How Can Systems Thinking Help You Improve Performance? With Rob Wilson

A second episode, in which Rob Wilson (Co-Founder of Service Economics) shares his insights into Systems Thinking – an approach that can help transform how businesses work.

We discuss how you can change the way you think about your system (or organisation) to improve customer and staff outcomes. Rob's advice is easy to understand and pragmatic, and it's immediately apparent how it will radically improve performance.

Plus, you don't need to wait for the next Apple Event (pun intended) to find out what the must-have gadget is this Autumn, as James shares his latest acquisition!

To find out more, contact James, Jimmy or Rob.

Or have a look at Service Economics (service-economics.com)

Transcript

0:03

Hello, I'm James. Hi, I'm Jimmy and welcome to A Job Done Well, the podcast that helps you improve your performance enjoyment at work.

James: 0:15

Good afternoon, how you doing?

Jimmy: 0:17

Afternoon, James doing well, how are you?

James: 0:18

doing very well, thank you very much. Although it is hammering it down here at this precise moment.

Jimmy: 0:22

Winter is coming. What are we talking about today?

James: 0:25

Well, we are doing a follow on episode. Last week we had Rob Wilson, who, talked to us about systems thinking and explained what systems thinking is. Which was all lovely. He pointed out all the problems that we've got. We've got him back for a follow on episode to explain what exactly we should be doing about it then.

Jimmy: 0:41

So, hopefully People listened to last week and the stuff that Rob was talking about definitely resonated with us so I'm sure it would have resonated with our audience. So now Rob, you are going to tell us how to solve the service issues of the country and effectively the economy of the country. But in 20 minutes, 20 minutes. Yeah, just like

James: 1:01

before we do that, Rob, would you like to just introduce yourself again for people who didn't listen to the last episode?

Rob: 1:06

Yeah. Hi. so good afternoon, everybody. Rob Wilson, co founder director of service economics. Uh, CX consulting professional services, business by former customer service director and group systems thinking director for Aviva.

Jimmy: 1:20

Thanks Rob, we're lucky to have you and I feel bad now standing in the way of you and the answer to the country's economic issues. But James, what have you been up to?

James: 1:30

I have been hunting and gathering. I have been, picking apples off an apple tree. Which my wife's amusing. I went out and bought, spent twenty quid on one of those fancy apple pickers, and I probably got about eight quids worth of apples out of it.

Jimmy: 1:42

You bought an apple picker, can't you just go and climb up a

James: 1:45

Not my age, mate, no.

Jimmy: 1:47

mean Rob, you must, everyone loves a gadget, right? You want a new gadget.

James: 1:50

This is not a gadget, this is, this is a professional apple picking piece of apparatus.

Jimmy: 1:55

I was going to say, because, because there's no way, at any point when I'm thinking what gadget do I next want to buy, do I think, you know what, I'll buy an apple picking thing.

James: 2:03

That's because you haven't got the apple.

Rob: 2:05

it's a lot. It's a long way down the list, isn't it? It's a long way down the list of things that you need in your life..

Jimmy: 2:10

It's not going to trouble the top three. Is it? Let's be right.

James: 2:13

Yeah, go on now. You're finished laying into me. What have you been up to?

Jimmy: 2:18

Well, now, what have I been up to? Well, I have been experiencing how the other half live. One of my daughters went to a private hospital this week so I could see how, uh, the other half live, which was, which was great. Um, bear in mind, my, my daughter's only 21. We, we walked into this private hospital and it is pretty luxurious and coming out as we're walking in, Is a guy who's accompanied by three prison guards in really massive. I mean, we're not talking handcuffs We are talking full monty chain.

James: 2:51

Did you have the honorable lector mask?

Jimmy: 2:53

It wasn't it wasn't far off that Anyhow, he was he's obviously had some sort of treatment. He took it off and My, my eldest turned around to me and said, so, you know, Aaron, the insurance is paying for us, who's paying for him to get treated? I said, we are the taxpayer in my sleep. So, uh, yeah, that was my experience of private hospitals. Can we just recap, Rob? So, you know, just in 30 seconds, what is systems thinking?

