More with less: Practical steps to operational excellence

[Philippa]
Kia ora, my name is Philippa Tinetti. I'm a consultant at Allen & Clark and I'd like to welcome you to today's webinar, More with Less, Practical Tips for Operational Excellence. I'm joined by Allen & Clark's resident continuous improvement expert, Jeremy Markham, who will be sharing some thoughts about managing delivery under tight capacity pressures.

For those of you just joining us for the first time and wondering who we are, Allen & Clark is a management consultancy that ensures complex, high-stakes decisions are made with evidence, defended with confidence, and are built to work with the people and communities affected. We specialise in strategy, change management, evaluation policy, and more, and we give a damn about impact, not just deliverables. Okay, let's get straight into it.

Jeremy, would you like to introduce yourself?

[Jeremy]
Yeah, sure. Well, kia ora koutou, everyone. Yeah, so I'm Jeremy Markham, Allen & Clark's continuous improvement lead.

I've had a really diverse career, which has given me a lot of insights about working under pressure, and you'll hear a little bit about some of my background as we talk, but I'm really looking forward to sharing some insights today and hopefully giving you some really practical things that you can quickly take away.

[Philippa]
I'm really looking forward to it, so let's just get straight into it. So first off, I'm going to give you a few stats. So both New Zealand and Australia's 2025 Public Service Consensus has found that high numbers of public services staff feel they are working above capacity.

So in New Zealand, 73% of survey respondents also thought that complicated or unnecessary business processes prevent individuals and teams performing at their best. And in Australia, 28% reported feeling burned out by their work. So what this is telling me is that workers are often feeling really squeezed, and things are just not set up as well as they could be.

[Jeremy]
Yeah, absolutely. And I think in that situation, one of the things that, I mean, there's lots you can do, but right here, right now, one of the things that managers need the most is just a bit of breathing space and a sense of momentum, right? You want to feel like you're better off this week than you were last week, and that somehow you're finding a way forward.

And so this webinar is specifically targeted at those facing those pressures. I'm going to sort of use a three-step playbook today. So I'm going to talk about head, heart, and legs.

So head's about helping to make sure that you, and this could be a manager, it could be a team member, it doesn't matter. It's about, as an individual, getting in a really good head space to be able to confront the challenges you're dealing with. It's about heart, which is really about helping the team be really well connected together and making sure that their head is in a really good space to think about the challenges that they've got.

And then we come to legs, and that's kind of the real doing, that's what moves you. And so I want to be talking there about how do we prime people to notice ideas? How do we capture those ideas?

How do we work out what to work through and move forward? So yeah, that's it. Excellent.

[Philippa]
Head, heart, legs. I really like that, and it sounds really easy to remember. So let's get straight into it.

[Jeremy]
Perfect, right. So high-pressure environments can be really stressful, right? So maybe it's good to start there.

So one of the things that we know is that people can respond to the same situation in really different ways, and it's because of how our brain processes it. Now you'll have your own examples in your own mind when you can recall this, but I remember as an example I was in a pretty major earthquake. The building was actually a little bit dodgy, ended up having to be demolished in the end, but it was an earthquake and the building was really moving a lot.

And I actually felt pretty okay in it, but my colleague who was like this far apart from me, they were terrified. You could just tell the look of absolute horror on their face. Same situation, really different response.

And also when I reflect, years ago I was a bank manager. I was bank manager for a number of years, and we had all sorts of stuff. We had an armed robbery, I had a fire, we had threats to my personal safety.

But the weird thing is, yeah, the weird thing is, is that those things didn't really phase me, but what stressed me out was achieving my weekly sales target.

[Philippa]
Wow, that seems really odd given those things sound genuinely more threatening than sales targets. Why do you think that is?

[Jeremy]
Yeah, it is odd when you rationally think it out, but the thing is, is our brain kind of tends to run a little bit on autopilot. And I had some, I guess you could call it faulty coding, or whatever that's going on in my brain. And because I wasn't challenging it, it was just loading me up with just more and more of that sense of pressure.

