Rapid Mass Engagement – Frank Devine

Why do so many culture change initiatives fail to stick?

In this episode of Beyond Deming, James Lawther and Frank Devine discuss Rapid Mass Engagement, a system designed to create sustainable, employee-owned cultural transformation. 

Frank shares how early-career frustrations—watching improvements unravel after leadership changes—led him to develop this method, which flips traditional hierarchies by giving employees the power to shape their workplace culture.

Listen as they explain the three-stage process: Diverse Workshops to identify obstacles, Consensus Day for collaborative decision-making, and creating Behavioural Standards tied to a deeply emotional higher purpose. Frank also addresses common challenges, such as overcoming blame culture, ensuring psychological safety, and preventing burnout by tackling root causes. 

Discover how this approach fosters adult-adult relationships, aligns entire workforces, and delivers rapid, measurable results—without relying on charismatic leaders or superficial engagement. 

Essential for managers ready to build cultures that outlast individual tenures.

Transcript

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James 0:15

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Beyond Demi. I am joined today again by, Frank Devine, who is going to talk to us a little bit more about rapid mass engagement. Frank.

Frank 0:25

Morning, James. Morning

James 0:28

We've already recorded, and it's worth going back and having a listen, a, podcast about the cathedral higher purpose model of leadership. What we thought we'd do today is we would talk about rapid mass engagement, and we would, refer back to some questions that we've had some listeners ask. So before we start then, Frank, how about you give me an overview of rapid mass engagement? What is it and where did it come from?

Frank 0:51

Before doing that, James, it'd be nice to just have a little thought experiment for people who, who may have no knowledge of it at all Before going into it. So I want people to imagine this scene. You're, um, you've just been appointed as a senior director, let's say, to a big factory, and you're doing your induction, and part of your induction is to understand the culture of the factory or the, or the, section of the organization you're now the senior director of. And, um, so you're probably expecting someone from HR to explain the culture or maybe the general manager of the site. But actually, the people who are presenting the whole outline of what the culture is are two people from frontline. And they take you through not just what the culture is, but how it was created by them, by the employees. That it wasn't handed down by any previous management. It was agreed between the employees and the senior management through the process we're gonna talk about today called Rapid Mass Engagement. Frontline, ordinary non-managerial staff are, first of all, presenting how they as employees own this culture, so it's not something that future management has the right to change. It's a-- It has, it has been created by all of the workforce. And, and they'll probably throw in a few jokes. They'll say, "You senior guys, you guys come for a couple of years, and then you bugger off somewhere else when you get promoted. Whereas we, we stay, and we live this culture, and we want to keep living this culture until the day we leave." Can you imagine the expectation that sets for the senior leader about what that senior leader's behavior needs to be to succeed in this new job that you're walking into? The reason for the thought experiment is that everything else, all fits into a system to create that output So the confidence and the trust that those employees have, that this is their culture and their management and them are working together to, to sustain this, all, all works, in a system, to create that kind of output and that kind of change. And the other thing it will create for the new director is massive curiosity. And if you like, a de- a desire to learn more about how is this possible? How did this happen? If, if people are curious that, that curiosity creates the openness to think and to explore ideas which previously would be regarded as crazy. So rapid mass engagement and the cathedral model of leadership that's part of it are the result of over thirty years of experimentation with great, bigger and bigger numbers of people in a wider, wider range of sectors and geographies and cultures. So that's what we're gonna talk about today, is the

James 4:17

so where did it come from to start off

Frank 4:19

Yeah.

James 4:20

So

Frank 4:20

Okay. Yeah. The original spark, if you like.

James 4:23

exactly that

Frank 4:23

Well, it c- it came from naivety and frustration. So my, my naivety and my frustration. The, the naivety was because I'd up- uh, because I'd played football at the highest level I could, I thought what worked in sport would be working inside organizations.

James 4:44

Yeah

Frank 4:44

And What I found was highly hierarchical, organizations with often hostile or dismissive attitudes between,, management, white-collar employees, and blue-collar employees. It's like the old John Cleese thing the upper class looks down on the middle class, who looks down on the working class. Although, uh, John Cleese was being humorous, there was a large element of truth in the, in the caricature and It went the other way around as well. So the shop floor didn't like the guys in the office. They thought they didn't do any work. You know, they, they f- they knocked off at 5 o'clock whereas we're here on shifts and, you know, all the, all the usual stuff. It's always the other guys. The other guys are the problem rather than looking inwards. Some of the things I'd learned in sport worked well, but some of the things didn't, and which was which, and that's an important thing to discover and to know. The other thing was I got rapidly promoted, because I got things done, and I got things done quickly. Just, just my nature. I'm impatient, and people say demanding in terms of standards and stuff. So but what I noticed was when I look back to the improvements made in previous jobs, I realized a lot of them were not sticking, not sustaining. Some of the cultural aspects plateaued and in some cases started to go backwards as other managers came in and put their own stamp on things. And also because what I'd left behind wasn't sustainable. It was too dependent on the energy and commitment of a small group of leaders, including myself. And the lesson there is, no matter how good you are as a leader, no matter how energetic and committed you are, and no matter how hardworking you are, there just aren't enough of you. That the coalition, that needs to be built has to be much wider than management

James 7:01

Yes

Frank 7:02

and the ideal, the ideal coalition is the entire workforce

James 7:07

Yeah, because I've seen that. I've worked for some great managers in my time, that's fantastic they move on,

Frank 7:14

Yes

James 7:15

whole thing can fall apart

Frank 7:18

Now, I wouldn't claim to be a great manager because the inherent weakness in what I was doing was I was creating s- things which were not sustainable, it forced me to look inwards and think In- instead of just focusing on the results, which were always very good, but, but at what cost, and did-- how many people did I bring with me? I always brought an enthusiastic group with me, but what about the rest? So I had to retreat a little bit into, into reflection and learning and however good we are as leaders, how do we create sustainable systems that survive us?