Rob: 3:18

Yeah. So systems thinking is an approach to, to change in organizations that first of all requires you to take a systemic look, at the organization. So understanding how the whole organization works together. It's different component parts to deliver. A shared aim, and then the thinking part, and I'm really oversimplifying this, but the thinking part is about understanding some of the beliefs and assumptions that we have as, as leaders and just challenging those, critically, using sort of data and evidence to understand whether they're actually, based in reality.

Jimmy: 3:49

Great. Thanks, Rob, we will get out of your way and, uh tell us how does systems thinking solve the problems of the world?

Rob: 3:58

Well, I don't think it solves the problems of the world, but I do think that there is some useful techniques and things that, you can do, which will definitely help to improve service in your organization. So I think on a practical level, first thing that you have to do when you want to improve service is go to where the work is being done. And typically in most organizations, that's going to be in a kind of contact center, call center environment. Bye. Very often, I used to run a contact center. We'd get royal visits, you know, the CEO would come along and say, I wanna spend some time, you know, some, the people. He, he dedicated, you know, 12.3 minutes listening to calls. and what would happen was he'd listened to a call, there'd be a problem for a customer that came through. And we then spent next six months trying to fix that problem for that customer.'cause that was the most important thing that we'd heard. Um, don't do that. That's called Seagull Management.

Jimmy: 4:53

Oh, I spent ages. There was a guy who came and did that once to me in a sales operation, and yes, it still haunts me. And I tried to explain to him that in terms of the issues we had, that again wasn't troubling the judge. It wouldn't have it, just had to get it fixed.

James: 5:12

so, Royal Visits notwithstanding, the most important thing is to go and, understand what's going on in your organisation.

Rob: 5:21

Yeah, that can be. You can be the HR director. You can be the IT director. but you should really understand what's going on at the coalface. in the organization. I can remember, an operations director that that came into the contact center. I was running, and had one of those kind of profound observations. He says, you assume that things work. But they don't do that. And what he meant was, you know, sitting in the ivory tower of, senior management, there's just this belief that everything is working as it's as it's been designed. And it's only when you come down to the shop floor and you see, the challenges customers have, the workarounds that front end teams are having to put up, etc. But there is stuff isn't isn't working as it should be. So getting into the contact center, getting where that where the work is done. and seeing what happens is, is, is really key. Not with that view to, I'm going to go and solve the first problem that I come across, but to understand what, what's the, the, the failures and the frustrations. So the first question that you should be asking if you see a problem is, well, does this happen a lot? is this, is this something that goes, goes on, um, regularly? Because we want to be fixing the problems which are systemic, the ones that happen regularly rather than things that happen, infrequently.

James: 6:33

Some organizations are really good at this. I, I used to work for Asda, a major supermarket chain. And, I was a head office wallah I'd sit in Asda house in central Leeds, and it was all lovely and beautiful. What they used to insist at least once a year for a week at Christmas, but preferably more often than that, every head office colleague had to go and spend times in the store And I tell you, Asda in Heysen Green is a million miles away from Asda House in Leeds. But it really does open your eyes and give you a really sound understanding of what's going on. And things you just would not believe.

Jimmy: 7:07

Was that your job title? Asda Wallah?

James: 7:10

Asda Wallah, yeah.

Rob: 7:10

yeah, I mean, if you've ever seen that program Undercover Boss, it's a great example of that where the CEO, you know,, bounces his wig and his false nose and glasses and goes undercover, um, and just learn, learn stuff about the organization, but there's no idea is, is what's going on. They very often jump to the wrong conclusions about what the issues are that need to be solved, but they at least can see what the, what the problems are.

James: 7:33

right, but then there's two bits to that then. So the first bit is Go and look, but it's not just enough to go and look and understand that really is a question of, well, what are the really big problems and focus on the big things rather than trying to fix all this more stuff.

