Your System Is the Problem (Here Is How You Fix It) - With John Seddon

Welcome to the 100th episode of A Job Done Well—where we celebrate the art of calling out corporate nonsense and replacing it with something that actually works. This week, we’re joined by John Seddon, a management thinker so influential he’s got his own Wikipedia page (unlike James, who may or may not have written his own). John’s spent decades proving that traditional management—targets, incentives, standardisation—doesn’t just fail to improve performance; it actively makes things worse.

John’s approach is simple: stop incentivising the wrong things. Most organisations reward behaviours that undermine their own goals. Engineers rushed to fix boilers in 15 minutes? They’ll be back six times a year. Call centre agents hitting sales targets? They’re hanging up on customers who won’t buy. Incentives don’t drive performance—they drive gaming, cheating, and a race to the bottom.

Highlights include:

• Why failure demand—work caused by previous errors—is crippling your team (and how to spot it).
• How to redesign systems so your team can actually use their judgment (instead of following scripts).
• The Aviva case study: How blending call centres boosted capacity by 20%—without adding staff.
• Why specialisation is a myth, and how it’s costing you more than you think.
• How to make your boss curious about what’s really going wrong.

If you’ve ever watched your team chase targets while the real work piles up, this episode is your wake-up call. John’s not here to sell you a quick fix—he’s here to help you burn the rulebook and start again.

Key Points:

1. Incentives create perverse outcomes—people game the system, not improve it.
2. Failure demand is a symptom of a broken system, not lazy staff.
3. Specialisation sounds efficient but creates silos, inefficiency, and frustration.
4. Redesign systems around customer purpose, not internal targets.
5. Leaders won’t change unless you make them curious—show, don’t tell.

Transcript

Speaker 3 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 0:16

I'm doing well. James, how are you?

James 0:18

I'm fabulous. Thank you very much. What are we talking about today then?

Jimmy 0:22

Well, today we have a special guest John Sadden, who's a genuine management guru, and he's going to talk to us about all things improving performance. So yeah, honored. He's actually properly famous, James. He's got his own Wikipedia page. Unlike you or I.

James 0:43

I've got one. I started it. I did it myself.

Jimmy 0:45

Yeah,

James 0:46

I think they call it a stove. Yeah.

Jimmy 0:47

It doesn't let you do that. It doesn't count. He has also, James written seven books, best selling books,

James 0:55

selling books.

Jimmy 0:56

unlike you with your one published book. That was a bestseller on what

James 1:01

I was bestseller in management advice for over fifties who were pointy ahead and were interested in process improvement,

Jimmy 1:07

exactly,

James 1:07

got to number one. Yeah.

Jimmy 1:09

Anyhow, more of that, but an important thing today, James, today is actually our hundredth episode.

James 1:15

Very good. I'm amazed. Do you know, I've read a stat, I met a stat about I, this will interest you. I've read a stat about podcasts with more or less than a hundred episodes

Jimmy 1:25

Gone in,

James 1:25

and apparently podcasts with more than a hundred episodes have 20 times listeners than podcasts with lower than a hundred episodes.

Jimmy 1:33

that

James 1:33

So I'm expecting

Jimmy 1:35

It's

James 1:35

absolutely. That will have 60 listeners. It'll just take off. It'll be amazing.

Jimmy 1:40

It'll be more than just you and me listening to

James 1:42

Yeah.

Jimmy 1:43

something we're gonna multiply out. But in fairness, we are in an elite group because most podcasts don't make double figures, and over 85% of them are inactive. So we've got longevity. If nothing else, James,

James 1:56

Anyway, stop blowing our own trumpets. Mr. Setton,

Jimmy 2:00

I.

James 2:01

delighted to have you on the podcast with us. Would you mind just in, I would imagine most of our listeners have heard of you, but would you mind just introducing yourself, John?