[Philippa]
Yeah, so would you say that the stress response can come down to exposure as well? Like, so if a person hasn't been in a situation, that it might feel more overwhelming than it would be to say somebody else who has?

[Jeremy]
Yeah, absolutely. And that's probably actually a good thing to think about, because if you're a manager who's really experienced, for example, you may kind of forget about that. And so it is important to be thinking about where the different people in your team might be.

But one of the, I think the things that's interesting to talk about is that exposure really helps, but you want to make sure it's managed carefully, because too much really impairs your performance. And I've certainly experienced that.

[Philippa]
Yeah, I've also heard that when people are in distress, the blood flow and the brain changes, which can affect the way you think as well.

[Jeremy]
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I've really experienced that firsthand, like normally creative, good problem solver. Sometimes in situations where things got really tricky, it felt like I just wasn't performing in the same way.

It was a little bit like trying to run a 100 metre race against people, but I had a backpack which was 10 or 20 kilograms, right? I knew I was going to get to the finish line, but it felt like I just wasn't performing in the way that I knew I could.

[Philippa]
Yeah, well, that sounds good. So, thinking about changing gear.

[Jeremy]
Yeah, so I've got this idea about your car, your brain being a little bit like a car, right? Think of a manual car with the gear shifts. So what you have is first gear.

First gear is awesome, but you need first gear. It's really important. It takes you places.

But ultimately, if you want to drive on the motorway, right, you can't stay in first gear. You've got to find your way up to fifth gear. The brain's a little bit like that.

You can start in one place, but you need to learn how to make some shifts to do what's needed at the time. So for me, first gear, first gear is threat. First gear is thinking about danger.

I'm seeing things, new thing comes along, what could go wrong here? You know, how am I going to manage those things if they do go wrong? And those are useful from like a risk perspective.

So they're good, just like first gear is good, but we need to find a way to move beyond them.

[Philippa]
So how do we change gear?

[Jeremy]
Yeah, great. So, you know, when I was 13 years old, I had this cool little epiphany. It just hit me when I was struggling with something and it was find out how you work and work with it.

And it was just about, I needed to find ways that would work for me, knowing that what worked for me wouldn't necessarily be the same as everyone else. And that's really helped me in my life. And so if you're thinking about how to shift gears, there's going to be lots of opportunity, lots of options out there for you.

Lots of resources. I'm certainly not a mental health professional, but three things that, three questions I found are really quite cool and helpful. First question is, what story am I telling myself?

Right. So sometimes when I'm in the heat of the moment to try and just pause, take a breath, notice what's going on in my body, notice what's going on in my mind. Sometimes it just, yeah, like that in the escalation, right?

It just gives me a bit of space. And it helps me sometimes to pick up on what some of that, I guess, unconscious programming is that I'm writing in my brain, like how I was with the sales target. And so I think that when you can begin to become aware of that, then you begin to be able to challenge it and manage it.

So that's really good for that. But another question that I really like is what do I want my story to be? So this is where you think about your core values, the type of person you want to be.

And this, I love this because it takes you out. It gives me a sense of objectivity, gives me a sense of distance. And so I can think about myself, who do I want to be?

I want to be like a, let's say a master problem solver, right? And then when I think about that, okay, so I want to be a master problem solver. How should I think about what I'm dealing with right now?

And then I go, oh, actually, well, maybe it's not so much of a threat, it's a challenge. Because in order to get really good at being problem solver, I need to have problems to work on, right, to build that muscle. So that's a really good one as well.

And then another favourite of mine, another favourite, and these are questions you can just use today, right, today, is what would it take for me to succeed? In other words, if you knew you were going to be successful, what's the most likely path you would take to get there? What I like about this, it seems to work for me, is that when I'm in first gear, my brain, all its mental processing power is going towards thinking threat, threat, threat.

This question stops that and says don't put any energy into that, put it all into thinking about the future. And I found it a super helpful way to just literally shift gears in my thinking and I begin to just open up lots of creativity. So yeah, awesome.

