Related Podcast and Transcription: Systems Thinking in Public Services
Joe: You deal so much in the public area, in the public service area, and we’re always thinking of what the public side can learn from the private side. What can the private side learn from the public side?
Benjamin Taylor: Wow, that’s a great question. Well, I do think there’s a lot because I think actually public services work under a lot more pressure in some ways than the private sector. Okay yes, if you don’t do a good job in the private sector, eventually you get shuffled out of business unless you’re a General Motors. But actually, a lot has been achieved in public service transformation because what it drives is better service at lower cost and an understanding of when helping people to help themselves is more effective and more efficient than actually dragging them in for help. I’ll give a couple of stories to illustrate that. One is that it’s said that the best way to build brand loyalty for a car manufacturer is to arrange for something fairly trivial to go wrong within the first 4,000 miles of driving the car, but then give somebody amazing diva service when they go in to get it fixed and that burnishes the reputation of the brand, right?
The other one is we often heard this kind of story in the Lean movement. Are you in the business of fixing tires or are you filling the potholes in the road which actually are causing the tires to burst in the first place? Are you fighting the alligators or are you draining the swamp? When in the public services when you’re under pressure, you have to drain the swamp. You have to be the one who is fixing the potholes and not fixing the tires. You have to get out there and try and find out how to help people out themselves, how to prevent the need, prevent the demand for service before it arises, and you have to be really, really clear about that and you have to put funds into that at the same time as you’re dealing with all the failure demand, all the broken things that are still coming in and presenting themselves to you.
We have a little model called ‘7 ways to safely improve’ which is about helping people to see both the customer and the demand side of transformation which is the more upstream and the more transformational thing, because if you meet the customer’s needs immediately as soon as it arises, or you prevent it from arising in the first place, none of the costs, none of the processes, none of the structures, and none of the leadership is needed because you solved the problem before it has even begun. But you know, we’re realistic so the 7 ways to safely improve’ goes right back into the organization, optimizing the use of resources and all the rest of it. So you could compare it to one of the reasons why Toyota has great insight as I understand is because they had very little opportunity for capital investment at the end of the Second World War, so they had to make do, so they learned better ways of working without just building huge, expensive dedicated, inflexible plans. They learned to be flexible. They learned to make continuing improvements, and I think a lot of that is what’s happening in public service now. Part of the RedQuadrant mission is to transform consultancy and to do things differently and better but to transform public services and show the world that they can lead the way. And believe me, there are things that my clients could teach a lot of private section organizations right now.
Benjamin Taylor is a founder and managing partner at RedQuadrant. Passionate about systems thinking, customer-led transformation, lean, and generally thinking about better ways to run and lead organisations, Ben holds a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and is accredited to run the power+systems organisation workshop and ‘when cultures meet’ workshop. You can find Ben on Twitter as @antlerboy.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Systems Thinking in Public Services
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