James 8:03

two, well, two or three frustrations there that you're talking about.

Frank 8:08

Yeah

James 8:09

One is that you can be as charismatic as you like as a leader, but it'll only take you so far.

Frank 8:14

Yes

James 8:15

The second one is that, and I've experienced this time and time again, culture change doesn't stick. It's linked to the first point, but when somebody moves on, the culture will change. And then the third one really is about- getting the most out of the people who are in the organization, the people who are staying rather than the people who move on

Frank 8:34

Yes. The recognition that managers, particularly if you're on a fast track promotion thing in an organization, you're moving on, you're moving on. What have you left behind? And is what you've left behind sustainable? The objective is to create something that is a culture that is so strong and so owned by the employees with so much commitment, that if a senior leader tries to change it, it will cause a major problem and difficulty for that senior leader.

James 9:04

Ahead of this podcast, we, actually asked some questions. one of the questions was, We all know that frontline staff know a lot of the answers because they

Frank 9:16

Yes

James 9:17

But why do s- organizations struggle to listen to that?

Frank 9:23

I think a lot of people do understand this, but there's a lot of other people as well who... who pay lip service to believing that, And that second group, sometimes, can be misleading in that you can get superficial agreement with this kind of approach. But superficial agreement when faced with real challenges soon dissipates. So what, what you're aiming for is that you create so, so strongly emotional ownership and commitment to the whole process that anyone who's be inauthentic is easily spotted because of the rigor of the behavioral standards that are built to sustain. in a situation, where feedback and challenge is not only permitted but mandated in order to keep the culture alive, individuals who are not truly understanding of that point it becomes uncomfortable for them because the number of people giving them feedback from all directions, And if, if your boss is giving you feedback, your peers, your peers are giving you feedback, and people just in the canteen are, are, are giving you feedback, you soon say, "I don't wanna work here anymore," and they will often leave. if fundamentally you don't align, you don't agree with treating employees with that much respect, it's gonna show

James 11:04

another question we had is managers often say, "What's stopping you from performing at your best, and how can I

Frank 11:13

Yes.

James 11:14

So is

Frank 11:15

Yes

James 11:15

the same or is it to that?

Frank 11:17

The, the person asking the question is absolutely right. Looking for feedback, taking on the feedback, adjusting your style and approach to adapt to feedback is how we improve as individual managers. What we're talking about with rapid mass engagement is the entire system operating that way from top to bottom, left to right, across functions, everybody operating like that. Ideally, no employee will ever worry about who their new boss is because all the bosses are excellent. They won't be roboticized the same, but the-- in terms of their outputs and the way they develop their team, the way they drive standards, the way they lead by example, the way they connect all the dots, they will do all those things. They'll have their own personality. They'll have their own style, but, but the, the people working for them will get all of that as part of the package.

James 12:19

Okay, but then so that brings me back to another one of the questions we've got, which was, so this isn't about individual managers, this is much more systematic. the, the

Frank 12:28

Yes

James 12:28

we've got was how does this link to large group methods from the systems thinking discipline?

Frank 12:33

Yeah. Now that, that particular question referenced Beer and the, viable, system model. And, Beer was coming at this from a different start point. As organizations get more complex and there's just more information and more size and more complexity, a centralized top-down, approach cannot handle that. A, a, a small group of people in headquarters can't adequately manage the, complexity. So you have to create self-sustaining mechanisms at local level, Now that, that's what the viable systems model aims to do. In terms of its link to rapid mass engagement, the difference is that once you've decided in rapid mass engagement what system we're trying to optimize, The issue is: how do you make it, it, the whole system aligned regardless of function, regardless of hierarchy, et cetera, et cetera. Beer's approach was a kind of, um, how do we design the systems to do this? And what he's arguing is absolutely true. Rapid mass engagement was more about how do we create a culture of improvement, um, and in order to do that, some of the things Beer talks about, like distributed power,

James 14:04

Yeah

Frank 14:05

decisions to the lowest level, is maximized in rapid mass engagement. So there's a lot of similarity, albeit the starting point is very different,

James 14:16

yeah. Okay. And so one more question then, which is just how do you stop this becoming just another initiative?

Frank 14:23

That's an incredibly important question. Um, I mentioned earlier about curiosity? One of the things in the structure of rapid mass engagement is that the entire workforce is divided into diverse workshops in order to avoid groupthink. So you don't have lots of people who do the same jobs in the same workshop. You expose people to lots of different employees doing different jobs in different functions. So they have to listen and understand what it's like for other people, not just be selfish, if you like.