[Philippa]
Yeah, that is a really nice question. Could you also use it to help team members manage their challenges?

[Jeremy]
Yeah, absolutely. If I get a time, I might share that hopefully. Yeah, because I do have a good story about it, but that's definitely part of the coaching piece.

But just to move on from here, because I don't want to spend too long there, just the key thing is, we all know that stress can impair your performance, but there are things you can sort of hack your brain to help you get into a better headspace. And the key thing is to figure out what works for you and to be proactive.

[Philippa]
Sounds good. Okay, so moving on to the heart now. So this is about connecting with and then getting the best out of your team.

[Jeremy]
Yeah, I mean, I guess pressure can bring out the best in people and the worst in people. And just as I said, stress can impact your individual performance. It's also potentially affecting the performance of your team.

So I like to almost think about it quite visually, you know, when I'm under too much stress, it's like trying to walk around with a really heavy backpack on me, right? If you can imagine all those people in your team having to walk around with all these heavy backpacks, they're trying to deal with stress, right? Obviously, you're not going to be able to do the best work.

So you want to kind of help address that. Yeah. So the audience, I know you didn't come here today for a lecture on psychology.

I've got a psychology background, but I know you're not here for a lecture on psychological safety and, you know, all that kind of stuff. So I won't state the obvious, but about how to lead your team and so forth. But what I would say is as really clearly is that when people are working under pressure, how you show up really matters, right?

So your people, you know, sometimes people feel alone. They feel that all the work's on them. They're not sure if anyone's got their back.

But if you can break that, if you can push through that and help people come into work every day, knowing even though the challenge is really tough, I know I'm not alone. I do have help. We can get through this.

It just makes such a massive difference.

[Philippa]
Yeah, absolutely. It takes a lot of pressure off when you feel like others have got your back.

[Jeremy]
Yeah, absolutely. So that may sound a little bit like stating the obvious, but it is important, so I'll say it. But the other idea that I really did want to get across is this idea from Kaizen, and it's this idea of everybody, every day, everywhere.

And this is really about setting expectations and genuinely empowering your people to grow and improve. If I was to talk to all the managers in the country and I asked them, do you empower your teams? Probably everyone's going to say yes, right?

Yeah, they will. Yeah. But how?

Like, think about it. If you're a manager, how? What are you actually doing?

What are you doing in terms of not only expectations, what are you doing in terms of reinforcement, in terms of incentives, in terms of capacity, right? It's actually kind of like a system you've got to get going to make this work well. One of the things I've observed is that those who are doing the job, right, they usually notice lots of opportunities that their managers don't.

In fact, if the worker doesn't actually even say anything to the manager, the manager can go for years without even realising that it's a thing, right? So there's all these opportunities that are sitting there. The manager's probably not going to fix them unless they hear about them.

So, you know, you've got a problem there. But the team member, often when the team is there, they're busy, they're working away under this capacity pressure, and they'll have thoughts like, someone should fix that, but I guess it's not my job, or someone should fix that, but I don't have time, or I should just follow the procedure, that's what I'm meant to do, right? I should just do what we've always done.

Or that's the boss's problem. And there's all these things that people tell themselves that ultimately mean that they never take any action. And once that initial burst of energy and excitement you get when you realise that something needs to be done, pretty soon all that just disappears in the noise, right?

So if that just happens, it just gets lost. And so the opportunity gets lost. So I think it's really powerful for leaders to set the expectation and say, team, I don't have all the answers.

If we're going to make this work, we've got to really rely on each other as a team. And that's that idea of everybody, every day, everywhere. And what it's doing is really sending that message, hey, team, I need you, I need you, I need you all to be looking every day.

And, you know, when you're doing, try and find something, even if it's something small, let's just try and be a little bit better today than we were yesterday. And when your team's under pressure, you might kind of go, oh, I don't want to burden them with having to do another thing. But I like the kind of metaphor of the idea of you're not burdening them, you're kind of just giving them a key to help them get out of their own locked door, right?

