the development of Mäori Health providers and the development of Mäori Health Services with the public health system.

Bridging the gap

The Mäori Health Strategy is based on three principles articulated as Treaty of Waitangi principles:

• Partnership: Working together with iwi, hapū, whānau and Māori communities to develop strategies for Māori health gain and appropriate health and disability services.
• Participation: Involving Māori at all levels of the sector, in decision-making, planning, development and delivery of health and disability services.
• Protection: Working to ensure Māori have at least the same level of health as non-Māori and safeguarding Māori cultural concepts, values and practices.

To achieve this, in practice, where Huria works the main initiatives are:

• Having Mäori staff available in wards to facilitate engagement between Mäori patients and clinical staff.
• Ensuring Mäori voice is heard at all levels from the board to the ward.
• Promoting and educating in Mäori health and cultural concepts to hospital staff.
• Promoting health careers to Mäori in the region.

Cultural practices

For Huria, Mäori cultural practices happened from the start. The image below is from Huria’s powhiri (welcome) on her first day at work. The powhiri is a ritual of encounter. Huria was supported by Mäori elders and family members, some travelling for half a day to attend. The family handed her over to the new employer, with the understanding that they will care for her. The powhiri is an expression of both engagement and appreciation. It was heart-warming to hear people speak so warmly of Huria’s qualities – a great way to start any new job.

Other common cultural practices Maori bring that change the flavour of the work environment are karakia (prayer) and waiata (singing).

Dollars and sense

No doubt there are those who think that this is a waste of money, and it would be better to fund more operations. But ultimately these engagement processes will change both health practice and Mäori perceptions of health practice for the better. Surely, if Maori are more comfortable and at ease in the environment that is attempting their healing, the outcomes will be better.

Health models based purely on scientific practice are deficient. Mäori academics contribute to the engagement process. Mason Durie’s Te Whare Tapa Wha model, for example, positions health as a function of four interconnected dimensions:

• hinengaro – emotional and psychological
• wairua  - spiritual
• tinana – physical
• whanau -  family and extended family

Engagement principles – worldviews

Two engagement principles are illustrated here. The first is the benefit of sharing world-views. If any system of knowledge becomes too insular and too dependent on its own resources, its ability to adapt and develop is compromised. Western medical models can only benefit by learning from traditional and indigenous world-views and vice versa. The more engagement, the better the learning.

Engagement principles – diversity

The staff working for any organisation, should look like the communities they serve. Having a diverse staff is not just a nice idea. People are more likely to feel at home and want to use services if they see people working there who look like them, speak like them and dress like them.

Ultimately there will be no need for Mäori Health Services, because Mäori will be more represented at all levels of staff, and the two world-views will sit naturally beside one-another.  Hopefully it won’t take too many years for this to happen.

Leading engagement

It’s no surprise that the attributes required for effective leadership are those required for effective stakeholder engagement. My website, Stakeholder Engagement offers resources for developing capability for stakeholder engagement. Alongside specific stakeholder engagement capabilities, I have identified leadership, organisational learning, communication and adaptive capacity (change) as four essential capabilities to support enhanced engagement.

Compare this to the findings of the Hay Group 2010 Best Companies for Leadership research. The top twenty companies collectively, from General Electric at number one, to BASF are huge, and therefore have potential to do a lot of good by modelling leadership excellence.

Hay Group’s Ruth Wagemen pinpoints the practices the twenty best companies are more likely to do than the rest of us:

• “developing structures and practices that locate the best practices wherever they are, and whoever has them, and make sure that that’s what’s getting used throughout the organisation”
• they were “far more likely than everyone else to have an ex-pat programme that is intended to help people learn how to operate really effectively in a different culture and to lead effectively in that context”
• “were more likely to actively collect the best practices in leadership development throughout their subsidiaries, throughout the world, and to harvest those lessons and to share those practices with the rest of the organisation”
• “were much more likely to pay men and women the same, for the same kind of work.”

Organisational learning to the fore

What is particularly encouraging is the strong thread of organisational learning through these findings. The idea has been around for a long-time, but is yet to become mainstream. Bob Garrett relates how organisational learning emerged after World War Two, with the work of Reg Revans, Fritz Schumacher and Jacob Bronowski. Chris Argyris gave it impetus and Peter Senge popularised it in The Fifth Discipline. It appears that organisational learning’s potential is being tapped in these trail-blazing companies. Peter Senge urges us to “stop thinking like mechanics and to start acting like gardeners”. One interpretation of this, is to leave behind industrial age practices of organising and management, and embrace the more organic and emergent processes of the knowledge age.

Businesses can scour their internal environment for knowledge as is modelled by the top 20, and seek learning from external stakeholders too. Fostering stakeholder engagement capability can only benefit this process.

Hay Group links

• Hay Group Best Companies for Leadership
• Hay Group video
• Key findings

Organisational learning links

• The importance of learning in organizations – great video by David Garvin and Amy Edmonson  of Harvard Business School. Cuts through a lot of the verbiage about organisational learning.