James 14:55

Yeah

Frank 14:56

They have to think about the whole system rather than themselves. Initially when people walk in, they will think it's just another initiative 'cause that's been their experience. So, so for example, when they realize that the senior leadership team is the only group that is not en-entitled to put an item on the agenda for the decision-making event called Consensus Day, which creates the joint change plan.

James 15:24

Sends a

Frank 15:24

they think

James 15:25

message that it's not the same as everything else they've seen

Frank 15:28

Yeah. Usually that's where the power is,

James 15:31

Yes

Frank 15:32

and what we've done is we've kind of reversed it. Now there's still... the senior management team has to agree the whole approach, they have to agree the logistics, they have to ag- there's a whole lot of guardrails around this. But ultimately, when the senior management team walks into consensus day, the entire agenda has been created by other people, not them. Ultimately, when the employees have spoken, who makes the decision as to what to do? And inevitably people say, "Oh, well, yeah, senior management makes the final decision." I say, "Well, in this case they don't." And that's the fundamental difference. It's by consensus in cons- in, hence the name Consensus Day. So nobody has more power on Consensus Day than anybody else

James 16:23

So you've explained the

Frank 16:24

Yeah

James 16:24

it, but what's... How does it actually work?

Frank 16:26

well, well let's look at

James 16:27

to

Frank 16:27

the three words 'cause the three words are significant. Rapid is, is about the pace at which everything happens. Conventionally, we're told repeatedly that culture change is very difficult, true, and it takes a long time. False. because I believed if it was, if it was highly worthwhile and it takes a long time to do, why don't we speed the bloody thing up and, and do it quicker? And in terms of signaling commitment to the workforce From senior leadership. When the employees see the entire process, they see that in small organizations, the whole culture is gonna be codified within two weeks, that we're gonna have a change plan within two weeks that's, that's owned by the workforce, not by senior management. That, um, all the things that they've raised as a priority are going to be addressed, w-when they see that, it, it's-- they realize that, um, wow, this is different. and they say, "No, this is real," that creates a bow wave effect

James 17:55

Yeah

Frank 17:56

in the organization whereby people are now coming... are less skeptical. So therefore, what, what might take me two hours in the early workshops to explain, by the time we get to the end, because of the viral effect, it might only take an hour

James 18:15

That explains what it is, but what, I mean, how does it work? What's the foundation

Frank 18:19

How's it working? Yeah.

James 18:20

Yeah

Frank 18:20

first step is, um, senior leadership team will have seen-- They'll have visited a location where this has happened, or they've heard about it, or they'll have read my book with all the examples in it and stuff. There'll be some mechanism to make the f- to trigger the phone call to me,

James 18:42

Yeah

Frank 18:42

uh, "Frank, we want to, we want to do rapid mass engagement." And I'll say, "Okay, um, how, you know, how long is it gonna take? What's it gonna..." Say, "Well, let's not go ahead of ourself. First of all, you need to understand what it is,

James 18:58

The challenge here isn't so much engaging the staff. The challenge here is much more about getting the managers to back off, isn't it?

Frank 19:07

It's to get-- Well, it's to get managers to understand w- if they sign up for rapid mass engagement, they're signing up to actually having their employees decide the agenda

James 19:19

yeah, yeah.

Frank 19:20

for a change plan and

James 19:22

definition, the managers have to give up some control and they have to be willing to do that

Frank 19:27

Yes. And, um, in that I call it a diagnostic and decision-making day. That's what I call it. 'Cause the diagnosis is what are you trying to achieve as an organization? Where are you now? Current state. And I-- and the preparation for that involves create-- them creating their own data. I don't charge organizations to go in and do diagnoses. I get them to do all the data, and then we diagnose together on that one day. And so where do you wanna be? Where are you? And as part of that, what level of engagement? Now, not involvement, not employee voice, engagement. So, so the, you know, the old, thing about the traditional British breakfast, about the, bacon and egg. You know, the chicken is involved, but the pig is deeply engaged, okay? So, we, we need more, more bacon and less egg in terms of what we're aiming for here because there is a transfer of power at different stages, and employees are actually making decisions. Traditionally, we treat our employees parent-child. We ask them for their input, but the parents decide where to go on holiday or whatever it is. Here, the whole thing is adult-adult, so employees have to prioritize. You know, you, you, you remember when we first had Kaizen events and all the rest of it, the mistakes people make by asking the employees what's wrong, and you get 100 things on a flip chart, and then we tell the engineers to go and fix them

James 21:17

Yeah.

Frank 21:17

you know, and they, and they just haven't got the capacity and which is more imp- so it's to avoid all of that. So the employees have to prioritize what are the most important obstacles to the organization achieving something called its higher purpose, which I can go into if you want

James 21:35

on then, because I think that's quite important. So

Frank 21:37

When I, when I was looking at how do we make it sustained? How do we create a level of ownership that sustains a, a high-performing culture forever kind of thing? You can't get that purely logically So the idea is to create a purpose, a reason for doing this, which like the old Heineken ad, uh, reaches places that any other form of, of, uh, this doesn't reach. So just to give you a practical example, I'm Irish, and, um, in Boston Scientific in Galway, it's in the west of Ireland, which suffered the most, the greatest, population decline after the famine and in the waves of emigration. But the aspect of the higher purpose in Galway, when I was walking around talking to, uh, employees And I used to ask them, "Which part of the higher purpose meant the most to you?" And the ones who were from the west of Ireland said it was, uh, creating a future for our family and friends in the West. So in other words, reducing emigration, redu- reducing forced emigration, so families kept together, et cetera, et cetera.