You know, they're in a difficult situation right now, and you're empowering them to move beyond that.

[Philippa]
Absolutely. So how can leaders reinforce this mindset to identify and act on those opportunities?

[Jeremy]
Yeah, so when we get to legs, which we will in just a moment, I want to talk about some of this in a little bit more depth, but I do want to go back to what you said before about that, what would it take question, right? And how I could use that with a team. So let me give you an example quickly.

I was a project manager of a project, and there was a technical component to it, and we had a roadblock. And everyone's telling me, like, everyone's telling me, we have to stop. This thing has come that was unanticipated, and now everything has to stop for a few weeks until it gets sorted.

And obviously, as the PM, I'm conscientious, and I'm like, oh, I'm feeling bad about this, but everyone I ask just says there's no option. And so I went to one person who I thought was a really clever person, and so I said to them, I know you say that there's not a way, but if there was a way, what would it be? And so they kind of look at you a little bit strangely, and I was like, no, seriously, like, if someone was to come in here today and said, I'm going to, I'm going to offer you a million dollars if you can come up with a solution, you'll say something, right?

You'll make something up, right? You'll make something up. So I said, if you had to, what would you say?

What would you come up with? And they just paused for a moment, and then they just had the most amazing light bulb moment, right? You can tell their eyes, their smile, and they just got it, and they suddenly realized, they're like, actually, we could try this.

And just I could tell in the way they were saying that it was a real possibility, and so I said, let's try that. And it worked, and it got the project really back on track. It was awesome.

[Philippa]
That's an awesome story. And I bet the person who had that idea was feeling pretty chuffed.

[Jeremy]
Yeah, yeah.

[Philippa]
I can see, I can see that if this is done really well, this could really help build a culture of empowerment. Hey, so to close out on this heart section on team mindset, what are your top three points?

[Jeremy]
Cool. Well, obviously, choose how you're showing up every day. Probably another one, which I didn't really talk about, but just focus on the long game.

Don't sacrifice those long-term relationships in order for a short-term deadline. I think that's important. But the other one is unleash your team, unleash the ingenuity of your team through that expectation and coaching like I was saying.

[Philippa]
So this is a really good segue into the action stage now, and this is where all the legwork happens. So can you tell us a bit more?

[Jeremy]
Yeah, so, and the people in the audience can maybe do this too. So, but PT, when was the last time you thought about brushing your teeth? Like the technique?

[Philippa]
Yeah, I don't really think about it, so I can't remember. Yeah, it's just second nature.

[Jeremy]
Yeah, so I'd be interested if anyone in the audience actually is like, actually, I was thinking about my teeth last week. But no, so the reason people don't tend to think about it, right, it's not because dental hygiene isn't important, because it is, everyone knows it's really important, but the brain's only got so much processing power, right? So if it thinks it's mastered something, it then thinks it's kind of irrelevant, so it then stops noticing, right?

Now, what's that got to do with today? Here's the insight, and if you listen to anything I say today, maybe this is the one thing, right, one thing. You could have the most skilled team, the most talented team, you could have the most experienced team, you could have the most conscientious team, right, so you think you've got the absolute dream team, but there could still be incredible opportunity, incredible things going on that they're not even noticing, because their brain is just, in this moment, it's decided that that kind of stuff isn't relevant, they're not looking for it. It's, yeah, so there's just great opportunities, I think.

[Philippa]
That's really interesting. So you're saying that the opportunities are likely to be much greater than you initially think. So how do we get people to start noticing these opportunities?

[Jeremy]
Yeah, great, and I agree with you, I think sometimes people put like continuous improvement in this little bucket of turning increment, but you can actually achieve incredible things with it. So, but on a practical level, right, so what you want to do, you know the story of the person who suddenly sees a car they haven't seen before, and then they notice it everywhere, right?

[Philippa]
Yeah, that happens.

