What is Systems Thinking? Rob Wilson Explains.

This week, we are lucky to have Rob Wilson, Co-Founder of Service Economics, as a special guest. Rob has 20+ years of experience leading and transforming service operations across various sectors and is an expert in Systems Thinking.

This approach can help transform how you think about doing your job, and it has some stunning results. However, it has been surrounded by mystique and cynicism, as highlighted by the first rule of Systems Thinking – never talk about Systems Thinking!

Rob breaks this 'rule' and shows us behind the curtain to understand more about this method and some of the challenges it can help us solve.

You'll also get insights from James on Nottingham's roundabouts, and Jimmy recommends the Art of Football for all of your football attire needs (and to get excellent customer service).

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, a podcast that helps you improve your performance enjoyment at work.

James: 0:15

Good morning. How are you doing?

Jimmy: 0:16

Yeah. No, I'm doing well, James. How are you?

James: 0:18

I'm doing very well. Thank you very much. I'm quite excited today. We have a visitor, a guest on the show today. Good. So, I'd like to introduce you to, Rob Wilson., Rob, how about you introduce yourself rather than me doing a botched job of it?

Rob: 0:32

No worries. Thank, thank you James. Yeah, I'm delighted to be here. I, I'm a big fan of your, your podcast, I think listening to every every

Jimmy: 0:38

You are the fan, Rob. The fan.

Rob: 0:39

I'm, I am, I think, I think I'm the, the fanboy of the, the po. I'm like a child appearing on blue Peter. so yes, I'm Rob Wilson. I am, the co founder and director of a company called Service Economics, a CX consulting and professional services firm. My background is, I am a former customer service and operations director at companies like Aviva, Marsh, RAC, and Hyperoptic. And relevant to our topic of conversation today, I'm a former group systems thinking director. At Aviva, so that's me.

James: 1:12

Very good. And that's a good segue because, surprisingly, we are going to talk about systems thinking today.

Jimmy: 1:17

in the interim, what have you been up to, James, since last week?

James: 1:21

I've mostly been sitting in a traffic jam. Nottingham City Council have, purloined some money from the government for a big infrastructure scheme to improve the road work, and, it's not working, so we'll just leave it at that before I start frothing.

Jimmy: 1:33

Well, I wanted to give a shout out this week. I had a great experience from a small local company called the Art of Football. If anyone is a football fan listening to this, you should go and check out their website. They sell clothes, quite smart, stylish stuff, They're a small company based in Nottingham. Anyhow, we, bought some stuff from them at their recent sale. And there's just a service they gave was, was excellent, So, Art of Football. It's worth a look.

James: 2:03

So when you say stylish, Is that like sort of being on an intercity cruise in the 1980s, is that what it is?

Jimmy: 2:10

Not stylish in your barber jacket, stylish. But go and have a look, we'll see. So, let's start off then, Rob what is the first rule of systems thinking?

Rob: 2:21

Well, the first rule of systems thinking, James, is don't talk about systems thinking. So we're clearly breaking that already,

Jimmy: 2:27

like, it's like Fight Club.

Rob: 2:28

podcast. It is like Fight Club, Jimmy. I'll be honest, if you walk into any chief executive's office and say you want to talk about systems thinking, you can just watch their eyes glaze over, particularly the head of thinking because, you know, CEOs want to hear action rather than the thinking stuff. There's also, there are people that do understand systems thinking, but they're a bit of a cult. there's lots of, evangelists out there for systems thinking, and if you try and define what systems thinking is, I can guarantee that by tomorrow I'm going to be bombarded with people going, Oh, no, it's not that you got it wrong. So, it can be a bit of a bit of a minefield.

Jimmy: 3:02

So in your view then, breaking the first rule, what is systems thinking

Rob: 3:06

Given that your audience are business people and operational people. Let's focus on what it means for them. There's two parts to systems thinking. The first part is about systems. Let's break it down. So what do you mean by a, by a system? Deming defined a system as two or more parts working together To create a common goal. If you think about it as an example, a car, a car is a collection of random parts. It only becomes a car when you put them all together to achieve, achieve motion. A human body is a good example of a system. Now, if I were to take James. Lay them out on the table, chop them to bits into all the constituent parts,

Jimmy: 3:47

if only?