James 23:05

Yeah, yeah,

Frank 23:06

at least

James 23:06

But higher purpose is not about creating market share or reducing

Frank 23:12

No,

James 23:13

or any of

Frank 23:13

no.

James 23:14

corporate things. It's much

Frank 23:16

Yeah

James 23:17

deeply held emotional, if that's the word for

Frank 23:21

That everyone can buy into.

James 23:22

Okay

Frank 23:23

Even, even people who haven't signed up for capitalism can buy into the idea of having a thriving community with jobs and,

James 23:32

Yeah

Frank 23:32

and, uh, and help for local businesses and local schools and all the rest of it. So

James 23:38

And so who

Frank 23:39

now that you-

James 23:39

this higher purpose? How does that get done?

Frank 23:41

Well, that's interesting. usually that would be, created by the senior team, but often then socialized among a wider group of leaders, and then it becomes the higher purpose. But in smaller organizations the workforce itself has created its own higher purpose, and that's more powerful. But if you've got 3,000 employees in a room, you're not gonna be able to... It, it doesn't work in terms of the int- the, the sheer mechanics of how you, how you debate and create this. It's too, too difficult a task for a very big group.

James 24:20

So go-- talk me through the sequence then

Frank 24:22

It starts with that diagnostic. Where are we? Where do we need to go? What... Three, three quick questions. level of employee engagement as opposed to involvement or employ-- what level of engagement is, is required to ch- to achieve that

James 24:41

Yeah

Frank 24:44

This is one of the biggest mistakes organizations make. They have the ambitious stretch target, but the conventional methodologies trying to use to get there are just not gon- not

James 24:56

Yeah

Frank 24:57

enough. So in other words, they've set themselves up for failure. So that's an important discussion for that leadership

James 25:05

then by definition, they have to realize in that discussion that they are not going to achieve those goals unless they get everybody with them

Frank 25:12

Exactly.

James 25:14

So let me just summarize where we're at then in terms of the sequence then. So you start off with a senior team diagnostic day where people understand the gap, what are they trying to achieve, and this is the management team. But the key question is, do they have the wherewithal in their organization to fulfill that gap? And it's only if they come to the conclusion themselves that they need to get everybody lined up and engaged that rapid mass engagement works. Because if they're not prepared to l-lose that level of control, then you're on a hiding to nothing have I got that right?

Frank 25:48

Yeah. And now people will naturally hold on to existing, processes that they've got running already. So one of the things I try and encourage them to do at this stage is not to start any other

James 26:01

Yeah

Frank 26:03

Think about bandwidth.

James 26:06

So once you've got everybody lined up at a management level, what happens next?

Frank 26:13

We have to create a mechanism getting the entire workforce through three-hour workshops as quickly as possible to create the data on which the whole system will be built. So those workshops, they w- uh, they will decide the biggest obstacles to the

James 26:36

Yeah

Frank 26:38

what stops them doing their job well, if you like, in relation to this higher purpose. They have to prioritize those to stop us having a massive list, that forces adult-adult prioritization conversations. They then create the behavioral data which the new culture will be based. So that's the raw, the raw experience of life what's motivated them and what hasn't motivated them through their life. That's collected

James 27:09

Yeah

Frank 27:10

And then the third big decision they have to make is: Who do we send to this consensus day?

James 27:18

But before we move on to the consensus there then, a couple of, uh, questions that people have asked. How do you make people feel safe enough to speak honestly about what's working and what's not working?

Frank 27:31

In the original workshop, there's rules around confidentiality, so I say to them: "What we talk about in the workshop, Any, any contribution by any individual within these walls. I ask all the people in the room to protect each By not talking about what anybody says in the workshop. Now, the fact that X has been elected by the workshop is public. You know, we, we have a little ceremony. We write it on the wall and stuff, and so that's knowledgeable. And what the issues are is made public as well in the agenda for consensus day. individuals say personally

James 28:12

Totally off the record. Yeah. Okay so another question we got asked then, Frank, was how do you overcome the, the prob- the problem's not me, it's everybody else, that sort of mindset that you get in organizations?

Frank 28:24

That exists both at management and

James 28:25

Yeah

Frank 28:26

level. It's always tempting to point to somebody else and blame somebody else, and that's why the workshops are diverse in the true sense. looking for not just diversity in terms of job, but cognitive diversity, people who will disagree

James 28:45

Yeah

Frank 28:47

Disagreement is a good thing because that's how we work out what actually is a lot more important than something else. So, If we ever get, people blaming other people, I, I say, "You know, whenever I've done this, um, it's always the other shift that's at

James 29:03

Yeah

Frank 29:04

So really, I could make my job a lot easier if I went back to management and say, 'It's all right, just fire the other shift.' And then they'd say, 'Which shift is that?' And I'd say, 'All of them.'" So it's n- it can't be everybody

James 29:18

Yeah

Frank 29:20

Um, so that lightens it a little bit. And, in explaining what consensus means as part of the first hour, I explain to them that we will only have consensus on consensus

James 29:34

Yeah, yeah

Frank 29:35

when ev- everybody has deeply listened to and to understand where everybody else is coming from. And get to understand where anyone's coming from if we're blaming them So there's a kind of separate the, separate the situation, the problem from the person or the group, and let's talk about the issues rather than hanging anybody out to dry,

James 30:06

Presumably this has got quite a lot, a big effect on wellbeing and how you retain staff and things like that?