[Jeremy]
Yeah, it happens, right, and it's because all of a sudden your brain's gone, oh, actually that information is now relevant. So what we want to do with our people is to make them go, noticing inefficiency, noticing waste is relevant, you should pay attention. One good tool I like to use to help with that, it's what's called the eight wastes, right, and it came out of manufacturing, and there are other models, but I like it because there's only eight things, and it's got a really catchy acronym, and it's a really good way to structure and talk people through some of the common areas of inefficiency in a workplace, right, and the acronym is downtime, so each letter stands for something, and I'll just tell you a little bit about, I won't talk through them all, but just talk about a couple of them to highlight how you could engage with the team, right.

So, for example, the D, D downtime, stands for defects. Now, when you think about defects, the first thing you might think about is, let's say you're a knowledge worker, you might think of defects as being spelling mistakes or factual errors, like things being incorrect and, you know, the wrong statistic, yep, but it can be more than that. So think about this, imagine that you've been asked to write a report for your boss's boss, and it's to deal with an issue that, yeah, you've been involved with, yeah, and so you're going away, you're going, trying to be conscientious, I want to provide a good report, you spend all day, you write a 10-page report, if I ask you, you say you're busy, if other people around you see you, they say you're busy, you produce this report, the person gets it, and they kind of go, oh, this is just, this isn't what I need, like, this is just, it's like, it takes me ages, it's too long to read, I'm trying to find the insight, it's not enabling me to make the decision I need, right, and so, in a sense, that's a defect, right, it's a defect, right, because it's a thing which isn't delivering the value that it was intended to, and that's how you can have a team meeting discussion, to go from just saying, let's talk about defects, to actually getting people to think about the work they're doing and how it could potentially be a little bit better. So, that's one, yeah.

[Philippa]
Yeah, so, I mean, that's really interesting, because I can see how talking about it like that can prompt people to think about how their work might not be meeting user requirements well enough.

[Jeremy]
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, it just begins to get them noticing. Just quickly, another quick one is not utilising talent, that's obviously when there's, people have great capability and it's just not used optimally.

[Philippa]
Yeah, so, I've got a really good example of that, so a person who recently used their initiative to upskill themselves in AI could be an ideal person to be involved in teams work that uses AI, but if their skills aren't in their core role, they may never get that opportunity.

[Jeremy]
Yeah, often we kind of pigeonhole people, right, based on their job descriptions and what we know about them, but people tend to have a lot more skills than we might even be aware of, and there's lots of opportunities there. So, that's definitely one. Another one that I want to briefly touch on, I know we're pressed for time, but extra processing.

So, you go all the way down the list from D to E, E is extra processing, and that's where you're doing more work than what's necessary, and the reason I wanted to talk about that one in particular is A, because it's a big source of hidden waste and knowledge work, but also, because actually, if you think about that example before about, I talked about the defects, writing a 10-page report instead of a two-page, right, that's the same problem. So, you could identify it by talking about defects or extra processing.

The secret isn't to get caught up in which particular heading it is, category, it's about having the conversation to surface the issue and then you can begin to actively work on it.

[Philippa]
Yeah, I mean, that's something I can relate to in my job, but I think there'll be a lot of people in the audience that can relate to that as well, or lots of places.

[Jeremy]
Yeah, yeah, so what you're doing here is you're priming people to begin to notice these issues. I ran a session here at Allen and Clarke not long ago, where we went through these eight wastes and I talked about it. One of the great things that happened after it is I talked about inventory, that's the I of downtime.

So when I talked about inventory, I talked about it in a particular way. But then after the meeting, someone came to me and were like, when you said inventory, that made me think about our staff energy levels and how we manage them. And it was just absolutely brilliant, because it was exactly what I'm talking about.

You throw it out there, it's like a seed in people's minds, and it just triggers all sorts of thoughts. And then this person's mind suddenly took them down a path about, oh, maybe we could do these other things differently. So I would challenge you and encourage you to run a team session.

It's not that hard to just get yourself up to speed with the basics and to do it. It's really a good way to engage your team.

[Philippa]
That sounds awesome. It sounds like a really great way of getting people thinking about better ways of working. Any other suggestions, Jeremy?

