TheTricordNovember 2013 / www.tricordant.com

P.1Tricordant is a whole systems organisation design and development consultancy. We work with complex organisations in different sectors. Tricordant’s passion is enabling organisations to be whole and healthy. See www.tricordant.com for more details.?WHO

ARE WE

Thriving in UncertaintyIn our Curl Up with a Great Book section we review “Great by Choice” by Jim Collins and Morten Hansen, which tackles the question of how to steer a company to lasting success in an environment characterised by change, uncertainty and even chaos. While the data period for their research was until 2002 and time has clearly moved on for some of their top-performing cohort of companies, the lessons have lasting value.

One of the characteristics of the top-performing companies in their research is described as “productive paranoia”, by which they mean hyper-vigilance to threats and changes in their environment, especially when things are going well. Paranoia might not seem an attractive characteristic to want to acquire, but we hope we can help you with a technique that sounds a bit less neurotic when considering your organisations future!

Scenario planning is a disciplined process for imagining equally possible futures. Its strength is in helping organisations make informed choices today by understanding how their

choices might turn out tomorrow. It is a participative process which, when implemented through a safe learning environment, will result in rich and creative scenarios that are understood by all and will prepare the organisation for the forthcoming changes.

Currently we are working with a social enterprise to test and develop their strategies, to support leadership development and wider organisation development. Further articles and commentary from this project will be written in the next few months to share our insights and knowledge.

Scenario planning has been successfully used by our Core Associate Consultant Helen Blanchard with an English Ambulance Service to help identify some challenging questions about their future and to test their existing strategies, for example:

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Uncertainty across IndustriesIn the public sector there is major change happening related to reduced funding, increasing demand, and in some cases prescribed structural changes. In manufacturing, although the UK is officially out of the recession, growth is by no means assured, as other countries are still in recession and skeptics are still speculating whether the Chinese demand bubble will burst.

IntroductionSky-trains, space travel for the masses and food pills? The stuff of Star Trek or the stuff of strategy?

What are the big issues facing your business or service in the next 5 to 20 years? How could these develop if you don’t tackle them now?

This edition opens with a feature on scenario planning as an aid to strategy and decision-making in an ever more unpredictable and complicated world. And we close with a recommended book about thriving in uncertainty and chaos.

P. 2www.tricordant.com Enabling Organisations to be Whole and Healthy

• Would future competition be based upon service quality or cost? Was the service equipped to cope with both of these?

• How could the service respond to potential changes in the health care funding model, for example

co-payment or minimum service guarantees?

A question that commonly arises is how often organisations should be thinking about their future. Jim Collins “productive paranoia” concept seems to suggest it should be a regular activity!

What do you think? We’d love to hear from you. If you would like to comment on this article or just get in touch please email nick@tricordant.com or comment on our blog.

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Bring on the Engineers!

Whatever the future holds, we believe that if you could get all people in an organisation rowing in the same direction toward a common vision, you could dominate that industry, in any market, against any competition.

Tricordant have supported a series of transformational projects with commercial engineering/industrial companies over the last year that have enabled us to evolve our ways of working with clients. Do the reflections below chime with your view?

1. Even in recessionary times, the call for ‘organisational transformation’ to make game-changing performance improvements is as great as ever. For such significant change you need to improve the ‘health’ of the ‘whole system’.

2. Companies increasingly want support to enable them to transform themselves. They don’t want consultants doing the redesign for them. They know sustainable change comes from staff-engagement and local-ownership in designing the future together.

3. We’ve been increasingly asked to train internal change teams in our approach whilst actively implementing

our tools, enabling them to work independently. We’ve gladly acted as advisors and guides rather than hands-on experts.

4. We’ve been asked to facilitate, or be on hand while they facilitate, multiple strings of workshops and large-group events, engaging with employees from all levels and areas of the organisation.

5. The upfront work on strategic re-planning and organisation redesign is only the start. Clients want seamless support with staff engagement and organisation development through to implementation.

6. We have learnt to help clients to work simultaneously on both the visible and the invisible aspects of the organisation (see iceberg diagram). This creates culture related challenges for some process-led engineering company teams.

7. Clients need coaching support through the transition. Coaching the senior team. Coaching new team leaders. Coaching their own coaches for ongoing support.

8. The first step is with the senior team; transforming themselves into a world-class functioning leadership team. This needs mutual trust, preparedness to be vulnerable to one-another, confidence to argue with passion and all backing an holistic vision.

9. Results are visible across the whole company: productivity, quality, delivery, service, absenteeism, employee satisfaction and on the bottom line.

For those of you who think this is fluffy thinking, the results can be staggering! Here are the results of a previous transformation journey for an engineering company….one we lived through!

TheTricordNovember 2013

Two Key Dimensions when Managing Change:

A Success Story

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“It’s the economy, stupid” went into history as Bill Clinton’s key campaign slogan in his successful presidential campaign of 1992.