Rob: 7:47

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's, there's a, there's a way of going in to actually study the work. and, and so the first bit is to understand, well, what's the, what are the demands that I can hear coming in from customers? Why are customers contacting us? And you'll start to get a pattern after a while. you'll start to see the, the demands that the most common, but the key thing is to understand which of those are Value demands from a customer's point of view. I used the customer, you know, I want to buy a policy. I want to make a claim. I want to change my address versus which of those are failure demands. So what's happening with my claim or I haven't received my documents or I don't understand this thing that you've sent me. Um, it's starting to get a feel for. Which, of those is giving you the majority of the work that's coming in? of course, you can start to kind of categorize that and quantifies how much failure demand is a really good, really good starting point. The second thing you can then start to do is look at how effective are we at handling that demand? So when a customer contacts us, am I able to actually deal with that? When it, where it comes in, or do I have to pass it on to another team, another colleague to complete, which means the customers now got kind of waiting. or do I even worse pass it back to the customer? Actually, Mr. Customer, you need to do something else now. So, for example, a customer would call to do their change of address. I was working in another country where the response was, we'll send you a form to fill in. or you need to go to our website to do that. So the customers that being sort of, you know, had the job coming back to them. And when you start to then look at the matrix of what's coming into your organization, value failure, first point resolution, pass on, pass back. It's quite possible you see in some organizations that what's coming in, again, it's a really high percentage of failure demand. That's then being passed on somewhere else in the organization or being passed back. Now there's two, two things that tells you. First of all, that's a pretty unsatisfactory place for the employees to be working. because, they can't actually help the customers that are coming in and the customers are calling the failure. And the second thing is from a customer point of view, that's not giving you a great experience. So it really quickly starts to give you a very different lens, around, around what's going on.

Jimmy: 9:55

And, and we talked to, you mentioned this is a good way of senior people looking at, when they go and visit an organization and go and look and learn. But, but I suppose reality is. anyone can apply this to their teams. if you're a, you're a team leader, you want to understand the type of work your team's doing and improve the work. You can apply this sort of thinking to that as well, can't you?

Rob: 10:18

Yeah, abso absolutely this, so this stuff is not, it's not rocket science. It's not complicated. Um, and it's something that really every leader in an organization should be doing on a, on a regular basis. I think the, the, the next thing that when I'm going into a contact center, to talk to people is you get chatting with the people on the, on the phone and you ask, what does your manager pay attention to? That that tells you a lot, because if the answer comes back, it's a whole set of numbers. Um, and what those numbers are, that will give you a fairly good idea as to what the organization's focus is. And it's very rarely on doing the right thing for the customer, delivering on that to the customer. You'll very often hear backwards about how many calls are taken per day. You know, I've got to take 50 calls a day and hit a compliance score of 95%. and, if that's the case, again, it gives you an indication back to what we talked about the previous episode about what some of the things going on here in terms of the thinking that's driving this

11:10

that we probably think we're driving efficiency, but actually are we driving the effective outcome for the. For the customer.

James: 11:17

I suppose the real question is, but then so what? What comes next after that?

Rob: 11:21

Yeah. So I guess once you've studied the work, you've understood the demand that's coming in, then really you need to start to understand what's driving the failure demands. And this, this potentially requires you to then start to go beyond the contact center to other parts of the organization. So you might find that you've got backlogs in another team, or you've got issues in terms of the way the product's been designed. Um, That are upstream from the contact center that was driving the, uh, driving the, the, the, the failure rate. and it's one of the reasons that we talked in the, in the start of the first episode about, you know, systems thinking some of the challenges with it, that by its very nature, you do start to kind of creep out into the organization to people who are, hang on, who are you? Why are you knocking on my door? I've got important things to be getting on with, your problems in your context that they're not my priority. cause I've got my own things to be getting on with.