Frank 30:14

Yeah. I mean, the, um, the evidence on that is pretty overwhelming., Just in terms of simple things like the number of complaints, you know,

James 30:27

Yeah

Frank 30:28

absenteeism goes down. You're making a marginal decision, do I go into work or not? If your work is really meaningful to you and you can see the higher purpose in your

James 30:37

You drag yourself in. Yeah.

Frank 30:40

you're

James 30:40

Yeah

Frank 30:40

yourself into work. Simple stuff like that., So, so the idea is to get things sorted, if you like, at the lowest level of the organization involving as few people as possible, and the efficiency and productivity effect of that is very, very difficult to measure, but there's certainly a correlation between, between doing this and increases in productivity almost immediately. Literally almost immediately.

James 31:10

when I've seen this done in the past in tuition, you just get far too many ideas far too flipping quickly. And you don't stand a hope in hell in, in of doing them all. So how do you get around that?

Frank 31:21

The way we get around that is very simple, force prioritization. and they grumble like

James 31:27

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Frank 31:30

And that's... Well, we've got to find out what the biggest things are to give us a better chance of, of them being actually, uh, true and reliable. 'Cause don't forget, when we come to implement and debate the, change plan, we're gonna have to subject all this to data analysis and, actual

James 31:52

Yeah.

Frank 31:52

stuff, so we gotta get it

James 31:54

Yeah

Frank 31:54

And I... what I say to employees is, "If we come up with Mickey Mouse stuff that turns out not to be true, what happens to the credibility of employees',

James 32:04

Yeah, yeah.

Frank 32:04

to this? We gotta get

James 32:05

Yeah

Frank 32:06

So we've got to, we've gotta be adult-adult and make decisions. That is more important than anything else, so that's what we're gonna put on the

James 32:13

What you're really saying is uh, hugely important thing is to get the employees to prioritize their problems.

Frank 32:19

Yeah, and is the separation of diagnostics from problem-solving. They're explicitly told not try and problem-solve. not about suggestions. not about ideas for improvement at that stage. Because if you get individual workshops thinking they've got a solution, their ownership will be for

James 32:50

Yeah

Frank 32:51

Now, that solution's not been tested against all the other solutions or the data on consensus day. So you don't want to create ownership of the wrong stuff. You wanna create ownership of the final change plan agreed on consensus

James 33:08

So at this stage, it's really just about getting people to be clear what the obstacles are. Yeah. Okay. I understand

Frank 33:16

"There's only one thing worse than crap, and that's deeply owned crap."

James 33:23

Yeah

Frank 33:24

we don't, we don't want the emotional commitment behind the wrong

James 33:27

Yeah

Frank 33:28

Now, when I say wrong, mean that I'm correcting them or anything. It's the rigor of the analysis, the rigor of the diagnostics has to be there.

James 33:40

So at the end of your all employee workshops, you've got a list of the key issues that they would like to see resolved, and you also have a nominated person or persons, who will then go in into your consensus day events. Is there anything else you get out of that?

Frank 33:59

And we have the raw behavioral data the raw behavioral data is the mechanism for transferring what's deeply impacted individuals in their life, not just their work, into, uh, a culture for the site the other thing to be aware of, the senior leadership team at the beginning creates the scope. So what's up for discussion what isn't? mass engagement is a power-sharing

James 34:32

Yeah, okay

Frank 34:34

and the senior leadership team can't share power they haven't got. So

James 34:39

Yeah

Frank 34:40

decides, for example, budgets are already set, Now, in the debate around how to achieve the agreed change plan, at that stage, senior leaders can come in and say things about the next year's budget, But the current year's budget is already established. You can't just create from nowhere.

James 35:08

So an example I would give of that, I'm deeply skeptical about any HR performance management process. However, it's not something I've ever been in a position to change.

Frank 35:19

change it?

James 35:19

if you can't change it, you just have to suck it up. But be clear, you just have to suck it up from the get-go

Frank 35:26

What I say to people there is, if something's really, really big and it's out of scope, I will take it back to the senior leadership team. So in Bacardi Martini, scope did not include the pay system But the pay system that had been put in previously was, uh, try to engage people by giving them stuff. So they had created a deeply uncompetitive pay system compared to competition, the way they dealt with it was all new employees coming in on a competitive pay scheme, but that meant the lo- the, the people who were there longer were being paid far more for doing the same job. So normally, a pay system would be corporately agreed, corporately determined, and out of scope. the particular circumstances um, the senior team was able to commit to a, a pay working party with a job evaluation process to back it up, whereby the whole pay system was redesigned but within the existing budgets.

James 36:43

okay

Frank 36:43

So it was a redistribution one group to the other, and the higher-paid guys on the working party voted unanimously for all of the future pay budgets to go to their lower-paid colleagues to speed up

James 37:02

The closing of the gap. It was originally off the table, but it was such a big issue

Frank 37:06

Yes.

