Kia ora koutou and welcome to today's webinar. Today we're going to be talking about how you can unleash efficiency. You know it's one of the main topics and discussions that we're actually hearing a lot from our clients at the moment.
It seems like everyone is having to relook at how they do their business, how they can be more efficient. Now for today's conversation we have specifically chosen a panel that comes from really different backgrounds and they bring different techniques to how you might even start to think about how you might want to optimise your business, whether it's your team or your business group or your organisation. So I'll get on to the intros.
To my left is Craig Griffith, also known as Craig. Sorry, always, never refer to him as Craig. It's always Griff.
It's actually strange saying the name Craig because you always know him as Griff. Kia ora everyone, how are you? Kia ora. So Griff always brings his human-centred design background and the techniques that go along with that.
On the other side, I can't get his name wrong, is Jeremy Markham. So Jeremy brings his continuous improvement background, you know that includes like process re-engineering and all the good stuff that goes along with that. And myself, I'm Charlene Harvey and I've got a bit of a passion for strategy and planning.
So working with leadership teams to ensure that they're having the right conversation at the right time around where you're heading and then how do you bring that through to fruition. So all three of us are part of the optimisation team here at Allen & Clark and we've actually been working with clients over the last couple of years on this specific topic. Okay so if, I'll start with you Griff, if you were working with a client and you were coming in, where would you start on this topic? Yeah thanks Charlene.
I guess because I've got a little, well I have got a big bias towards design thinking but I guess the key thing for me is to start with identifying what it is and getting a really clear understanding of the challenge that you have to solve as opposed to the, or the actual challenge as opposed to the perceived one. And I guess by perceived I mean you might be one where you've actually had a directive from somebody or it's come down and you know kind of coated in a personal bias or a historical bias. So actually understanding what the actual challenge you need to resolve is really important and I use the word challenge intentionally here because it might be that you end up solving a problem but it might also be that you actually look to take hold of an opportunity or amplify something that's working really well, you know a positive, and look to take those characteristics and apply it to something else.
So that's why I talk about challenge and it's really important to do this because what we see a lot, what I see a lot in design is that people often think they know or assume that they know what the challenge is and they jump straight to solutions, which is really great you know like as humans we're wired to solve things and help people, but a solution's only as good as the challenge it's aimed at. So a poor or unclearly defined problems or challenge statement often leaves you way behind the eight ball and that's often a tough you know sometimes expensive and definitely time consuming place to recover from. So it's really well worth investing a time up front to understand what it is that you're trying to, the challenge you're trying to solve for and what you're trying to achieve as a result of that.
I love that, that's really, I think about if you frame it as an opportunity automatically you're thinking in a more positive mindset as opposed if it's a challenge automatically it's slightly negative so I love the way that you're thinking about well this could be a challenge or an opportunity. Yeah it's a neutral term so you can kind of go either way on it and I think it just helps people stay open to all sorts of the possibilities. Now you know taking that time to kind of think about what the challenge is can often require quite a bit of bravery at the start you know like imagine that you're in a situation where you know that the challenge has come to you in the form of a directive or you know you're being required to do something, so it can take a bit of bravery to do that but what we've found over our work certainly in the last you know 18 months, two years is that taking the time to do that really pays dividends in the end so it might take a bit of bravery but it's well worth doing and once you've done that you know I think a really great place to start for me is that ironically is to take a pause you know like to really just kind of take some time to consider what the challenge is and the best place I think to start with that is to check your frame of reference so you know how has that challenge been developed or what are some of the things that you're thinking about or haven't actually taken into consideration in forming what it is that you need to do.