12:14

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James: 12:47

But that's really interesting then, isn't it? Because what you're saying is, the most important place in many ways to be is the shop floor and understanding what's going on there. But in a lot of the organizations I've worked for, success looks like getting off the shop floor. Which

Rob: 13:03

Yeah, you're right. in most organizations, the contact center dealing with customers is the lowest paid, lowest rung job, in the organization. And people are trying to get away from, from dealing with customers. whereas, In reality, if you're a customer, you'll be talking to people that have got the most experience, the most skill that can actually help you solve your, solve your problems. This goes back to this front office back office thing where people tend to organizations tend to want to put their most experienced people away from the customer. You get this kind of front office back office thing. So customers end up never, never talking to the people that really know the answer. They're the ones that will get back to you in three days. what we've learned is it can be much more effective to put those people closer to the customer, resolve the issue there and then, and reduce the overall workload on the organization.

Jimmy: 13:49

And, and that's an interesting one'cause I've seen that, done in particular in claims organizations and when dealing with complex claims, people would think that that first. bit that you have where you have to just triage the claim and gather some info. That's the easiest bit. So put anyone on that, then the, the, the, the clever decision making at the back end that, get your best people on that. So you end up doing that that way around. But what you end up with is huge amounts of work up the front end because people don't quite understand it. Don't quite know what to ask for. Can't make the right decisions. And so you create a load of work that then it eventually gets to the expert. The expert has to rework it anyhow. So don't, to your point, put the expert at the front of your process and watch what happened. Everyone thinks it's the wrong way to do it because it's a little bit counterintuitive, but actually it's hugely effective.

Rob: 14:44

Yeah, massive, massively so.

James: 14:46

So we've talked through the system. So at this point now, you've got people understanding the system more, but what about the thinking bit then?

Rob: 14:54

yeah. So I think one of the challenges here, is helping some of your senior leaders to really understand not just what's happening, but why it's happening. So we can see for ourselves, okay, I've got these issues and why is that happening? And that's the bit where typically people need help. They need people like me and you to come in, to help them with that thinking. So, I'll give you an example, which was again, back from my time working in Singapore, where I had a CEO was, in the contact center, our request listing some calls and the call came through and the young lady took this call from a customer who was really pissed off loads of times before. Um, and, and the young girl really took time. She got this customer sorted, dealt with the issue. The customer's really happy, went away. and this call 15 minutes, but she'd done a fantastic job, sorted it. And she put the phone down, and she immediately turned to the CEO and said, I'm really sorry. And he said, what do you mean? I just listened to the call, you did a fantastic job. And she said, oh, well, yeah, but that call took 15 minutes, and I know I'm only supposed to take five minutes on the call. Now, he couldn't understand what this conversation was about, and so that will have to be helped to understand. Well, okay, the calls in the team have got a target to deal with these calls in in five minutes. The reason they've got that call target of five minutes, we can kind of trace that back to your conversations at the exec level around productivity, efficiency, need to save cost, et cetera. That's how it's manifested itself. And very rarely do the senior leaders directly say, I will have a five minute AHT target in the contact center. And it's about how do you help join the dots between decisions that are made at a senior level for the right reasons, but then seeing how they operationally manifest themselves because the wrong thinking has been put in place. And that's the, I guess, the secret to it.

James: 16:43

Somebody once said, when you're at senior levels, you're worried about money, and when you're at junior levels, you're worried about tasks. But it's that middle bit where you're trying to marry the tasks to the money and get people to explain. Mm hmm. Which is actually, that's our translation, but that's the most difficult bit in many ways.

Rob: 17:00

Yeah, you're right. And it's good. It's back to those unintended consequences of decisions. So another example was in the sales and service contact center where, strategically, right, we need to sell these additional products to customers. That's what drives our revenue and profit. So 80 percent of sales. That we make a car insurance need to have, legal expenses, products, you know, attached to them. So you imagine what happens that I'm a call handler on the last day of the month, 10 minutes before the end of my shift, I'm sitting at 80%. I'm going to get my bonus and a customer comes through, uh, and says, yeah, I want, I want to buy the policy, but I don't want that legal cover. Now, if I sell the customer that policy, I'm not going to hit my bonus this month. So what happens? I, Oh, hang on. My computer's not working. Um, sorry, Mr. Customer, can you call back tomorrow? So we're actually turning, we're turning, we're turning sales away. Now again, that that's

James: 17:53

It's funny you should say that, because I've seen exactly that thing happen in the call centre near me.