James 37:07

it back to the management team and they did actually do something about it

Frank 37:10

Yeah.

James 37:11

So you get to the point where you've been through your all employee workshop. So the next thing is this consensus day you talk about. So what's that, and how does that work?

Frank 37:20

Well, consensus day is you've got the senior leadership team there as of right. If you remember the old American president why he'd appointed one of his biggest critics into his cabinet, and he said, "I'd rather having in-inside my tent peeing out," "than, have him outside the tent peeing in." Well, you don't want any member of the leadership team not to feel the emotional commitment behind the

James 37:50

Yeah

Frank 37:51

so they've all got to be there. And then you've got all of the delegates come representing

James 37:59

Yeah

Frank 38:00

with the, items that were nominated in their individual workshops. You'll get issues nominated, we combine them together into an agenda. And for all the employees who are not in consensus day, when they get the change plan back, know, the next day, briefed by employees, not by

James 38:23

Yeah

Frank 38:24

so again, you know, different from just another initiative, peer that was at consensus day is now explaining this plan to me, not my boss. you can trace you said in your workshop. So individuals can see that what they said directly links, they can trace it,

James 38:49

What exactly happens in the consensus data? So you feed in this agenda

Frank 38:56

Yeah. You've got, let's say, biggest one, ninety-five, I think. Big

James 39:01

Yeah

Frank 39:02

So you don't have rows of

James 39:04

Yeah

Frank 39:04

each other. Everybody's in the front row. and I'm in the front row as well. And I do some introductions in terms of this is the consensus day we talked about in the workshops, but I remind them of the rules. The rules of what consensus means. So in other words, even if we've gone round the room consensus and ninety-four of the ninety-five agree with it, we haven't

James 39:30

Right. Yeah

Frank 39:32

We ask the ninety-fifth person, "What's the p- what, what, what worry do you have about

James 39:37

Yeah

Frank 39:39

And their answer provides the problem statement for the next problem-solving. So that's how it drives. That's why it takes a while to do

James 39:48

Yeah, okay. And then what? You just simply go through the agenda

Frank 39:54

Go through the agenda. Yeah. It takes people a while to learn how to do consensus. So the first decision can often take three to

James 40:10

Okay

Frank 40:12

And that's because people are unsure now they've got the senior management in the room, it's not like

James 40:18

Yeah

Frank 40:19

in the little workshop, they can be nervous. We've got-- I train them how to to me any nervousness or any worry, and then I call a break, I talk to them. Um, if they want, I can actually raise the issue

James 40:39

Yeah

Frank 40:40

them. But ideally, I want them to raise the issue themselves because the power of the employee in their own words, and the words they use, are often emotionally very compelling, and it's important for the senior leaders to hear those words spoken. In one case, there was a crisis and the senior leader had to go and deal with it and missed consensus day, and, it was much more difficult for her to understand the power of consensus day because she

James 41:15

Yeah

Frank 41:15

room. She, she'd obviously seen the plan, other people told her. But because she wasn't there, it just didn't have the same emotional

James 41:25

Well, so So what, what is the outcome of consensus day? So you go in with a list of issues, and you go in with a list of what you call the behavioral feedback, but what is the outcome? What, what do you get out of consensus day?

Frank 41:39

The, the outcome is an agreed, um, plan to deal with all of those

James 41:44

Right.

Frank 41:44

every single one.

James 41:45

Every single one

Frank 41:47

Yeah, the behavioral data is subcontracted to a smaller group that meets the following day, has

James 41:57

Yeah

Frank 41:58

to be diverse and elected by consensus day. they get together the following morning, and we have all the data on the wall, and until we've ticked off every single piece of data from every workshop, the group of behavioral standards is not finished. then the briefings of the change plan and the behavioral standards happens at the same time. So usually starting in the afternoon of

James 42:25

Yeah

Frank 42:25

day, the day after consensus day, and then goes through the

James 42:29

But if something is raised as an issue and prioritized as an issue in one of your all-employee meetings, and then that goes into consensus day with the management team, do you get to the point where the managers can legitimately say, "Well, I don't see that's an issue," and then it just gets ignored or

Frank 42:49

No. The, the-- no, they don't get ignored 'cause

James 42:50

gone?

Frank 42:50

You can't say it's not an issue when it's been nominated as an issue. And the great advantage of, of listing the number of, uh, of workshops that have nominated it is... You know, if, if one workshop nominated it it's obviously less of an important issue than, let's say, 30

James 43:11

Yeah. Okay, part of the act of this then is actually the bringing together of all that information out of those workshops in such a way that is very clear what the really big issues are

Frank 43:23

So what the agenda looks like is gives quotes f- w-without naming the person, it gives quotes It then, it then states my s- my view of what that issue is, having been present in every single workshop. So this can be different aspects of the same issue. There can be causes and there can be symptoms but if they're logically connected, they're dealt with as the same issue. We don't wanna be solving or trying to solve symptoms when we've got a root cause analysis later on. We want the root cause analysis

James 44:02

Yeah

Frank 44:04

And the employees are asked to look for root cause, to look for the root cause rather than symptoms.

James 44:13

But you're then bringing all of that into the consensus day and the specific outcome, or the first thing is to get a change plan, yeah. Okay. So some questions then about

Frank 44:24

that."