You know I guess a kind of classic current example is we've noticed over the last 18 months, two years again this kind of proliferation of subject matter expert roles like SEB roles and with that you know they're fantastic right because they give focus but with that comes this kind of intrinsic pressure to have all the solutions you know we're hearing a lot of people in these roles like you know I've got to almost prove my worth, got to show my value, come up with solutions but one of the base tenets around design thinking is that the people that are best placed to solve a problem are the people or just find the challenge are the people that are actually experiencing that so the people would live the experience so you know involving those people and helping you shape the challenge making sure that you have that really well-rounded whole kind of perspective and point of view can be really really powerful and makes it's almost like a sense check to make sure that you're not you know diving down a rabbit hole when you need to be going over here. So that resonates with me but I'm also really conscious that sometimes in the pressure it's kind of you kind of feel that you just need to do stuff ASAP and so the idea of taking a breath and doing this work you know how do you do that when you're under real time pressure? Yeah look you know I guess it wouldn't be if I think about it wouldn't be unusual for well be a rarity that some of us haven't had a hard deadline at some point in time right but I guess that what I would say is that the approach still is applicable it's really really important to do it but perhaps look at the scale on which you apply it so you know if I give you an example like if you are you know if you're taking a national problem a national level problem you might talk to 50 people across the country but actually what you could do if you were really pressed for time is to do 20 instead but what I would say if you were to do that is to be really intentional about the makeup of that 20 so to be really careful to make sure that you have that again that range of perspectives so you might talk to someone at the north of the north the south of South Island you know a rural and an urban perspective metropolitan perspective but also young and old those types of things so make sure that you have a really good cross-section of proximity to the issue but also influence on it and and that cross-section of perspectives yeah that makes sense that's pretty important and I think it shows that you know actually taking the time to frame the situation the challenge this doesn't need to be a long and laborious time intensive process I think what you're saying is you can do this in quite a rapid effective way if you just get the right input yeah great so you know we've got examples of we'll talk about one soon that was a you know six month project but we've also done rapid turnarounds in five to ten days you know like it depends on well timelines but also you know I guess the urgency of the result so so the mechanics are really important like taking that approach but the other thing that's really important to keep in mind you guys are aware of this is gotta talk about it all the time but it's it's the mindsets that go with it so design and looking at anything and making sure that you're kind of haven't gone off down on a tangent is to keep this curious and open mindset it's really really fundamental so if you think about it because gathering all the insights in the world will be absolutely useless to you if you're kind of wedded to the current or a predetermined approach you know and we're all guilty of bias so we've got to make sure we watch that but it also helps you think and gather information around what are some of the things that are currently driving the current state so there might be a particular set of levers that are being pulled by you know externals or internally and so you can understand their relationship to each other and how they're impacting each other and you know a bit down the track when you come to think about what how you might solve it you might use those levers in a different way that could actually result in the solution so yeah do you have any ideas or tips or how do you put that into practise yeah so I have this little because I have to work at it even though I do it kind of day in day out I have to be really conscious of doing it it's the technical term for it is deferring judgement but you know if I give you an example I'm sure everyone has been in a situation where you've been talking to someone and they're answering a question that you've put to them and this little voice in the back of your head goes no that's not right or no that's wrong or I don't believe that or where the hell did you come up with that you know so that little voice I call the assassin of innovation because it actually cuts information off at the knees you know it actually you don't actually hear about it and it might be that little bit of information that gives you a different perspective which then lives leads to innovation and that innovation could react result in increased efficiencies so you've got to really remain really open at this point like a big sponge take it all in you know time for analysis a bit later on but at this point you're trying to figure out what you need to concentrate on so you need to remain really open and I do that by just making sure that I kick that voice out and if I if I hear it I just stomp on it yeah I've got a little story that I could tell about how we've you know how we've applied this so Charlene and you'll remember this because we worked on it together that we actually did a piece of work recently in the health sector and the client that we were working with was engaged engaged us because they were experiencing this big increase in demand and associated significant cost increases with the provision of high-tech imaging or hgis and if you think you know the what makes that up is essentially cts and mri scans and so they engaged us to help understand what the current drivers of that situation are you know what was driving the demand and the cost that went with it and to help them prepare for the renegotiation of the delivery of the contract so we took the pause took a bit of a step back and we did our discovery work went out and talked to a number of people in the sector and what we found that was that hgis were being used in a very different way to what they were at the last time the contract had been renegotiated it was being rather than being kind of reserved for the tricky kind of more specialist cases because they're quite expensive cts and mris to conduct they were being much more used as a frontline tool and so instead of going down the usual chain of you know ultrasound