Jimmy: 17:57

Well, I, I had a, that example was um, selling loans. And we wanted to see people sell loans. The most profitable loans were the loans with the insurance attached to them. But it was done, as you say, on a percentage basis. So, if they got somebody come through for just a loan, And they realized there was no way they were going to sell them insurance. They would do that. Are you sure? Are you sure this is the right loan for you? Do you want to go away and have a think about it? And then give us a call back after you've had a, you know, all very nice about it. And I remember going back and listening to it and thinking, Why not? If you're doing that, and the reality is they were doing that because they didn't want to mess up their loan percentages, so they would rather not have a loan than have a loan that didn't have insurance attached to it because it messed up their, their, their bonus.

Rob: 18:46

Yeah, yeah. And it's really hard to explain

18:48

that

Jimmy: 18:48

It is, it is. When you're talking about thinking and changing thinking, is it, because I guess there could be two parts to it. One, there's, there's senior leadership thinking about systems thinking as a way of doing things. Or is it just senior leaders thinking about cause and effect between what they see going on in the front line and how that manifests itself? Or is it both?

Rob: 19:15

it's, it's probably both, but I'd say the second of those is, is really key one. If you're a senior leader, I do think there's a lot of kind of linear thinking goes on. and, and, uh, search for simple solutions, you know, golden bullets. Whereas actually real sustainable solutions tend to be a little more complex. And again, what we tend to find is that people want quick results. So, we've got a problem, what we're going to do, the first thing we're going to do is spring into action. Whereas actually the first thing we should really be doing is seeking to understand the problem. Have we really understood the problem and have some of the solutions we might believe are the right solutions. Have we tested them? Can we go away and test them? So this kind of studying the work, studying what's going on, that then leads us into another kind of, you know, systems thinking thing, which is, um, single loop versus double loop thinking. So let me explain that for a second. So single loop thinking is tends to be the default. We kind of think we understand the problem. So we can go straight to the straight to the solution. And it tends to be very efficiency focused. How do we do things kind of better, quicker, cheaper, faster. So we're going to keep applying the same The same logic, but just kind of ramp up the, you know, turn the dial up on that even more. Where's the double loop thinking you're kind of stepping back a little bit and questioning. do I really understand the problem? Might there be a different way of thinking about what might work in this? How do I get all the evidence that I need? And the reason that's important is that if you don't change the thinking, then you're never really going to change the paradigm, the core paradigm in which you're operating at that system level, which in turn is driving the performance. Of the organization, but getting people into a double loop thinking space again can be really can be really tough.

James: 21:09

Have you got a good example of double loop thinking? At work, what

Rob: 21:14

yeah. So, you know, a simple example. Might be, we get lots of calls from customers wanting to know what's happening with their claim. So a good single loop response to that might be, well, customers can now go online and they can find out what's happening with their claim. The double, the double loop is questioning why the claim is taking so long in the first place that the customers are having to chase up. They don't know what's going on. So the double loop thinking would be more focused on the effectiveness of how quickly we're setting the claims rather than we know the claims take forever to settle, so let's find a way of letting the customers know what's what's getting that update. when you start to look, you see those kind of examples of single loop thinking, everywhere, to be honest

Jimmy: 22:07

You've been asked to do. Whereas double loop thinking is, you might execute on it, but you think, is there a better way of doing it? Should we be doing something different here in the first place?

Rob: 22:16

Yeah, I think, I think the single loop thinking tends to still be associated with we want to improve, we want to, we want to improve sales. So let's, let's run a sales incentive. Now, the, the, the default assumption is that sales, sales incentives are effective. Therefore, running a sales incentive will. improve sales. But if you challenge the assumption that actually our sales incentives effective, do we have any, have we tested that? Can we look at the data to see how effective they are? Then you may realize that actually they're, they're not, but they don't, they don't work in the way that you did, although they're good at good ways of helping people to hit the sales targets without necessarily improving sales. Like the example that we gave a few seconds ago

James: 23:00

a couple of weeks ago, you said the first rule is don't talk about systems thinking.