John 2:08

Sure. Originally I'm an occupational psychologist. And in the 1980s I came across STEMS work because I had to audit a TQM program that was failing, so I had to read the books. And I became hugely influenced by his thinking. Some simple ideas that, you know, mankind invented management so we can change it'cause it doesn't work very well. And in the course of doing that work, I was seeing all the problems that he described in manufacturing their parallels in service organizations. So I set my store out to solve the problem of how do you run service organizations as systems and. That's been my career. That's what I write about. This year I'm kind of focused. I'm writing about productivity and growth because the government keeps talking about the problem of growth and I spent a career helping organizations grow and massively improve their productivity. So I thought I'd join in the debate. That's what I'm writing about.

Jimmy 3:07

Now when I was reading your Wikipedia page, John, it, it said that the Telegraph had once described you as a reluctant management guru. Where, where did that come from?

John 3:17

Well I was taught it was Philip Johnson. I, what I was saying to him is that, you know, it's the work that my clients achieve is, to their credit, not mine. You know, it's my job is to help them understand what's wrong with conventional command and control management, everything they know and how to run their organization as a system. But the credit has to go to them.

Jimmy 3:41

Our audience, John, is mostly made up of middle managers who are frustrated with their working lives.

John 3:50

Yeah.

Jimmy 3:51

wanting to improve how they operate and how they deliver and how they perform, and how they and their teams enjoy work. What would be your overarching advice to to somebody in that situation?

John 4:03

Well, I mean, first of all, I should say I only work in service organizations. But you know, if they're managers in service organizations and they are run on conventional command and control lines, you know, where people treat activity as cost and they set targets and they think doing more things in a period is greater productivity, which is a myth, you know, if that's their, if that's the kind of stuff they've got and service levels and standard times and blah, blah, blah then I, I could give them some advice. What to study to realize there are better ways to do things, much better way to do things. But I would say, I mean, I think it's important to say at the start that you know the systems approach that I've developed is counterintuitive. And and a lot of people have been fired for talking the language. So, you know, this should come with a health warning. For example you know, one of the published cases we worked in 20 years ago was Aviva. And before we started work I was invited in by one of the directors to go round the place and I was talking to him about what I'm seeing, and he, they had an internal blog in those days. It, it wasn't like the web now. And he started doing stuff on that blog and he got fired for it. Because it is look revolutionary, you know, it looks, it, it upset people who believe the conventional stuff about how you run a service business. And he's not the only one, but I'll tell you his story because. The beautiful thing is that we actually then got to work in there. We made massive changes in there. It was so successful 10 years later, they wanted to get it going in overseas territories, and they looked for someone to run that work and they gave him the job, so he got his job back. After 10 years of mucking about elsewhere. So I mean, that's the problem. So, so, you know, the, the advice to people is the things that you learn are counterintuitive. Be careful what you do with them or, and most importantly, remember how you learn them because you learn them by studying. And the thing you gotta do is find ways to get other people to study them. They'll learn them too.

Jimmy 6:08

So you describe it as counterintuitive. In what way is it counterintuitive?

John 6:12

Well, I mean, suppose you know, with Aviva you know, they had and they, they, they basically a service center operations with front and back offices. Front and back offices in the UK and in India. 500 people in India, 200 people in the uk. And it was all, you know, activity managed, how many calls you do, how long you take on call, standard time, service levels, all that stuff. And if I'd said to them, well, you know, the way to solve this problem is, is for your people at the front end. You don't need a back office. The people in the front end, if we understood the demand from a customer's point of view and trained them to service all of that demand, it'll work much better. And they just look at you and go, don't be stupid. That would be too expensive. So that's how they think. You know, they, they think there are things like easy work and hard work, you know, so we gotta divide work into simple stuff and less simple. This, this is how they think. But indeed that's, that's what they ended up doing.

James 7:10

And why is that wrong? Then, John? So I have some sympathy with your view, but why is it wrong?

