(2009-12-30) Seddon Alistair Darlings Backoffice Folly

John Seddon: Alistair Darling’s back-office folly. Before describing my epiphany, a confession: I was a culture-change consultant

While there was an evident shift...I was often left wondering whether, and if so how, the culture change programme had changed the way the work worked.

I have worse to confess. I trained as a group facilitator (in my defence this was the era of the Tavistock, T-Groups and the like) and would lead one-week 'teamwork' programmes

as we met people from the same organisations, it was clear that little of the 'benefit' achieved in one week of therapy was transferred back to work. I am ashamed to have believed that turning the people on could turn an organisation on

I received a video-tape in the post. When I played it I saw people who I knew as miserable, tired, stressed, unhappy and moaning, speaking as happy, problem-solving, engaged enthusiasts. They were, to use modern parlance, transformed. I cried. I called Peter Edwards to find out what they had done. "Just as we planned" he said. "We all went straight to the front line with the intention of working there until the staff who dealt with our customers could handle everything that came in".

It took three months. And it changed their lives.

But we did nothing to the people. Their behavior was a product of changing the system.

Fast-forward to today. Frequently, when I take leaders to places in their organisation where Systems Thinking is being employed, they ask: "What have you done to the people?" Again, the answer is "Nothing." The question merely exposes a belief; we have been taught that performance is a 'people thing'

To put it at its simplest: if we design work into functions and give each function its own target, should we be surprised if they don't cooperate? Why would we think a 'good talking to' or a trip to the Lake District would improve cooperation? Why do we design competition when we could design cooperation?

The biggest of the symptoms, turnover of staff, still a blight on our 'modern' service industry, ought to be a signal to managers. We exported our wrong-headed call centre design to India only to discover it created an even higher turnover of staff despite the relatively high wages.

When you see how the system constrains peoples' behaviour in dealing with customers you realise how absurd it is that organisations should employ internal marketing campaigns in an attempt to get the front line to behave better with the customer; their behaviour is governed by the system, the responsibility of management.

If you design a system where the people who do the work have control of the work, the people change. They take responsibility. It is as Hertzberg taught: if you want people to do a good job, design a good job to do.

And that, for management, is the challenge. To design a good job to do, you have to change the system. To change the system, you have to be prepared to change the way you think. Activity management goes out of the window and is replaced by measures that help you understand how to improve your service to the customer.

You can only contemplate such 'radical' ideas when you learn that your current means of control are actually not controlling much and, rather, are making things worse.

When measures are derived from the purpose, from the customers' point of view, and put to work where the work is done, innovation can flourish. And as people learn to solve problems, they solve more problems. Edwards always said you know when it is working when you discover people solving problems you didn't know you had.

Culture change is free

It is axiomatic that the system will govern behaviour, but something not understood by managers. Culture-change is appealing: 'what if all my people were positive, contributing, going the extra mile?' But it is fool's gold. Models promoting 'people-process-systems' and the like maintain this deception that keeps us from seeing their inter-dependence. It is ironic; when you change the system your people become your asset, but do nothing to the people, for culture change is free.