Rob: 23:04

Yeah.

James: 23:04

The penny drops for me really is people look at systems thinking they think oh well This is a way of improving my processes. if I do systems thinking I will get Efficiency I will get effectiveness. I will be able work better, but that's not the game at all really is it?

Rob: 23:24

No. And again, it's one of those kind of mental shortcuts that people looking for, which box do I put systems thinking in? Oh, it's in the process improvement box. I was it's it's an opposite. and therefore, by default, everybody else in the organization is often that of it. and it's why, you know, I would, if someone said to me, what we want to kind of do systems thinking, my first question would be, are you sure? Yeah, we were very fortunate when I did this at Aviva that we had the absolute support and commitment from the CEO. Who was pretty ruthless in kind of, telling the, the country CEOs, um, and seeing Egypt, you will be doing this, uh, whereas if you've not got that absolute buy in from the top, again, and I've seen this, is that you hit the point in the organization where it's really hard to then affect that change, because this is, this is about cultural change. It's about the organization. Thinking and working differently. It's about breaking down organizational silos. It's about thinking differently about the way that we, use measures and metrics. Yes, it's, it's about, changing our processes. But that's only a kind of a part of it. And I said, changing processes is really easy. Changing people's thinking is really hard. I will have run training sessions for senior leaders. You're not just operational people, but across the organization, everybody nods along when you tell the horror stories about bad customer service in the call center. But the minute you turn to the HR people and start talking about some of the kind of crazy things, really, that we HR perspective, you know, the defences go up, you know, you've gone too far there Rob now, you're talking about our stuff, you don't really understand it, because people get very defensive about what they do, because it's kind of their job. And there's a saying we used to use is that what one man's waste is another man's career. And, what we might look at and go, that job is no value to the organization. Well, that's still someone's job, you know, so walking into organization and going, well, you're, you're a waste isn't going to win you many, many friends. Um, so the kind of like the skill, the way that as an organization, you approach this has to be really carefully. Thought through, and I have seen examples where, you know, in individual countries, and you've got a few people that get the bug. It's one of those things. Once you get it, you can't, you can't get it. You can't unsee stuff. You can't unlearn stuff that you've learned, but you create, people that are then kind of isolated in a sea of traditional thinkers that get a level of frustration and that's almost not, not fair on them. So I think any system has to really come from the top down. Um, To have that support for the people, therefore on operational level who are gonna be the ones doing the work and challenging some of those ways of, you know, we've done things around here for the last 1500

James: 25:57

Yeah, but effectively then success looks like not a process improvement coming out of the end of this success looks like changing the way people think, and it has actually changing the way the senior people think, because if they don't change, nobody else will.

Rob: 26:14

you, you, you're right. And, and I also think, you know, one of the challenges, this is just a systems thinking thing. It's, it's culture change. Generally. You could spend two or three years as an organization on a big culture change program, and then the CEO leaves and new CEO comes in and, you know, pretty much that's gonna drive a different culture. So, you know, you realize that, that everything is kind of built on sand really when it comes to, to organizational change because you are only really, as, as stable as the tenure of your CEO and it is a driving that, that that organizational culture.

Jimmy: 26:45

And people often gravitate towards what they're, they're more comfortable with and what they know. And certainly my experience recently was, um, taking out some of the performance management processes in an organization. And, you know, which as we all know, kind of the, the annual appraisal, racking the stack, get rid of the bottom, that some of that, some of the processes around that are really corrosive. and then when a number of people left the organization at senior level, They're now putting them back in because it's like, well, that doesn't work. We're comfortable with this, and, and it is, it is just what, what, you know, what you think makes you successful.