Rob: 3:48

if only, then you'd have all the, all the bits of James, but you wouldn't have James anymore. The very stuff that actually makes James, James, you wouldn't have. You have a collection of body parts. So the point is that the, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And so what you're interested in when we're thinking about systems is how different things interact to produce a result. So, of course, organizations are. Systems, they're working towards a common goal, but very often they end up being a whole set of parts that are kind of acting competition with each other. I've got their own different internal agendas, not working to a common purpose. and hence why internal competition, for example, can be a can be a bad thing. So in summary. I would say that thinking about systems is about how everything is connected. understanding unintended consequences of, making a change on one part of the system, need to understand what impact it will have over there and going from a very concrete way. Maybe. Simplistic linear view of cause and effect. And again, it's kind of senior management thinking, I do this, problems we need to solve, do this, I get that, to actually understanding that much more complex and there are a lot more ripple effects of changes that you that you make in the whole organization needs to come together, to deliver the slack that comment that common purpose.

James: 5:07

I don't think most business people think like that. They think about their part, their function, and they worry about optimizing that, but they don't really worry that much about the effect that it has on the other parts of the business.

Jimmy: 5:19

I thought you were going to say you had me at Deming. But, in all seriousness though, Rob, I mean, this follows up really nicely from the episode we've recorded recently on the NHS, where exactly to that point, it's a such a complex, big system, that no matter how hard you try to You try on one little bit, unless you're changing the whole system, you're never going to get a better outcome

Rob: 5:45

Yeah, and I think that's that's why. So many change initiatives in large organizations fails because people try to change their bit of the system, and they try to optimize their bit. But ultimately, that isn't going to optimize the whole. There are plenty of examples of where teams have tried to make themselves more efficient, but. At the expense of a different part of the, of the organization.

James: 6:11

I like your attempt at lawthersplaining systems thinking as being two things. Part one is systems, so I'm guessing the second part is thinking. So mean by thinking? Yeah, I worked out all by myself.

Rob: 6:22

So, so the thinking part is the bit that really excites me because, we started to delve into lots of psychology and just understanding people's belief systems. I'm saying why people do things the way that they do. And the reality is that a lot of management. Is, is actually done without thinking. People in senior roles think that they should know what to do. They shouldn't have to come. I think about it. And very often it's like, well, we know the answer. And anyone that's read Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow. You're familiar with this, this, this concept of having our quick brain and our slow brain and, and most of the day we're using these mental, heuristics, which essentially is the shortcuts that goes well, sort of, I sort of know, know the issue. and, I, I don't need to kind give it too much thought. And, and as managers we've got so many inbuilt assumptions and beliefs and just stuff that we don't even challenge because we just turn up and do it, an obvious example might be the annual appraisal system. You know, what we do, we obviously do annual appraisals. Every company I've worked with is annual appraisal. Okay, well, why do we do that? what, what's the kind of the thinking behind it? What's the outcomes? And when you start to test some of those assumptions, you start to realize, well, actually, that doesn't work the way that I intended it to work. So challenging people's inbuilt beliefs and assumptions. Okay. It's fundamentally what the thinking part of systems thinking is about, but people don't like having their beliefs and assumptions challenged.

James: 7:50

Well, and it's hard work. Your Daniel Kahneman reference is really quite important. So for those who aren't familiar with it, it's a bit like when you learn to drive a car. When you first start. It's really hard work, and you have to think about everything in quite depth, but eventually you get to the point where it becomes almost automatic. You do it without thinking. And you're right. A lot of what people do in business, they do without thinking. it's just hard work to see something from a different perspective. And I think that probably is one of the greatest barriers to what you're trying to achieve.

Rob: 8:22

Yeah, you're right. And anytime you try to communicate with with somebody, you're kind of hitting that set of assumptions of beliefs that they've got. And it's why it's why trying to deliver change or influence through. PowerPoint presentations is really hard because, I'm giving you my kind of story and you're receiving it through the prism of your view of the world. And whilst I keep telling you stuff that you're nodding along at and Jimmy's going, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. This guy's fantastic. It's great. But the minute that I tell you something that doesn't quite fit with your world view, it's really easy just to kind of throw that aside and go, I don't agree with that bit. So I'm going to ignore that bit. In reality, the only way that you can start to create effective change and change some of those beliefs and assumptions, people have to kind of see it and experience it for themselves. and that can be the first challenge is kind of dragging people out of an office to actually go and see that thing that you thought worked really well in the real world doesn't work the way that you, you thought it does.