James 44:25

there will presumably be a bunch of change initiatives in place already.

Frank 44:29

Yes.

James 44:29

Does that help, hinder those initiatives?

Frank 44:33

I encourage people to go into a design freeze until they

James 44:38

Yeah

Frank 44:39

out. Because what comes out could be a lot better than what they were gonna implement.

James 44:44

So we've talked about the consensus there and the change plan. So that's then followed on with your behavioral standards. So let's just talk a wee bit more about that

Frank 44:55

Yeah. Well, for-- again, back to the origin, right at the beginning of the podcast about

James 45:00

Yeah

Frank 45:01

I spent years and years and years trying to implement corporate value

James 45:06

Yeah

Frank 45:07

um, and was very, very frustrated, especially with very senior guys, very senior guys are intelligent, and if you give them a set of values, interpret the values in such a way that it replicates

James 45:26

Yeah. Yeah

Frank 45:29

Yeah? So you get into Humpty Dumpty conversations about the meaning of words blame versus

James 45:36

Yeah

Frank 45:37

for example. So in, um, Dupuy in Cork in Ireland, they had a big issue around blame, medical devices, and people were taken off the job and had to, had to prove that they weren't responsible for the quality error to

James 45:54

Okay

Frank 45:56

So the perception of being found

James 45:58

Yeah, yeah

Frank 45:59

and then having to prove your innocence, and you can imagine the effect that had on the willingness to own up to

James 46:06

Yeah

Frank 46:07

and the concealment of errors and all the rest of it. So their first behavioral standard addressed this, So the actual behavioral standard for Dupuy was, When something goes wrong, we ask, "What happened? Why did it happen? How do we make sure that doesn't happen again?" And we don't ask, "Who did it?" And the transformational effect of the implementation of that behavioral standard on the quality standards in the factory were a, a, a major factor in the factory more than doubling its workforce during the 2008, 2010 recession.

James 46:51

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Frank 46:52

When people were laying off people all over the world, they they had to open a second factory and they won the Shingo Prize. So the behavioral standard is a very standards process, came out of my frustration. And just, just to give a feel, standards suffer from positivity bias. Uh, they're all positive. In terms of reaching people emotionally and changing behavior and creating ownership, stating things negatively is more powerful than stating them for

James 47:30

Right

Frank 47:32

So for example, if you think about the educational revolution in America, they called it the No

James 47:39

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Frank 47:41

program. no child left behind is far more powerful than everybody involved. part of behavioral standard is understanding which words and which combination of words are more compelling and more emotionally than others, creating or measurable standards. It's not-- They're not principles, they're standards. It's not a nice to have.

James 48:13

I suppose this really comes back to another question then, which is why do culture programs take so long? 'Cause presumably this is real-- this is your culture change, and this is the behavioral standard.

Frank 48:26

the example I use was, a very big site. Three thousand staff and lot of workshops. And it was early on, so it was only, there was 72 workshops in total, and I think we'd done eight to 10 from memory early on. And, I was sitting having a cup of tea the canteen manager approached me with a f-straight face and a solemn face, and she said, um, "Frank, my staff have asked me to have a word with you." And as of, as a man of a

James 49:00

Yeah

Frank 49:01

when a female manager of female staff approaches you and says, "My staff have asked me to have a word with you," you know, you can

James 49:10

Yeah, yeah. Where your head went, yeah

Frank 49:12

heart sank. have I said? Have I upset someone? anyway, she kept a straight face and she said, have asked me to say to you, you're doing in those workshops, please keep it up." And then she smiled broadly, and I thought, you know, she was winding me up. But what had happened was, going through the tills would often be on their phone or they'd be talking to other people, so the person serving them was treated

James 49:43

Yeah, invisible. Yeah

Frank 49:46

Now, when, when the discussions about respect and how people should treat other people, they're inherent in the first workshop when we're talking about behavioral data, people talk about that when they go out So the conversations they'd had coming out of the workshop with people who hadn't even been yet already changed the behavior of people going

James 50:13

Yes

Frank 50:14

in terms of eye contact, treating their staff better.

James 50:19

So all of this is underlaid by your cathedral higher purpose model, which is all about leadership, and we've done a separate podcast on that which people can listen to. But just very briefly, just touch on that and explain how that helps

Frank 50:32

Well, it's crucial because the, the rapid mass engagement process is the leveraging and the aligning of deep, employee engagement.

James 50:47

what you're saying is this program of engaging employees requires leadership behavior, and those leadership behaviors aren't widely taught in other leadership development programs,

Frank 51:00

Yeah. So at theoretical level, a theoretical level, conventional leadership development would, in a tick box sense, agree with the foundations of this. But, It's the quality and the quantity of those conversations that either with the cathedral model or accidentally undermine with a lot of the conventional

James 51:23

Okay. And if anybody wants to learn more about that, we've got a separate podcast which we recorded a couple of months ago. So that explains how rapid mass engagement works and the cathedral model that underpins it. We've got a number of standalone questions which we got which related to all of that.

Frank 51:40

Okay Yeah. One of the questions brought up, McGraney's book on how we influence people and Sentola's book about how to make big change work.