an x-ray and then an mri they've been brought forward down that chain a lot more and being used as a primary diagnostic tool and what in turn that had actually resulted in was a quite a reliance in terms of hgis in terms of a diagnosis and making a diagnosis so what started out as really a kind of a procurement and cost containment challenge quickly became a much longer term strategic challenge around how you might think how the client could reimagine the use of hgis and how they might reimagine the deployment and use in terms of delivering against the patient but also practitioners requirements and then how to position the organisation to best deliver on that so it was a really good example about you know just taking that pause to rethink and then remaining open to feedback as you go through that process because actually what we started out looking to solve was very different to what we actually ended up having to solve for yeah nice yeah it was a great piece of work moving us along if i was to think about okay you've effectively understood the current state the challenge the opportunity and what you're dealing with from a planning point of view i'd be thinking about you know what does it mean in terms of really refining your purpose and your impact and i'm really mindful that at this time of the year many of you will be starting your annual planning and starting to think about the new financial year and what you need to put in place and this is this is really a perfect opportunity to do what i call a bit of a reset you want to create the space and the time as griff said when you're thinking about the the context to really start to get really crystal clear around your purpose the impact the value that uh that the customers are deriving from you or actually what you want them to derive from you even who your customers are it's really interesting when we go into work with leadership teams and we start asking some of these questions and for some organisations they haven't really been really clear around who their customers are they don't understand the experience of of working with the organisation from the customer perspective they don't even really fully understand what the customers truly need and this is the opportunity to get really laser focused not just on on what you're here to do where do you want to go but how you'll deliver it so it's kind of you want to get laser focused and in order to do that what i love about what you're saying griff around being curious it's the mindset but also it does take a level of bravery you're starting to question the norm and that can always be a bit challenging so having the space and the time to really interrogate who you are and what you do is i think quite important and it's something we tend to do quite a lot at this time of the year in particular doing reset workshops with leadership teams one of the things that um i think reinforces that yes it does take some bravery but actually going out and talking to people and understanding what uh their perspectives and getting you know good stories and examples of what's happening actually um turns it from a a personal opinion conversation to actually i've spoken to the people that are experiencing this issue and this is what's important to them this is what the need is that we need to solve for and therefore gives you kind of your your you know you've got a much more of a solid foundation than i think we need to do this well actually we've been told that we need to do this and it's a really powerful way of engaging people and to move forward um i love it one of the things i did with the leadership team was i actually videoed customers like real customers and they were talking about the experience uh with this organisation and then i brought it back and it was part of the workshop where you're hearing the voice of the customer saying well this is what i think of the organisation or in some cases i don't even know who they are or they they were thinking about a whole lot of different things that wasn't even on the radar for the leadership team and you're right it's what's the objective evidence you can bring into these conversations to mitigate any bias i love that it's really hard to be efficient you know to apply resources efficiently if you don't have a an outcome that you're looking to achieve you know like if you don't have a clear purpose or a vision or those or even understand what those people that you're working in service of need correct you know it's a really hard to be efficient in that situation because you're kind of trying to serve everyone everything you've got no mechanism for prioritisation and i i remember um i was i was asked to go work with the leadership team and the problem we were given was um there's not enough money we don't have enough money and we don't have enough people uh to deliver the work programme that they wanted to do and we you know it was almost we were going down the path almost of actually we need to get a business case etc etc and we actually put a pause in the conversations we actually did a intervention and went actually we just need to take us take a step back and really understand kind of what's happening in the business what is really happening before we go down the path of saying we need more people for this because in business you can always have more money you can always have more people you know you can always organically grow but we wanted to put our hand on our heart and say we actually have an issue and we didn't have the evidence around that so we took quite a structured approach to analysing the business you know what was happening with the workflows what was driving them what was the dependencies between all the different work and actually what we started to find was we started to unlock a whole lot of opportunities just from that that first suite of analysis and the part that really resonates was with me because it's quite a large organisation and they had such a problem around managing their customer contacts and what we found was these various tipping points so we knew or we found out through this process that if a customer did not get a reply to their email they'd then call the contact centre if they couldn't get through to the contact centre or they didn't want to wait long on the you know the line on hold they'd then come into the office so what was initially one contact was then being kind of tripled and you're having to manage three times the amount of contacts and actually what we did was we reset the way that we approached managing all the different workflows and we knew that we had to keep the email channel in terms of the timeliness it had to be beneath three days otherwise we were going to have an influx of contacts through the other channels what we