John 7:14

Well, they, they, they think it's wrong because they think the cost will go up.. Imagine you, you're running a, a heat and hot water business and you're sending engineers out to do so many jobs a day. And the jobs are diagnosed by someone remotely. And the engineer gets a, a, a job ticket with the time on it. And a, a material that could be in his van might, might not be in his van. He's gotta go and pick it up and, you know and then, you know, the idea is that you should go in and fit that thing and then leave. If I said to them, you know, the better way to run a system like this is don't diagnose it till you've got the engineer in front of it. Know what's likely to be needed in terms of parts.'cause you understood the demand from the. In the systems over time. And, you know, that's, that's not a difficult thing to do. And when the engineer gets there, don't just fit the part. Make sure the whole system is running. That's the way to do this. And they look at you as though you're daft, you know?'cause that will blow the, the time requirements. But you see, what they can't see is that currently they're visiting customers on average six times a year. Fucking balmy, If they start doing the right thing, they'll be visits some, you know, down to once. I mean, we did it with a firm in South Africa where they got, they got down to close to one visit per customer per year improving on a break Fix design is what we just talked about. And then, you know, and this is, this is something I really like. Because we talking how to think about a year later, they were in touch with us saying, well, we've moved on. Well, what do you mean? Well, because we've been fixing whole systems, we've been keeping records of what customers got in their properties, and so we've moved to a preventative design because if we know what they've got, we know the probability of these things breaking down what parts they're going to need. So what we're aiming to do is to have. Them have a continuous forever supply of, of, of heat and hot water. And what we're gonna do is we'll turn up for a service visit and fix the things that we know could break. I mean, what an astonishing. Now you imagine the economics of that. You know, they've gone down from four or five on average a year to once and they've got customers who love it. Now they've got a great marketing strategy. You know, if you are with us and you haven't got your heat or hot water, I guarantee it'll be on by tee time. They can do that because now they've got the capacity to respond in that way.

Speaker 6 9:39

Our podcast is all about helping people, teams, and organizations perform better and enjoy work more.

Speaker 7 9:48

I get as far as to say that we believe that everyone and every team has the potential to transform their performance by optimizing what they currently do.

Speaker 6 9:56

So if you'd like to discuss how we can help you transform your performance, then get in touch or maybe check out our website. We also do speaking events, mentoring advice, work as well.

James 10:10

So the way you described that implies there are a couple of things wrong with the way in which people manage. So one is that. Well, more than a couple. Alright. was I was being polite. One is that you should focus on efficiency, right? So you should. Get people to be terribly good at doing one job and specialize. And you're saying that is or, or that we're just not very good at specialization.

John 10:38

you know, go, let's go back to call centers. You know, there's a lot of work goes on specializing in call centers because why do they do that? Well, it reduces training costs, you know, so these people will deal with. These kinds of loans and these people deal with these kinds of loans, you know, that kind of stuff In financial services, the interesting thing is that, I mean, the, the, the solution that you get to once you study your organization is you have one call center. And, and because you've understood demand from a customer's point of view, what value looks like then you can handle all that stuff. Especially, and the interesting thing is when we started breaking down, so these theses, you know, suppose you go into financial service company, they've got six different specialized call centers. When you start you start with one and redesign it, and then blend it in with another one. So, you know, you make two, every time you add another call center into the pot, rule of thumb, you get about a 20% improvement in its capacity. It's really, I mean, we didn't predict that it just happened. But you can understand why, because you've got more people who can add

James 11:47

Yeah.

John 11:47

the stuff.

Jimmy 11:49

back back to the point if a middle manager sat in an organization, and, you were saying that the, risk is, your views are counterintuitive. But I guess when, as we get into the philosophy and the thinking, it's difficult to argue with the, the principles that you're talking

John 12:06

Hm.

Jimmy 12:07

but how, if a middle manager, how do I get started on changing how I operate?

John 12:12

Well, I mean, if you are if you're in a trans, most services are transactional services. A transactional service starts with customer demand. So you might have an inbound service center. Step one, study demand. Demand is the big lever in, in transactional services. You know, if you go back to Veva when you studied demand what you learn there 20 years ago, 70% or more of demand as what I call failure demand. Demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for a customer. Now.

Jimmy 12:43

Yeah.