Rob: 27:26

Yeah. And yeah, one of the things that I'm quite proud of is some changes that I made in the contact center that I was running. 12, 13 years ago, have, have, say, you know, actually delivering sustainable change. The changes that I made were going from a, what was a very traditional, set up in an contact center, having a sales team, the service team and yours team, all different people. And I might be skilled them, put them all together. We focused on delivering all that for the customer. Um, so they're able to handle kind of 80 percent of the demands that came in. We got rid of all the targets, replaced them with sort of sensible measures over to all that. And it would have been very easy for that to have disappeared over time, but it was so effective. It, it, It's, it's survived and I think that's one of the real, anybody that's done systems thinking does become a bit evangelical about it because you really do see the power it has in terms of the better jobs for people, better outcomes for customers and better results for the organization. But because it's a thinking thing is going to be prone to the next person coming in saying, what's all this nonsense? You know, let's do it my way, the old way and you see that time and time again.

Jimmy: 28:33

And therein lies one of the challenges I think that I have with. This is a, not as a concept, because I 100 percent buy the concept and the stuff that we talked through. I think the key to a lot of this sort of thing, whether it's, you know, culture change or systems thinking as part of that, or whatever you're trying to do, where you need to influence people's thinking and behavior, it's, the key is in the execution of this. And whilst it was a long time ago, my experience of systems thinking was exactly what you said, in terms of some people picked it up. Got very evangelical about it, and then just treated everyone else like they were idiots if they didn't get it. It's all, well come on, you need to give me a bit more than just, well, it's obvious. And, and so I think that that's one of the strengths of this sort of thing, is that people become very passionate about it. But that, that sometimes that passion can blind them to how they influence and how they take people along with them. And actually, to your point about long term sustainable change, you've got to figure out how you take people along with you. And I rarely have found that telling them they're all idiots because they don't understand what you've, you've seen the light probably isn't the way of doing it.

James: 29:48

I don't know, I've been trying it with you for 20 years now.

Jimmy: 29:50

Exactly anyway, so it's like,

James: 29:54

right. How are we going to summarize that

Jimmy: 29:57

I guess it'd be great to hear from you. If you want to start to get some of the value of what you talked about for people to improve their performance, what would you reckon they start to do?

Rob: 30:04

I think there are some, some simple things that you can do. Invite people in, bring in the people from HR, bring in people from IT, from finance risk, encourage them to spend some time listening to, to, to what customers are saying. Do a debrief with them afterwards because of what they've heard. Get a conversation going about why some of those things might be the case. Help other people in the organization to think about what role they play in delivery. Good outcomes for customers and get them to start thinking about all the things that they do that may be getting in the way of that. I think that starts to get a company wide conversation going, and you've got the wider system working, working together.

James: 30:43

So if that's the one thing we should do, what's the one thing we should stop them on?

Rob: 30:48

Think the one thing we should stop doing is, is trying to fix the people too, too much change initiatives are, are really aimed at fixing people. what we should be doing is trying to fix broken systems

Jimmy: 30:59

And in fairness to James, despite the fact that he hasn't been able to influence me on many things over the years, when we started these discussions, I would always believe that the people can outdo the system. The more we've explored it and the more we've understood our history and understood some of the things that we did that worked really well, actually, getting the system right, is absolutely critical to solving any of your problems.

James: 31:23

There you go. Managed to change his thinking. Only took me 20 bloody years.

Jimmy: 31:28

If anyone wants to explore system thinking further and understand more about how it can work for them and the value that it can bring them. They can obviously get in touch with you and make sure that your contact details are in the, in the notes for this show. So get in touch with Robert, Service Economics. thank you very much, Rob. It's been a pleasure

Rob: 31:47

cheers guys. Take care.

31:49

We cover a whole host of topics on this podcast from purpose to corporate jargon, but always focused on one thing, getting the job done well. Easier said than done. So if you've got. Unhappy customers or employees, bosses or regulators breathing down your neck, if your backlogs are out of control and your costs are spiraling and that big IT transformation project that you've been promised just keeps failing to deliver, we can help. If you need to improve your performance, your team's performance or your organization's, get in touch at jimmy at jobdonewell. com or james at jobdonewell. com.