Fast forward to 2013. We’ve had the summer Punch and Judy show between Government and the medical profession over the state of the NHS and who’s to blame for rising demand on A&E departments. For other commentators it’s the cuts to social care that are to blame. We’ve had the conference season with brickbats tossed back and forth between political parties over the NHS. Everyone talks about who is to blame however very few talk about the system design.

The Health & Care system in the UK has not been designed. It has evolved through successive policy changes mixed with local initiatives and responses. Design by default at best.

Over the last 5 years, we have commonly said to client partnerships that it’s the system design that needs attention. It’s an insight that really helps partners take the heat out of the blame game, enabling them to get down and do something about it.

With system leaders and professionals we have co-designed a simple pathway for health and social care, with 6 stages. The pathway exposes the reality that 24/7 systems are generally designed to default to either hospital or residential care settings for the significant majority of the week. Speak to a group of GPs and ask them what’s easier to arrange on a Friday evening for an 80 year-old “off their legs”. One call will usually get them into hospital. It can take hours to arrange support at home.

The pathway system model helps health & care systems see how and where they are spending their resources along the pathway, and then decide where to focus their effort.

It’s a real eye-opener when a partnership sees what they spend on the key stage of assessment (stage 1) especially as it is the system gateway to spending on diagnosis and treatment (stages 2 and 3). In one system we found 3% of costs went into assessment, while 73% of costs were being spent on diagnosis and treatment. That really got their attention!

Another eye-opener is how many single points of access there are in systems. In one example we fed back to a workshop

that we had spotted 11 “single points of access”, only to be told we had missed at least 2 more! This highlights another point – system redesign needs co-production and engagement of all parties including users, carers and the public.

We don’t claim system re-design is easy, but taking a systems design view helps expose the nature of the system and what to do about it. Much more productive than the blame game!

If you would like to know more about our system design work in health and social care please contact Alastair Mitchell-Baker alastair@tricordant.com or Roger Greene roger@tricordant.com.

It’s the System, Stupid!

TheTricordNovember 2013

The Health and Social Care Pathway

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We love working with Champions; people who want to inspire change in their organisations and who know that standing still is not an option. They are brave enough to step out and create the energy to develop the new initiative that can change everything. To find, or help develop an organisational Champion is one of the joys of the job!

In a recent assignment with a large NHS Foundation Trust, a local council and a Clinical Commissioning Group we were delighted to find a whole Steering Group of Champions.

Starting with a review of their current provision for intermediate care, we moved into developing their commissioning strategy and specification for a new service. The Champions wanted something that really made a difference; something specific to their community. We, and they, faced some real challenges around delivering the highest quality standards to service users whilst managing the financial pressures, all too common today.

During this project the client asked us to look at their discharge management processes, especially for complex cases.This proved to be a key piece of work. We were able to reframe discharge and link in ‘Pull’ discharges with the new intermediate service and the re-structured adult community nursing service.

A key finding was that certain decisions had been made previously, all with the

best of intentions, however creating ‘unintended consequences’. We were able to show how this had created negative feedback cycles and then work with the client to reverse this into virtuous cycles. This transformed thinking about care packages, reablement and actions to avoid unnecessary admission to residential care.

The outcome of this successful piece of work has lead to the design and plan for a new ‘Reablement & Intermediate Care Service’ involving:

• Co-located Staff

• Single Point of Access

• Crisis Response

All these results were achieved in an integrated way, thanks to working with great organisational Champions!

Will you be next? If you would like to know more, please contact either Alastair Mitchell-Baker alastair@tricordant.com or John Taylor john@tricordant.com.

You Want Change – Find a Champion!

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Projects Round Up Current Projects – United Kingdom1. Organisation Transformation Project – Continuation

of project with Mahle Engine Systems Ltd. in Kilmarnock who manufacture automotive bearing products.

2. Integrated Care Programme – Working for a London CCG, local borough and 2 Foundation Trusts to develop an Integrated Care Programme.

3. Integrated Commissioning – Facilitating work in South Essex across the County Council and CCGs.

4. Scenario Planning – Preparing and running a 2 day scenario planning workshop for a NHS social enterprise.

5. Executive Awayday – Facilitating a one day event for a NHS England local area team, who are preparing for planning processes from 2014/2015 onwards.

6. We have recently completed and handed over 3 projects:

a. Delayed Transfers of Care – Reviewing discharge processes for a London FT and local Council.

b. Intermediate Care Strategy Implementation – Continuing support for the implementation of a new Reablement & Intermediate Care Service with a lead provider model.

c. Supported Housing Review – Completing a review of supported housing provision for a London borough.

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Welcome to the Team

TheTricordNovember 2013

Karlo Faggetter (Business Administrator)

Karlo is currently doing his BSc at the University of Surrey in International Hospitality & Tourism Business Management, and joined us for a 12 month work placement in August 2013. He has so far been able to

successfully utilise his skills and apply those to a broad range of tasks Tricordant has faced, on both internal as well as external projects.