call channel shift but you know when I think back to originally when we came in I was we don't have enough money we just need to do a business case and what we came out with through unlocking all these opportunities through analysing the business and really understanding that was actually we can live within the current funding arrangements we just need to be really savvy around how we're using our resources you know so the question I'd have for you if you know for those of you online would be do you really understand your own business do you understand what's driving the work do you understand the dependencies between the work do you understand yeah as Griff said what's the value that your customers want from your work do you even understand the costs the cost of the activities so actually I think it's really powerful when you combine being really clear on where you want to go and being really clear on understanding kind of the mechanisms and how your business works that just leads you into a really good conversation and approach to prioritisation I'm mindful that when you registered for the webinar there was a whole lot of comments that came through in response to the question you know what's the biggest challenge you have for creating efficiency and there was a there was quite a big theme around well effective prioritisation now I think it's one of those words that is easily said but kind of hard done prioritisation is not necessarily the easiest way to do it and especially if you don't have a clear purpose if you don't understand your business how are you going to prioritise so I always like to you know support the conversations or the prioritisation conversations with a tool and part of the reason why you use a prioritisation tool is to what Griff said you know how do you get some objective support to help with the conversation and I specifically call it a prioritisation tool because there is no prioritisation framework in the world that will ever give you the perfect answer 100% of the time you want to make sure that it's supporting the conversations you want a robust conversation around it now there's like loads of different ways that you can prioritise your work there's loads of different frameworks you can use you can go bespoke frameworks for your business through to really simple ones and they can be just as effective so the framework I like to use is a simple yes you look at all your activities and then you literally categorise the activities from a must do should do could do and you're using that understanding of where do you want to get to what does value look like given our understanding of the business and then you're applying this these three labels across the activities you've got any examples of what you'd I love that have you got any examples of what you've used in the past to determine what is a must do as opposed to a should do yeah so in practise what tends to happen the first time you kind of lay that out a must do should do could do and even though you would have had a conversation so everyone's on the same page around that everyone tends to lump all the activities most of them into the must do so you need to have multiple conversations but I like to be quite strict and that you know when I think about a must do and the way that I tend to apply this framework is a must do is if you don't do that activity the business is going to fail you know you'll be breaching your legislative responsibilities if you're in the public sector you'll be become unprofitable if you're in the private sector and you know the business will fail it's your core purpose your core reason for being that's how I tend to how I tend to think about it and if I think about why is you know why are these conversations so important why is prioritisation so important it's because you want the organisation to start to build their organisational muscle memory around trade-offs you know trade-offs are never easy many leadership teams struggle with it so what are the tools and the support that you can use to actually support those conversations because at the end of the day you cannot do everything you need to be really selective around what you can do how you do it yeah it's great so then I just really resonate with the content that both of you have shared I particularly liked talking about you know really tapping into your people and understanding the problem and just yeah really powerful about that prioritisation I think that is critical working out what it is that we can stop doing because there's just so much on with our people who sort of get overwhelmed need to remove some of that noise because otherwise it's just a highway to burnout really so but anyway in terms of implementing it let's say that you've you've got some clarity about what it is that you want to do now you're thinking cool let's let's go ahead and do it and I think most people appreciate that things like this implementation it's a little bit easier said than done there's so many things you can talk about in this but because of time I just want to touch on a couple of things so firstly I think one of the things that makes implementation really hard is being a little bit overly simplistic and underestimating just the the complexity and dynamic nature of your organisation or the environment in which you're working and so I like to think about it as one of those big wine barrels and I'm not quite sure but I think the bits of wood that go up they're called staves but you know what I mean right you've got the the wood going all the way around and I think you can imagine that if almost all of those were really really good condition but just one of them was broken it's going to really undermine the ability to hold the wine right it's going to really compromise it and it's actually a little bit like that in your organisation right so one little component of your organisation can undermine everything else even if all those other things are going really well and so one of the things that I like to do is to make sure that to sort of combat that bias is to use a tool to systematically think through a range of factors or influences in the organisation that I need to be thinking about right and then that enables me to actually kind of go okay what might you know what's the change here and what might need to be done there's a whole bunch of different tools you can do that I know with you know when I was a change manager I used detailed impact assessments they're obviously very thorough and good another tool which I find really simple and easy to use and scale as a model called the Gilbert model also called six boxes I quite like that because it's it's really simple it is easy to scale and I can use it both from a planning perspective but also from kind of diagnostic