John 12:44

We're talking about how managers react to these things. I know that if'cause people tell me this all the time and people go out and study demand and they learn they've got a huge amount of faded demand and they go into their boss's office and they say, we've established there's this, all this faded demand at the front end of the system. And some bosses would turn around and say, yeah, yeah, that's normal in our industry. And you think, what a fuck with, you know, well, I think, what a fuck with but you know, by definition the faded demand is there because the service is crap. You know, remember now it's defined, it fails to do something or do something right for a customer. And then the people you know. So it's easy to understand. It's easy to understand. It's costing you a lot of money. It's easy to understand. It's robbing you of capacity. But then what people do is they say, oh, well, you know, because of their mindset, they say, well, it must be because the bloody people aren't doing what they should do. Or the processes need fixing? No, no, it's not, it's the system's fucked. The, the, you know, if you go back to heating and hot water, you know, there's only two important value steps as I would put it. Diagnosis and then the fix, you know, same in the health service, diagnosis and treatment. You know, health service is another system. So you have to go and find out what's going wrong. In these value steps.'cause that's what's creating the failure demand. And what's going wrong is being driven by system conditions. You know, like I just described, you know, if, if, if we've got a design that separates the diagnosis from the engineer and as the engineer limited in terms of time, they can work and prescribes a part they're going to use with the purpose of just getting there. Those are the system conditions that are created in the failures. Make sense and your job as a leader is to change the system conditions. You know, so going back to, you know, if, if you've made a start and you've established this failure demand at the front end,

Jimmy 14:45

yeah.

John 14:46

that what you've gotta do next is find a leader who actually cares about customers and about productivity. Who's looking to improve productivity and cares about customers and introduce'em gently to the idea. There's this phenomenon going on that's telling us the service isn't working well and therefore it's worth exploring it further. Now, you know, I often talk to middle managers about the need to make leaders curious, and the curious person is someone who would invest their own energy in finding out more about it. One of the mistakes that people can make is. Repeatedly telling leaders the same things and that just pisses them off. That can get you fired.

Jimmy 15:36

What do you mean? As in. I've seen in my team, I've got failure, demand. I've got to go and convince someone in seniority that that's worth doing something about. So it is, it's how you go about making them curious to solve that problem as opposed to just con continue shouting about the problem.

John 15:56

correct.

Jimmy 15:56

could just say there's failure, demand, it's

John 15:58

Yeah.

Jimmy 15:58

and it's it, but you, what you're talking about is more than just telling them there's a problem. How do you make them curious about the

John 16:05

Well that's right. And you know, you could, for example, suggest that they go and have a look at some things, but. Rather than give them the things to look at, give them a link so they can follow their own interest, get creative you know I, I know people who established little book clubs. You know, so,

James 16:23

Yeah.

John 16:24

And they know full well that, that some of the stuff in the books that they're gonna use, and I know because, you know, often they're my books ought to make them start thinking. You know so it is kind of, they've come to it through the book rather than being pushed by somebody else. I know people who hijack management development activities. You know, we, these days in service centers, they record all the calls. Wow. Great. Well, you know, let's listen to a whole bunch of calls. Let's, we're gonna take these calls completely randomly and give them something simple to. Focus on with this call. You know, I mean, you could you could say, okay, let's take the data and put it in in what I call capability chart charts, chemical control charts, but let's put the data from the agents on the floor. In a chart. And it's important to have a chart because you wanna see, as you guys would know whether people are truly different in their performance. And so there's, so you get a group of people who are top sellers other group of people who are not so good sellers. Now,'cause you know, when when a manager sees that, they say, well, brilliant, now I wanna, why isn't everybody like the top sellers? Well, okay, let's listen to top sellers calls. And we'll listen to the not so top sellers calls and see what we learn. And what you always learn is the top sellers cheat the system. They use their ingenuity to maximize the sales. So what does that mean? It means you'll listen to calls where they've got a customer, it's got an issue. There's no way on God's earth they're gonna buy anything. So what do you do? Get rid of it as soon as you can so you can take another.

Jimmy 18:05

Yeah.

John 18:06

when you design a system correctly, is to use that ingenuity in improving the work,

James 18:12

A lot of that John is down to, or no, all of it I would say is down to the fact that people are hell bent on designing incentives to make people work

John 18:22

Yes, yes.

James 18:23

and those incentives that they put in place just screw things up. And so yeah, seeing that countless times,

John 18:30

Basically, incentives always get you less. Because people work for the incentives not, and that's against the purpose of the system.