James: 9:17

you talk about performance appraisal as an example of one of those sorts of assumptions Is there anything else you would call out?

Rob: 9:24

Well, I think in in operational leadership, in particular service organizations, there are quite a few things that we do, which have their roots as management practices in manufacturing. If you think back, 50 years to the day where customer service was, I'd go into my local bank and talk to the bank manager. It's a. Get alone. it's very sort of personal local thing. a guy used to come around to your house to collect life insurance premiums. that was personal service. And then around 50 odd years ago, there was a guy called Theodore Leavitt, a Harvard professor. Who wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review and said, look, manufacturing has made all these massive advances over the years in efficiency, but we've never applied them to service. So why don't we apply that same logic to service kind of ever since then, service organizations have been trying to deliver. That greater efficiency. They can go back to the 1700s, a guy called Adam Smith in his book, The Wealth of Nations, and he observed work in a pin factory and saw that by splitting the work up into individual repetitive tasks, rather than making Single people doing the whole job end to end, you could become much more efficient. from there, this idea about the division of labor, came up in the kind of the production line, the production line of thinking, Henry Ford, is famous for, you can have any color car you want, as long as it's black. So this kind of, we've standardized stuff on the production line. The production line works really well when everything's been churned out. Standardization comes from Henry Ford. you've then got this concept of Taylorism. So F. W. Taylor, who postulated that it was the job of the workers to do the work and the job of managers to think about the work. You don't want workers thinking, that's the last thing you need. so, so managers will do that. and, and then a guy called Richard Chase in 1978 again, another Harvard guy who wrote an article saying, look, the problem with customers is they keep getting in the way of doing the work. So he came up with this idea about front office and back office. Front office will deal with the customers and the back office will do all the work uninterrupted by those pesky customers getting in the way. So all of those are examples that come from the world of sort of manufacturing industry that we've applied into service. And if you're a servicing now, you can't do those things without. Thinking, but when you actually start the question, go, actually, we'll do these things work. What impact is that kind of way of working where thinking have on customer service? You see that many of the things that go wrong for customers actually have their roots in that kind of industrial way of thinking.

James: 11:54

so I think there is a lot of good in all of those things. The problem becomes when you don't challenge what the bad is in them, if that makes sense.

Jimmy: 12:02

Yeah, it's interesting though. When you were going through the list, I was thinking perhaps almost the opposite of that, which is like, Oh yeah, so that's why we do that, that, that way. Oh, that's why the whole back office front office split. Nonsense. Absolute nonsense. it's that sort of thing where, the boss is no best. in organizations today, you'll get the top 100 leaders together and they'll figure out the answers to everything. And then the other 20, 000 people will just sit there and wait to be told what to do. And that's the best way of enhancing that human potential in that organization.

Rob: 12:38

Yeah, look, no one's saying that one of these things are good or bad, but I think having an understanding about why we do these things, I guess, at least invites you to challenge. Well, hang on. it's 2024. We're in the world of digital AI and we're still deploying strategies that were developed 250 years ago. You know, now you can say a good thing or a bad thing, but it's a thing. And so it will at least make you curious as a manager to go, well, is there a different way of doing it?

James: 13:05

So that all sounds very sensible. Yeah. So I understand systems I've got thinking, but how does it manifest itself? What does that actually mean?

Rob: 13:14

I think there are six main issues that you come across regularly in service organizations that I've worked with, which have their roots in that, that manufacturing mindset. So the first one is, is this kind of production line mentality so the work gets split up into smaller repeatable tasks. What comes in from a customer as being a single demand for the organization gets turned into five or six different, different jobs. that's simply in a simplistic way. Recently I, I had to notify my insurer of a change of address. And I have three policies and I have to speak to three different people in order to tell them about my, change of address. So that, that was a kind of a production line based around product knowledge. for a customer, that was a real ball. That took me 40 minutes to do a job that should have perhaps taken taking 10 minutes

James: 14:04

well, that search for efficiency actually cost the organization money because they took three people to do what one person could have done.