He has so far worked in both public and private sectors across various cultures including Germany, New Zealand, Singapore, Canada, USA and England. By doing so he has not only learnt to be flexible but also gained insight into a broad range of business issues, hence has devotedly developed a drive to solve problems and overcome obstacles aided by his language skills and cultural awareness. More recently he organised and ran a music festival for the University of Surrey in which he raised funds for a local charity called CHASE – Shooting Star based in Guildford.

Projects Round Up Current Projects – New Zealand1. Action Learning Groups – 2 action learning groups for senior public sector

leaders in Christchurch.

2. Global Agricultural Research – To improve food security and nutrition for the poor. On-going support to the ERP system implementation team and now an additional role in co-ordinating the planning process for the centre’s largest (US$30m pa) research programme.

3. Leadership Development – Teaching on an innovative programme for science and technical leaders within the Natural Resources Sector.

4. Church Leadership and Governance – On-going work with the leadership team and elders of one of the most influential churches in Christchurch.

5. Youth Workers in Schools – Strategic planning support to an organisation facilitating relationships between schools, churches and communities to provide youth workers in schools.

Andrea Barker (Principal Consultant – Personal & Organisational Development Practise)

Andrea joined the Tricordant team full-time on 1st October as a Principal Consultant, having worked as a free-lance and associate consultant for 7 years. She has 28

years health care experience working at national and local levels in voluntary, public and private sectors, including the Healthcare Commission and the Kings Fund. Her consultancy practice supports individuals, teams and whole systems to manage and deliver change. This is achieved through her skills as a process consultant, offering systemic coaching, team and leadership development as well as her skills in managing, leading and delivering change programmes and service reviews.

She has a Masters Degree in Management Development and Social Responsibility, University of Bristol. In addition, she is an MBTI Steps I and II qualified practitioner and qualified in Advanced Process Consultancy (Tavistock Institute, London). She lives in Hertford and is Chair of a local charity set up to help young people in crisis.

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There are no cut and paste solutions to business or organisational success, especially in volatile times. It helps however when there is a bit of research to help our insatiable appetites to know what works well.

“Great by Choice” is a sequel to Jim Collins’ best-selling “Good to Great” (2001), and tackles the question of how to steer a company to lasting success in an environment characterised by change, uncertainty and even chaos.

While the data Collins and Hansen examine ends in 2002, well ahead of the chaos of the 2008 financial meltdown, the lessons are meant to apply to a business world full of rapid change and dramatic disruption. Sounds like now.

The authors studied a set of major companies that achieved spectacular results over 15 or more years while operating in unstable environments. They call them “10Xers” for providing shareholder returns at least 10 times greater than their industry. They compared those companies to similar, but less successful, “control” companies.

So what does it take to be a 10Xer? There are some surprising and counterintuitive conclusions. Collins and Hansen describe 10Xers as:

• Clear-eyed and stoic- they accept without complaint that they face forces beyond their control, but reject the notion that luck or external factors will determine their future.

• 3 core behaviours:

– Fanatic discipline. Consistency of action with values, goals, standards and methods.

– Empirical creativity. They make bold and creative moves from an empirical base of observation, practical experimentation and engagement with evidence.

– Productive paranoia. They maintain hyper-vigilance to threats and changes in their environment, especially when things are going well!

• Level 5 leadership. A motivating passion and ambition for a cause or company larger than themselves.

“Great by Choice” is very engaging. It has an organising metaphor built around the story of Amundsen and Scott, the two men who set out separately, in October 1911, to become the first explorers to reach the South Pole. Amundsen won the race by setting ambitious goals for each day’s progress but also by being careful not to overshoot on good days or undershoot on bad ones, a disciplined approach shared by the 10Xers, according to Collins and Hansen. Scott, by contrast, overreached on the good days and fell apart on the bad, mirroring the control companies in “Great by Choice.”

Enjoy the read with all its surprises - and use it to check out your own approach to doing what you do.

Great by ChoiceBy Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen (Harper)

Curl Up with a Great Book

TheTricordNovember 2013

Events Associate Development DayOur next Associate Development Day will be held on Thursday 14th November 2013. Details will be announced shortly, so make sure to save the date in your diary.

Associate Introduction DayThis is an open invite to all of our associates who feel they would benefit from joining us for a one day introduction to an overview of Tricordant. The next session will be held on Thursday 9th January 2014 and will cover who we are, our approach, organisational transformation, the key tools and areas of expertise we offer as well as offerings we are wishing to develop. Moreover we will give space for current and potential associates to explore our mutual ‘fit’ and discuss the practicalities of working as an associate with us. Anyone wishing to attend, please email karlo@tricordant.com by Friday 27th December.