James 18:38

Yeah, and it is very difficult.'cause if I'm sitting in the middle of the organization, what can I do about that? Probably not a whole fat lot,

John 18:46

I've worked with people in the middle of an organization where all they do is they say to the boss, I've got an individual idea. You know, can I take a group of people and put'em in a little pod? And we'll feed them the same demand that other people are getting and we're gonna deal with it differently and see whether we get better results in terms of whatever measures they are relevant to, what their purpose is there. And sometimes, you know, they've got a boss who says, yeah, that's a good idea. Off you go.

Jimmy 19:15

The other point that you've made, John, is that you know, you've gotta find somebody who's interested in productivity and interested in the customer.

John 19:23

Hmm.

Jimmy 19:23

And if you position it in the right way, that should include nearly everyone, because there should be very few who in theory, are not interested in one of those

John 19:34

Well,

Jimmy 19:34

if not

John 19:35

Jimmy, I'm afraid, I'm afraid I'm a bit cynical about that. You know, I, I've, I've worked with so many top leaders who are only concerned about delivering their particular thing to get their particular bonus.

Jimmy 19:49

Yeah.

James 19:49

And are those your points about the post office? I was reading about that. It was interesting and they they actually got a bonus. The senior guys in the post office got a financial bonus for not paying out the incentives because the cashflow in the stage in the organization. So it hit their profitability numbers by paying out compensation. I kid you not,

John 20:06

Yeah.

James 20:07

yeah,

John 20:07

It's a sin, isn't it?

Jimmy 20:09

Another way though of getting people interested in the work it's a bit cynical, but it plays the ego a little bit.'cause you know, often senior leaders don't like to spend time on the front line. But quite often, you know, I had a conversation in one organization recently, I was saying that, you know, the frontline would really love to hear from the senior leaders and love to spend some time with them and it'd have a real positive impact. So you place that ego a little bit. Everyone wants to come and then spend time on the front line. And then when you get. There. Then they see what's really happening and they see how the system's really performing and how the work really is being done and how the customers are really being impacted. So, you know, a little bit like your point about listening to phone calls, but actually getting them alongside people so that people can explain to them the challenges of doing the

John 20:55

Yeah, yeah, We often do that kind of thing in very, very big companies. You know,'cause people think, you know, big companies, they think that they've gotta do everything at once, and that's, that's a big mistake. You can't do that. But, you know, you've started somewhere and the re results are coming through and people are buzzing, and people are, you know, morale is up. It's all, all cool, great. And other leaders get curious and instead of telling them what's going on, what we do is we set up what, what I would call a, a normative design. And normative. This is designed to change the thinking. Okay. So, and it's in a location somewhere. And so they're told, yeah, yeah. We, we, we are gonna explain this, but the way to get it is to come to this location and you'll be taken through this. It's gonna take a day or they're gonna take two days, whatever we decide it is. And when they get there, what they get is, okay, here's old world, which they're familiar with., We actually see people working in Old World and they see the measures on the board and all that sort of stuff and they're familiar with it. And then they go onto, now this is what you learn when you study Old World. So it is all the things that are dysfunctional failure to achieve purpose, you know, where the costs really are, how the costs are higher than they, they think, and all that stuff. And then, then now this is New World. So this is a different set of principles and this is how it's working now, and that works for quite a lot of them. It's not as powerful as them doing the studying, but it basically sets it up

Jimmy 22:23

Yeah.

John 22:23

to show them there's a better way to do this

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Jimmy 22:54

So, I've found failure, demand in my team. I've got somebody curious. I think you were saying you test out other ways of working the new ways of working and then demonstrate those ways of working compared to the old ways. What else would you recommend that middle managers do in terms of to, to transform their work performance?

John 23:14

Well, I mean, that is, that is sufficient, isn't it? Why? Why would that not be sufficient? I think the important thing is that, you know, when they're,

Jimmy 23:23

Yeah.