way to sort of figure out what's going on with current state so yeah I definitely am a strong advocate for that and just to give you one example of what the sorts of things that can come out so often when we talk about our plans or our visions we may express what we're trying to do in kind of a high level conceptual way so people kind of get that big picture which is great it's fantastic but sometimes that doesn't necessarily translate into the individuals being really clear on what that specific behaviour change they need to do is and so this enables you to go oh actually maybe we need to plan to do something to fill that gap so I would say that's a really easy thing and it doesn't need to be overwhelming like some of the other things you can definitely scale it down how much effort's involved and so you can use that at pace and be really quite effective I think that's about being really clear on what are the current processes that are in place like I was thinking that's just a planning process and planning is not effective if the people who need to make the decisions don't actually know or can't understand what does it mean in terms of the decisions that they need to make so I think yeah you're right you can you can revitalise and optimise your current processes just by looking at are they efficient are they are they working as intended that's quite a simple a simple element and suddenly you can be guaranteed that from the you know your exec through to frontline staff they really understand the plan yeah and also is that intention in service of the purpose yeah no is it because the intention needs to also equal value delivery so you know it might be that they were intended to work some way but also that kind of double check about does it flow through the value for those people that are kind of in service of yeah yeah so that's one thing you can you can kind of take away and have a thought about another another thing that I wanted to talk about which is quite different I think at the beginning showing you know she might have mentioned I have an interest in continuous improvement so for a couple of years you know my day job was to you know just be a continuous improvement specialist so there's a team of two of us we did some some training and we also ran a whole bunch of events where we would go around and map out people's processes and go through a whole range of exercises to help work out some ideas and just a couple of examples really stand out to me of this and I really want to emphasise this because I think people underestimate how much can be achieved through continuous improvement people put it in the box and see it as small stuff but actually you can achieve really quite significant changes through continuous improvement and also I want to talk about it because it's incredibly empowering right for for the for the people and one of the things I think we heard from some of the people that were commenting when they registered was all about this people element and how do we take our people on board and how do we deal with this fatigue and so it really is about how do we tap into that and and bring them along not only bring them along the journey but really look to them and their brains and their minds as the the people who are coming up with some of the solutions we need but I remember in one of these events you know a team that had a major change happen that had been well supported with a lot of effort and change management and so forth and it was now in place but as people began to work with a new way of working after a while they it didn't take long before they began to come up the whole list of things they could do to improve the process but essentially it had nowhere to go they didn't feel they had the mandate they didn't feel they had capacity or the structure those ideas just sat there and so not a lot happened so it was only two years later when we came along some of these ideas came out and uh and we were able to move on it but it just seemed to be such a tragedy and so that for me it's important I think because it really highlights that not only often does the integration between change management and continuous improvement isn't well established in the organisation but also highlights that the people have brilliant ideas brilliant ideas and they just sometimes aren't given the the space to be able to act on them another one very quickly happened to do with a process and we had two teams that used would largely work in silos and it worked out that one of the teams was doing a whole bunch of work based on assumption of what the other team needed but when we were in the room we realised that actually a whole bunch of that work wasn't needed and that's important because you know if you were to look from outside you would look at the team and think wow they're doing a great job they focus on the customer they're delivering um high quality but actually there was um what you might call over processing involved in that situation so there was actually there's there's more opportunities around continuous improvement than you think and in terms of practically how to how to implement it um one of the one of the things you can do capability building and so forth but one of the things that uh i remember that worked really effectively for me when i was a bank manager for about four and a half years is every month we would have a theme and every week we would have stand-ups um where we would work through the problem and that gave this level of structure and support and mandate to really drive through and create a lot of gains and having that structure really sent the message you know ci matters your ideas matter we're going to give you support and so we achieve some great including savings and i know that's an important thing at the moment right savings and and making it sustainable um on that uh how did you go about um i guess showing that those those improvements or those returns did you have some goals or measures that you had used or did you develop those as you went yeah so so you're always looking for signals and information sources and i think it's a lot of it's about thinking about what do you actually need and what's going tell the story it's easy to go oh we just need some measures and and and we go oh i know well what do we already measure let's just use those but sometimes they those measures um they're easy but they don't necessarily tell the story so it is important to actually think about okay how will we actually know when we get there um what should we put in place and what's going to give us those early signals to let us know whether our even our early progress is on track or not and so yeah but there's lots of you know if you want to get into measurement there's a whole bunch of things