James 51:51

Yeah

Frank 51:52

Now, what I would say about both of those books is what they're saying is valid. So there's no, disagreement. The difference is that rapid mass engagement was a very practical of, yeah, if that's true, what can we do about it to make it work? both of those are good books the, the evidence base behind them is very, very valid

James 52:24

Next question then we had was, can rapid mass engagement work in an organization which is really very, very target driven?

Frank 52:33

Yeah. I mean, i-if you think of the areas I mostly work in, and in my whole career has been competitive organizations. operating in highly competitive markets there's a real penalty for lack of success.

James 52:51

Yeah.

Frank 52:51

You know, you lose your job, your factory gets closed,

James 52:53

yeah

Frank 52:54

cetera, et cetera. Um, now they, almost by definition, are highly driven by targets.

James 53:00

Yeah

Frank 53:01

to have those targets. The issue is, how do you go about achieving those targets? if you've got an entire workforce that realizes and, and genuinely that by reaching those targets, this will sustain jobs, this will create jobs in the local community, Th-then you're gonna hit those targets. Now, you do have to be intelligent about how you do targets. You drive recognition and improvement and psychological safety by when you are reviewing targets, don't just focus on the red because it's urgent. You know, you focus on the green. And if you focus on the green within the red, People feel appreciated. They don't feel beaten up. So targets are inevitable. but they enable organizations to reach those targets m- in a much better way.

James 53:54

another question how does rapid mass engagement work in organizations where people feel burnt out or disconnected?

Frank 54:00

when we talked about the cathedral model of leadership, burnout is in the cathedral model in a way that it's not dealt with anywhere else. I had to invent something called managing overcommitment. If you look at, if you look at what we do the world for burnout, is we send people on resilience programs. we say, "You've gotta be stronger and more resilient to deal with it." And then, and then people won't-- don't wanna come work for you. They don't want to be driven into the ground. But if you can get to the root cause of what's causing the burnout and remove that systematically, then you actually, the evidence is you actually improve performance without burning people out

James 54:47

another couple of questions then. So is this really different to other approaches?

Frank 54:53

I think if, if you, if people listen to what

James 54:55

See, yeah.

Frank 54:56

I think it's clear that it is

James 54:58

Yeah, let's...

Frank 54:58

Yeah.

James 54:59

Yeah

Frank 54:59

aspects, obviously. What I'm, what I'm not saying is that I've invented everything. the process was testing what's out there, testing the research, keeping and consolidating what did work, so the basis of all of this is research, but interestingly, not just psychology. neuroscience is incredibly important here, and so is, engaging with people real. The kind of thing, David Attenborough did with the gorillas.

James 55:30

Yeah

Frank 55:31

You know, if, if, if an academic psychology person had dealt with the gorillas, would have sent the gorillas questionnaires about what, what it was like working in the, in the jungle. But it's far better getting in with the gorillas and letting them scratch you and scratching them, and then you get to know what actually works. And now, I'm not suggesting you go around scratching your employees, but the eq- the equivalent is genuinely sitting in the canteen talking to people, playing on the same sports teams

James 56:01

Yeah, understanding what's really going on

Frank 56:05

When I joined Shell, we had our own toilets, and I used to make a point of going and, and weeing in the toilets with the ordinary employees in Shell. We had our own dining rooms, you

James 56:18

Yeah

Frank 56:19

of... Now, that-that's gone probably mostly, but the mentality of, uh, unnecessary hierarchy and all the rest of it is inherent in this approach

James 56:31

So another question, is rapid mass improvement mainly about improving morale or improving how the system and processes work?

Frank 56:39

The morale question is similar to the happiness problem, in the pursuit of happiness, what employers often do is they they give people lots of stuff. Now, giving people stuff suffers from diminishing returns. It becomes an expectation. Real engagement comes from m-making meaningful impacts on people's life and their life chances. Not pursuing happiness. happiness in this sense comes as a result of, it's not the objective,

James 57:13

Yeah, this is a result of achievement

Frank 57:16

amazing things.

James 57:17

Well, so that leads me on to my last question, right? Which is how do we initiate a national conversation? 'Cause a lot of what you've said plays absolutely into, yeah

Frank 57:25

That's, that's difficult. because it's a differentiation process, not an integration process, no, there's no logical limit mathematically doing this in every hospital in the NHS, for example. But you couldn't do it for the NHS Because the circumstances in each hospital are different, the experience of people working in that hospital different and have to be, have to be reflected, for example, in the behavioral standards, et cetera, which will be different.

James 58:01

If I understand what you said, you don't change picking on the NHS. You can't change the whole NHS, but what you can do is you can change one ward or one department. And so the issue... Or one hospital.

Frank 58:16

So I'm not in despair about that. I think it can be done. The problem is the people who could arrange for it to be done themselves are not exposed to this kind of thing, so they're not aware of it. But ultimately, politicians, uh, do not think like this

James 58:35

Well, it's your point, It's your David Attenborough points.

Frank 58:38

Yes

James 58:39

need to go and cuddle up to the gorillas

Frank 58:42

Yes. Yeah. I'm not anti-politician. There are some very good politicians. Um, but their own life experience often means they're not exposed to this kind of

James 58:54

Yes, they don't see it. Super. All right. So thank you very much, Frank. Before we go, I think I should just thank people who sent us some questions. Thank you very much.