John 23:24

The way in which we work the first iteration of a new design is a proof of concept. You know, so really what we're trying to, the proof of concept means we're gonna take some of the demand, we're gonna feed it through this redesign, and we're gonna study the economics of it. We're gonna study how it works for the customer, what the costs look like. So it's basically getting leaders comfortable with. It is feasible and it's better economically, it's better, and for the customers it's better. And it is feasible to have this idea that the people can do much more than I thought they could do, kind of thing, you know? And then, then you've gotta go from there to what we call a prototype. So now a prototype. It's where you're focused on, well, what are the, what are the system conditions that have gotta live in this? And we're gonna establish them all here. Because this is like a, a, a mini version of what we're ultimately have in the future. Okay. But at that stage, the leaders have gotta start thinking about how the support organizations are gonna have to change. You know? Because for example, you know, you've got finance, hr, it. Together, they're actually creating the old system conditions that are part of the problem. So they have to be reconfigured and so on, you know, so there's a long journey. But I mean, the important thing is just get focused on getting to the proof of concept, because that will open people's eyes to the benefits of designing in a, in a better way, designing it as a system.

Jimmy 25:00

When you go back to the redesign point,, you said that. Managers have to look at the system and the system constraints that are causing some of the failure on

John 25:09

Yeah,

Jimmy 25:09

are the things that they should be looking at in terms of the system?

John 25:13

of the controls, basically the controls, you know, typical controls of the service organization are activity as cost, aren't they?

James 25:21

So sorry, just to elaborate on that a wee bit, John. So you are thinking things like a control will be task completion rates. Is that what you are?

John 25:29

A number of calls a day, time and take to do calls. Number of visits, a number of fixes an engineer does in a day. You know, if one of the controls you find with engineers doing heating systems is the control on the, the money they spend on spares. I mean, they're not spending but the, the, the value of the spares they use in a day. It's also

James 25:49

about system conditions.

John 25:51

like specialization standardization protocols in health protocols mean an awful lot of protocols in health and care services stop you actually giving personalized care to people because, you know, the, the people delivering the care are fearful of stepping outside of protocols. So they knowingly do things that are not optimal for patients, but they're safe if they do that. And that's crazy.

Jimmy 26:24

one of the big problems in today's environment is the systems, the way they're treated, the way they work, it stops them from thinking. So, we're all put in a box and we, so how, if, if I'm a middle manager and my people have been squashed down for their, their whole careers, how, can I improve their judgment? How can I improve their thinking? How would I go about that?

John 26:44

Well, you could you could set them up to study, end to end from a customer's point of view, so they see what's going on. I mean, this is particularly true in, this is so true in in the health service. You going, you going into the health service and you meet great people with great skills and a good attitude, but it's a crap system. And you know, and some people get angry with the staff where they shouldn't.'cause it's not the staff that are the problem, it's the way the system solves the problem. And you can't tell those people that, that, you know, it's crap. If you, I mean, and we've done this a number of times, well, loads of times, if you get those people to look at the whole thing, end to end, they suddenly go, oh my God, I didn't realize, you know, what's going on here. And outta that,

James 27:34

And it's amazing. So the creativity that that unleashes when you can do

John 27:39

yeah,

James 27:40

that and it was a. There was a bunch of Disin member, believe it

John 27:43

believe it.

James 27:45

people would imagine, you know, they're refuse collectors. They're not the world's brightest, you all sorts of negative connotations going on their manager's minds. But they sat back and they looked at the whole system and they saw all the things that were going

John 27:58

Yeah.

James 27:58

and they just wanted to take some pride in their

John 28:00

Yeah.

James 28:00

wanted to clear the streets, you know, that's what they wanted to do. And it just, they lit up. I've never seen such an enthusiastic bunch of people in

John 28:07

Yeah.

Jimmy 28:08

I think, I think that snowball point is a really good one, James, because in my experience, I think as a manager, if you have those team who have been oppressed for forever when they start coming up with ideas, you've got to show some follow through so people then see some action. Then if they think, hang on a minute. I know we've always been moaning about how poor this system is. Now we've got a manager who's actually taking some action on it. Then that galvanizes their thinking, their activity, and then you know, you get that snowball effect.

John 28:39

That's right. And I, and I would say what's important at that stage is to inculcate an attitude of let's design an experiment with measures. See what we learn. Because you've gotta design the, the capability to learn into what you're doing.