Rob: 14:11

Yeah, exactly. And it manifests itself for the customer. you get through. You find that when work's being passed to one team to another. The first thing they do is kind of redo the work that's already been done. They, they go, Oh, I haven't done that, but they throw it back over the fence and it creates rework. It creates delays. So lots of the issues that customers complain about kind of have their roots in that production line, thinking. the, the second one, is then this kind of, front office, back office, split And, and that that's where, if you've ever flown through to talk to somebody, they're really polite and really helpful, but certainly can't help you, because they're not the people that can make the decision. also one of my favorite stories was when I was working in Singapore and I was working in the contact center and they would take. Information from a customer about a change of address and rather than inputting information directly onto the system, they would, they would pull up a word document, fill it in with the new information, attach it to an email, email it to the back office because that was clearly a back office job to update the systems. Now, when we actually saw what happened in the back office, we saw that it took much less time to input the information directly onto the system than it did to pull up the word document, fill it all in and email it off. So what they thought they'd been done from an efficiency point of view, or more the dogma of it's a back office task, was actually costing them more money. So there is a principle that says if you can get the work done where it first lands in the organization, rather than handing it off, that tends to be much more effective for the, for the customer. Yeah. Probably, and this will lead us on to the next point, but probably somebody is looking at a KPI report that shows all our KPIs are green. We're turning around all our standards. Everything's great here. so, so that's, that's the next issue that I want to call out is, is the use of targets, People are being targeted they tend to focus on the targets rather than focusing on on, on the customer. I came across a quite good example, on LinkedIn earlier in the in the week from somebody called up to renew their car insurance and, they want to change the payment card that they, they pay with. And the, the agent said, Oh, I, I, we, we can't, change your card. We're going to need to, set up a new policy. Now, it's quite possible that the individual concerned genuinely couldn't change the payment card detail. But more likely is that individual's got some kind of sales target they've got to achieve. And they see any kind of change, like a renewal, as an opportunity to sell new policy. When, when we first outsourced work to India, this was exactly what happened. Like I remember the meetings where we were being told how great the the offshore teams were, their sales performance conversion rate was so much better What a great job it was that we'd offshored all this work. But they were doing exactly the same thing. They were looking for opportunities to cancel existing policies and then, then issue new ones. there's probably a whole separate podcast on targets. so we won't go into that now, but, but where you, where you sit, where you sit.

Jimmy: 16:54

talked about it many times, Rob, and it's definitely I think all of us and and probably most of the audience will have got used to that now because, yeah, it's just, it just drives all the wrong behavior. A lot of the time you if you target stuff, you get exactly what you want. what you target.

James: 17:11

So I am the, I'll start frothing and talk about targets and then throw an incentive on top. I mean, for the love of God. But if you have a repeatable task that you want doing, making pins, for example, if you give somebody a target, it is without shadow of a doubt, the best way to get them to make more of them. But the problem is people have picked up the best practice in one particular scenario. Yeah. And then applied it to a whole host of other scenarios without thinking about the implications, which has posed your system's thinking.

Jimmy: 17:43

Although, having said that Rob, I was looking at our performance board this morning and we were saying, what are the things that indicate success for us? And one of the things was, number of times this podcast is downloaded. And I was, I'd taken my I was talking to my daughter to the doctor's appointment this morning and she said, Oh, your, your podcasts I said, yeah, have you downloaded it? She says, no, not yet, but I will do. I said, good. Well done. She said, I won't listen to it, but I'll download it. I was like, yes, that's right..

18:14

The show you're listening to right now. Brings you insights to help you improve performance and enjoyment of work. It takes a long time to produce, but we think it's well worth it. It's all in the name of helping you get your job done. All we ask in return is that you share the link to the show with someone that you think would benefit from it. And if you haven't already click on follow the show, wherever you're listening to this podcast right now. Anyway, let's get back to the show.

Rob: 18:47

okay. So, so the next one then is standardization to about Henry Ford, any color as long as it's black. So this idea about we are going to standardize our processes. Well, that's great in manufacturing. But the problem with, with customer service is that. Customers are different. Customers come with all kinds of different shapes of request. So when you standardize stuff in a particularly use that standardization to actually build it into your technology, you kind of hard code the standardization. This is where you end up with the whole computer says no mentality because the rules have been set. The people you're talking to. Whilst they can be very sympathetic to what you're telling them, they cannot help you. They cannot, they cannot deal with your inquiry in the way you want because that's not the standard the standard process. You also see that in those kind of IVR channels, how many times you've gone through an IVR menu and go, well, actually it's none of those things. There's none of those because the company's decided.