that you need to think about um and one of the big ones is making sure you're avoiding unintended consequences which can often happen with measures nice nice thank you um i'm mindful that you know we still want to have a bit of time for um questions where appropriate but i was just thinking in terms of some of the key themes that have come out um you know we've talked about how important it is to create the space to really understand the challenge how you frame the challenge making sure you have a curious mindset the importance of understanding your work and how it links to customers and are they are they getting value from it so what's the information that you're using um to really understand your situation um a bit of a bias from me effective prioritisation um but then the power of people you know how how can you elicit um you know all the good ideas that people have that are working on the coalface which i think it just comes down to you know do you really understand your business and and the people that are in it so i know we've got a couple of questions come through so this is from uh peter any tips on ensuring efficiency while also maintaining enduring relationships with the community yeah well um i i used to in a previous life uh have roles around community engagement so um i think what i'd go back to some of the points i made in the early stages around the design thinking discussion um involving people in the formation of the challenge getting their perspectives is a really great way to drive engagement if you're particularly you're dealing with externals you know you might be in the i used to work in the energy industry and have a lot to do with communities where we had power sites and um talking to them about um what were their concerns were actually helping them to identify what was happening for them um really helped identify what it was we needed to focus on to maintain that relationship um and therefore actually having that objective meant that you were necessarily efficient because if you developed uh delivered that you actually met the expectation so it was kind of like a win-win you know talk to them understand what's going on for them get their empathy for their situation and then use that to develop actually what needed to be delivered in order to meet that therefore you know almost by default became efficient nice because i tend to think about um it's really easy whenever an organisation has got um relationships with the community or their customers or industries or associations whenever you do some kind of prioritisation approach um people tend to discount the value of relationships and in some ways depending on what your purpose is um actually relationships can be your strategic assets within the you know for the organisation and one of the tips that i'll give with regards to prioritisation because yeah people do tend to de-prioritise them and i don't think it's necessarily right because you need to think about what's the time frame that you're assessing the activities what might be a must do um today might be very different or have a consequence if you uh in two to three years time so for example if you've got a really good relationship and you suddenly stop that you know that will that will impact the business in three years time and to your point you know relationships are a great source of insight around what's happening so i think this comes back to being really clear on what's important within your organisation and what role those relationships with community has um because at first blush yeah you could you know stop them um and i'd actually you know ask you to reconsider that you know especially if it's critical yeah and i think that you know i think people are particularly um primed to to the potential of a threat of loss and so if you're in the community and you think that a service provider there might be some things going on with them that may ultimately result in something that's benefiting you now actually being impacted that's going to potentially evoke a set of emotions and and so forth and i think uh just the organisation needs to be really mindful of that i think having um really good lines of communication and just being really open to to hear those voices and being transparent um about what you're doing is really helpful um this is a great one so this is from pete um is efficiency just cost cutting into just in disguise pete doesn't think so um but he's come across others that feel that way how would you approach managing this perspective yeah so i know we've even you know when we're thinking about this webinar we were really mindful around you know the interplay between efficiency and effective um so how would you guys go about managing those different dynamics where you don't just jump to cost cutting yeah yeah well i look you know the risk is sound like a broken record going back to figuring out what the challenge is and involving those um often in design um we we talk about getting uh you know i would say you know or black headers you know people that have that kind of no is their first default point or they default in this case they might default to that's just cost cutting we're actually um getting them involved in the discussion actually you can they can then for kind of understand what it is in terms of the value that needs needed to be provided um what's the need that needs to be met and uh like we talked about early and earlier on if you redefine that as an opportunity kind of talk about it as an opportunity to improve stuff uh they can actually kind of bring them along uh with you um it's important actually to have those uh personalities in the discussion because they actually kind of keep you honest you know you have to think about it so you don't all kind of end up you know drinking from the same Kool-Aid so to speak but if you use those people and bring them along actually i think what they tend to do is they understand the problem a lot better and they get a lot more comfortable with what you're trying to achieve because often you know that's just cost cutting is a personal bias or a fear that it's going to have a personal impact on you nice and i guess one of the things that um need to consider is if you create internal efficiencies it can improve your output and so if you think about the cost benefit impact it may be the case that if you can position yourself to just be delivering so much more than you used to through the efficiencies then actually that may mitigate the need for cost cutting because the value proposition has become so powerful but i think and and there are some instances where cost cutting is on the table and i think it is just important to be pretty open about that um and and explaining the why right so you know i don't think