James 28:57

But it's the way, and I suppose this is because of your point, way people are being managed and managed, being management, being something we've developed, but you give people a measure. They instinctively start to argue about the measure because they think it is going to become a target.

Jimmy 29:13

So I was working with an organization recently and they've got hung up on speed targets and they've got backlogs of decisions and speed targets that they're obsessing about. And these are complex decisions, right? But they've got a big backlog, I can sort all out tomorrow. I'll hit your speed targets and I'll, I'll destroy your backlog. I'll just say yes to everyone. Problem goes away. You've hit your target. Is that what you want? It's not,'cause you know, they're complex decisions and the consequence of getting the decision wrong is major. But organizations get fixated

John 29:45

it's the, the measures must always be related to the purpose of the system from the customer's point of view,

James 29:52

Yeah, as opposed to measures, which is just related to how much it's flipping, costing, and what we're gonna do to save some money, is inva what

John 29:59

Yeah, it's managing value rather than managing cost. Because the paradox is that when you manage value, your costs go down.

James 30:07

Let me just summarize this then. So I think I've got a list here. Let's bang through it. These are the things that you would recommend that a middle manager, does to improve the their lives and the lives of those working for them. I think the first thing is get really clear about what the purpose of your department is, but not as in what is your purpose within your organization, but what is the purpose for your customers? So what are you actually delivering to people?'cause that is what you need to be optimizing around. And if you haven't got clear about that, then you're on a hydrogen. Nothing.

Jimmy 30:39

The other pit that we talked about was then understanding how do you measure your successful delivery of that purpose, and how do you look at what failure demand you've got in the activities that you're doing that doesn't actually help your customers towards that purpose.

John 30:56

It's vital that you've got measures of achievement, of purpose from a customer's point of view being used where your experiment is alive. Okay? And, and as a leader, it's your responsibility to ensure that the people have the wherewithal to deal with the customers and are able to make judgements that are relevant to what matters to the customer. And when you do that well, it will show through in improved measures of achievement and purpose.

Jimmy 31:25

And, and we talked about redesigning the system that you're working within to look at the the things that that cause people to behave in certain ways and looking at the co controls, targets, policies, procedures, processes, all that sort of stuff. All the things that stop people from being able to use their judgment and make the right decisions

John 31:47

Yeah.

Jimmy 31:47

customer purpose.

James 31:50

I think the key thing for me though is once you've got to the point where you've created that system so your staff can do what they want and do the right thing, then it's about setting up a pilot or some way of bringing people in so they can see what is going on, and then get support from the wider organization.

John 32:10

Yeah, and I, and rather than call it a pilot, I'll call it a proof of concept

James 32:14

Yeah.

John 32:15

everyone uses pilots, if you know what I mean.

Jimmy 32:18

The other thing we also talked about is make sure that you get the right support from your leaders. And the way of going about that is get them curious in what you're doing

John 32:29

Yeah.

Jimmy 32:29

really going on,

John 32:30

Yeah,

Jimmy 32:31

then helps them be more supportive of you as you go through

John 32:34

yeah,

Jimmy 32:35

of concepts and changing ways of working.

John 32:37

yeah.

James 32:38

How's that? Did we nail it?

John 32:40

All right.

James 32:41

Anything you'd like to add, John?

John 32:43

No, no, of

James 32:45

There you go. We nailed it.

Jimmy 32:46

Well, thank you. Thank you, John, for being the, our reluctant management guru for our hundredth episode. It is a absolute joy to have you along.

John 32:55

It's

James 32:56

Thank you very much.

John 32:57

fellas. And I hope we meet again over the web

Jimmy 33:00

Thanks everyone.

James 33:01

Cheers now, Tara.

Speaker 33:03

We cover a whole host of topics on this podcast

Speaker 2 33:05

from purpose to corporate jargon,

Speaker 33:08

but always focused on one thing, getting the job done well,

Speaker 2 33:11

easier said than done. So if you've got. Unhappy customers or employees, bosses or regulators breathing down your neck.

Speaker 33:21

If your backlogs are outta control and your costs are spiraling and that big IT transformation project that you've been promised, just keeps failing to deliver,

Speaker 2 33:30

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 orJames@jobdonewell.com.