Jimmy: 19:45

one's going to get me through quickest? I always

Rob: 19:47

Yeah, yeah, it's 1111. yeah. So, there's this kind of this kind of belief that we can predict exactly what the customer is going to be calling about, and that in itself again, once you mix that with targets can can give you some really kind of bizarre outcomes.

James: 19:59

So stamp does is all things in moderation. I mean, you try making light bulbs without standardization, you really are on a hiding to nothing.

Rob: 20:08

Yeah, what I'd say is, again, I think it's one of those real kind of key learnings that I've had in my career is that probably 80 percent of what customers are doing can be relatively standard, but there'll be that 20 percent that's not. And if you can successfully manage the 20 percent of non standard stuff and absorb that into your operation and handle it effectively. You'll, you'll succeed. Where you try and ram that 20 percent through your standard processes, that 20 percent will create 80 percent of the noise in your contact

Jimmy: 20:40

Also, the art is figuring out, where the actual value is. So, where do customers want some variation, need something different, and it adds genuine value to them. And then, like you say, the 80 percent can all be standardised, but yeah, it is a real art form in identifying them, and then managing those exceptions.

Rob: 21:01

so that's that. Next one, it's a lack of understanding about measures for which, we can potentially blame the, the education system, but on a daily basis, Leaders in the business are getting presented with data. They're interpreting that data and making decisions based on that data. And yet very few of them really have the skills or the training to do that properly and effectively to understand things like variation, looking at numbers and going, well, is, is that a big number? Is that changing that number from there to there? Is that normal? Should I, should I react to it? Do I just need to kind of leave it? Should I give it a a couple more days? So first problem is wrong, Things get measured. You know, and you can talk about things like, average handle time and so on in a, in a contact center. and then the second part is, the data gets presented in, in the wrong way. So you see all these reports of, all this, this number has gone up since last month. But we look at that over the last 12 months, you go, well, it kind of goes up and down every month, and it kind of hovers around the around the main and that lack of understanding about variation, lack of understanding about data

James: 22:07

of times, the number of times I've stood in a monthly meeting trying to explain why a number has gone down when it's just noise.

Rob: 22:16

determining the signal from the noise. And when that gets used perniciously, I have to say, in many examples to manage individuals. Okay. So you've got this contact center and, what typically happens is that there's some kind of average is used to discern if you're above the average, you're doing okay if you're below the average, you're a poor performer. And if you're below the average, but still within what would be a normal range of variation, you're a loser. And, you know, bad things happen. You don't get the rewards that other people are getting. And so what happens is that people don't want to be there next month. They start trying to find ways to get themselves above the average. And that's when people start to learn how to kind of cheat and manipulate the data and it all comes back to a lack of understanding about what's normal, what you should be reacting to as a leader When you do a training session and you. You ask, how many of you guys have got a maths degree? how many leaders do you think put their hands up? And yet we're relying on people with that lack of mathematical training to be able to make quite important decisions about people, about business, etc. actions that they should take. so that was my number five. And Number six is this kind of Taylorist thing where managers are too far removed from the work. So you see management making decisions based on opinion, based on what they think happens, rather than real kind of detailed knowledge about what actually happens on the, on base day, the frontline staff who are not being engaged in decision making, and therefore it's kind of real sense of being. Being done to and good organizations. You see where they're involving the frontline staff. You're getting that kind of frontline feedback brought into the decision making process. So there you go. There's, there's, there's my six.

Jimmy: 24:02

I always find on that last one, Rob, absolutely learn. I always learn more about what was really happening by going and seeing it and talking to the staff. And that was great. Always more illuminating than, some review meeting or some, analyst pack or whatever it was because, often you look at numbers and you see what they, what do I want them to tell me rather than what they really tell when you're looking at it face to face, it's really hard to shy away.

Rob: 24:32

Yeah,,

James: 24:33

The other thing that's interesting as well, Rob, is those six things need to link with each other, don't they?

Rob: 24:37

Yeah. You very rarely see, see those six things. Only one of them being present, typically some degree of all six is, is there.

James: 24:46

we've said these things work in manufacturing Well, do they or not? I mean is it is it right to say that what's your take on that?