anyone just likes cutting costs for for no you know like impacting people for no reason there's a rationale right and it's how do you take the journey on the people and help them get that insight to realise that maybe this thing really does need to happen and that the decision making around it was uh it's really sound in that we've involved people in the process so that all the perspectives have been properly you know considered and weighted up to work out what the right thing to do is yeah nice um i think we're going to be running out of time yes oh okay we've got time for one more but we'll need to be really tight with this okay um so i'm gonna see if i can pick the most appropriate question okay people engagement what is the most efficient way to do uh efficient way to do this with busy people this can be really challenging you know how do you create the time so everyone's busy and now we ask them hey we want you to take the time to take a step back and think you know how do people find time to even think about this yeah um i love this one um because um often people's default mechanism i don't have time and that again is a little bit of a personal thing because you know if you if you seem to be busy therefore you've you know the the the kind of interpretation of it is that you're doing valuable stuff so um you never want to call someone out and say you're not doing that but um what i've done in the past is uh throwing a challenge out to people and say i need help with this um because everyone i've ever come across in that situation loves to loves to give an opinion on things you know they'll find time to tell you what they think about something so if you frame the challenge as i need some help you know like and which again helps you because you get that diversity of perspective i'd say i've got this thing i'm working on i'm struggling with a little bit i think i could use some help you guys are um got this perspective you've got that perspective i'd love it if you could help me i think that's a really good way to start and um again i use this in a previous role and what that actually created was a snowball effect people saw the power of that team because they're essentially volunteers giving their time we've got a really good result out of it people went out back out into the organisation talked about how enjoyable it was and that created the kind of not a FOMO but it was actually like a i want to be part of that that sounds really interesting so i think it's um just been quite open about it and calling for people to say i really need some help on this is a good way to start and and just quickly i guess my two cents of it is that um people have got so many things on information overload so if if you can you know really packaging up the messaging in a really clear way so if there's multiple things going away is there a way to tie that together so it's like a single message and it's it's seen as really contained uh and there's that clear you know what's in it for me so there's that aspect so you want to make it appealing and make people feel that if they do make this time they're actually going to be better off as a result of it because otherwise it's just another thing to the pile um but also i think there's a role for leaders and managers and um to create you know actually create the space and and and explicitly you know give people permission and set the expectations that other things can stop or not be done or be delayed because this thing's important and that and that we're not just saying oh this is just another thing you've got to do but i don't i'm not going to give you any leeway to to stop any of that other stuff yeah yeah yeah nice in some ways you're positioning it as you know it's time off the tools to create the opportunity that we might be able to come up with ideas to do things better and faster and so it's almost like the opportunity cost of not doing it not creating the space uh because i know we were talking yesterday um jeremy around uh the way the brain works when you're really busy and under the pump um you won't be able to come up with really innovative ideas well maybe you can but generally you know you don't tend to get the breakthrough ideas uh when you're in that kind of environment and that's why it's so important to like you said take a breath take the time when you're in a different kind of environment that's not so pressured suddenly you get some really great ideas coming through and that's where we see a lot of you know great innovations come through yeah um now we really are running out of time and so we're going to have to wrap up um if i was to ask each one of you what would be the one takeaway that you want people to leave with um yeah my word no no surprises but it's just take that take that pause you know like give yourself a little bit of time to just um investigate and validate what it is that you actually need to solve for rather than their perceived challenge uh engage people in helping you to do that but just take the time because it really does pay dividends in the long run nice jeremy um for me it's it is about really tapping in to the to the power of the collective of all the all the people right not just putting you know you might be a leader or a manager today and just feeling under the pump just to you've got to fix this like like we're talking about before like all the weight's on you but actually it's not no one's expecting you to be super human you know you're human you don't have all the answers you're doing you're doing a good job but let's let's be really smart about how we draw on those of us who are around to collectively come up with some smart decisions yeah and for me it would be getting brave around those trade-off conversations and what's the right evidence and tools and support that you can use to to be really brave and how you're thinking about what we can't do i see a comment that's come through around yeah what you not what you don't do and will choose not to do is just as important as around what you will do um i'm mindful that this is a really big topic and we have just skimmed through kind of at a at a whirlwind pace around just the top of it so if we didn't get to your questions i know there was quite a lot coming through or you have specific questions that relate to your organisation or just want to tap our brains around what are some specific tools or techniques or approaches that you could use in your organisation we are more than happy to have a quick catch up with you there will be a link at the end of this webinar where you can book a quick catch up with us and we are more than happy to do that this is quite a unique environment and you know we like sharing our information and our experience with you thank you for joining us again