Rob: 24:56

All of those as management techniques or ways of working a kind of proven, particularly where it comes to delivering efficiency in manufacturing, but there are key differences between. Making a car and delivering a service to a customer. You know, the first one is that there's a customer involved in the service process when you're manufacturing, the customer tends to arrive at the end of it, whereas in a service, the actual demand starts with the customer who wants something, and he's gonna be involved the whole way through. The other thing that you're going to get in in service organizations, which doesn't really exist in manufacturing is something called failure demand. So whilst that service is being delivered. The organization itself is being peppered with failure demand contacts from typically the customer. And much of the work that's going on in the service organization isn't actually delivering the service to the customer. It's in dealing with the failure demand, and in many service organizations, 50, 60, 70 percent plus of the work that's coming in is frankly work that shouldn't be there in in the first place. So, yeah, I think that's a key key differences. And then the other is back to this kind of variation point, which is that customers do all come with different needs and requirements. And what we we've learned is that the most effective way to deliver service is to give the customer what they want when they want it. As close to to what the customer is looking for as possible, whereas the further you kind of deviate from that, that tends to attract the failure demand, which creates more work and creates kind of more, more inefficiency. So, yeah, it might work in manufacturing, but service is different. It's like taking a hammer to to drill a hole. it's wrong tool for the job.

Jimmy James (2): 26:43

I think a lot of the problems exist in manufacturing as well people not going down to the shop floor and not looking people not asking people their opinions people not understanding the numbers So it's just a bit naive to think that oh this works in manufacturing Therefore we should use it in the service industry because a lot of these things don't work in manufacturing either

Jimmy: 27:01

I think there's an interesting point, though, that manufacturing as an industry is a lot more mature than services and industry, But now, now the UK is predominantly a service industry and, it's I, over 80 percent of us are employed in service related roles and, and there's lots of talk about productivity and the need to improve the economy. But a lot of the time spent is spent on fixing stuff. And I know it's a lot less than the figures you quote, But even the government was saying that people are spending a quarter of their time putting things right. Well, if you could get that, even half that, the economy, the impact on the economy, would be incredible.

Rob: 27:43

Yeah, I mean, most service organizations that I've worked with the biggest volume of work coming in. Customers trying to chase up what's happening.

Jimmy: 27:52

Yeah.

Rob: 27:52

And how, how you're dealing with that demand is yeah, is one of the big challenges that I think, think for organizations. So focusing on reducing failure demand is, is kind of the service equivalent of, reducing waste in a, in a lean process, in a manufacturing process. Failure demand is the waste in the in the service process.

James: 28:11

How would you summarize all that? What's the number one problem with the way we run our organizations? Do you think,

Rob: 28:17

yeah, so I think one of the fundamental challenges you've got is, is we're not allowing our frontline people in particular to do the thinking that the customers need. Thank you. So let me give you an example. I was in a restaurant a couple of weeks ago and there were five of us enjoying post dinner coffees. And the waitress came over and said, would you like some, some chocolate truffles? And I'm like, thank you very much. So she brought over a plate of four and there were five of us. So we said, Oh no, there's five of us. Can we have an extra one? She said, Oh no, they only come in plates of four. So I can bring you another plate of four which you did. So we now had eight between five of us. But it was a really great example of where the process was just. obviously stupid. The waitress could see that we could see that. And yet she was not allowed to deviate from that process So I think not allowing individuals to use their common sense, this difference between doing things right, which is sort of the efficiency thing versus Doing the right thing for the customer. I I think the other, the other thing that, that really comes through is, is lots of times that we try to change the people rather than change the system. You know, it's really obvious that that is the system itself that's to blame, but part of that default management thinking is I've got a problem with the people. And so if I can get my people to change, then that will change that, change the result. And yeah, it's like productivity has gone down in my contact center. if across a thousand people, productivity is going down, that's not because the people are doing something different. That's because something different is being done to the people. So systems thinking really is a way of looking at your organization through the customer's lens, because the customer determines your purpose. It's about understanding how your organization works together to deliver what the customers need. And it's a way of challenging management thinking, changing some of the assumptions we have about the way that things should operate and realizing that the way we've always done it may not be the best way of doing it.

Jimmy: 30:19

Excellent. So, we'll come back next week and hear more about how you go about doing it. Super. Thank you very much for your time. Thanks, Rob. Speak to you next week.

30:28

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 organizations. Get in touch at Jimmy at jobdonewell. com or James at jobdonewell. com.