[Jeremy]
Yeah, because you just don't want it to be a one-off thing you say in a team meeting, right? You want to really infuse it. I think one tip I would have is to make sure that, and a lot of this advice, you think it's about managers, but actually a lot of this is really applicable to everyone in the way that, because we're all learning from each other in a team, right?

But one of the things it's about that you can do, particularly if you are a leader, it's about trying to get the balance right between telling, showing, and asking. So sometimes if I need you to do a piece of work, for whatever reason, I just need to be really explicit and just to be like, because I know it's ambiguous and what, I just, I need it quick and I need it exactly looking like this, right? Telling.

There's a place for that. I think sometimes maybe we overuse it. But there's other times when you can use other techniques.

So if you think about showing, you don't, certainly you don't see it much in the public service, but one of the things I used to do, particularly in the private sector, was role-playing. Role-playing concepts. Don't you love role-playing?

[Philippa]
Nightmares.

[Jeremy]
Yeah, a lot of people don't like the prospect of it, right? Because it's got stuff, but actually it's a fantastic way. Sometimes when leaders give expectations, they give them at one level of detail, but actually the people doing the work to really get clear on what they need to do, they actually need a slightly different level, and so they actually don't yet have the clarity.

But when you do something like a role-play, sometimes people go, oh, I get it. Well, I hadn't thought about that particular way. I could do it differently.

And the secret is with this is I was never dictating. I was never saying, oh, by the way, PT, this is it. Watch me.

See, I'm the master. I'm the boss. I know it all.

You should do it this way. I was always like, look, I don't know, like, you do this more than me, because these were like sales staff, and I'm their manager, right? They're doing it all the time.

I'm not, but I'm like, this is just to expose you to a different way. And sometimes people would really have those triggering thoughts and go, oh, actually, yeah, maybe, yeah, OK, I've figured out something I can work on. So yeah, that's good.

Also, another thing that my current employer does really well here at ANC is exemplars of work, right? So I'm working on something. They will show me something and be, hey, I know you're working on that.

I know we once did this other piece of work that's quite similar. Why don't you have a look at that? Or I might show them a bit of early content, and they'll say, oh, yeah, that's looking really good.

How about this? You know, and they'll just express something in a slightly different way. And that really iterative, timely feedback, I'm not waiting to the end to get feedback.

I'm just throwing out these little bits, and they're not telling me what to do, but they're showing me, here's some options. I think that empowers me to make choices about what I'm going to do. So yeah, so that's cool.

[Philippa]
Yeah, it sounds like some really good performance coaching there.

[Jeremy]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And with the asking as well, that's probably a good one is to go back to that example that I gave before about that staff member. You can ask questions to help people think more deeply about their work and generate their own insights.

That's something I try and do wherever I can.

[Philippa]
Yes, that makes sense. So okay, assume you're doing all of that and people are identifying opportunities. So how do you decide what's priority number one?

Or what do you work on first?

[Jeremy]
Yeah, okay. So in this world of knowledge work, I think we can be a little bit perfectionistic. We want to get it all perfectly right.

But I would say done beats perfect, right? You can build sophistication over time. You can make things better over time.

But the first thing you want to do is just getting started, right? It's easy to go, oh, but we'd need to do this, that and the other thing. But like just find something, find something small, something quick, just to get you going.

If the intuition of everyone is saying, we think this little thing change should happen, and it seems really feasible to you, well, move forward, right? There's always a risk that you'll look back and hindsight and go, oh, actually, you know, maybe we could have done it better if we knew this or that. But it's actually what you just want to avoid the analysis paralysis, right?

When you've got so tight time pressures, right? Capacity constraint. Sometimes you go, oh, but I'd need to think about this.

And then you just don't get started. So I'd say, just get started. Another thing you could do, and you could literally do this in minutes, right?

Just a few minutes is to set up like a virtual or a physical Kanban board, like a planner board. And all it is, it could just be a sheet of paper on a wall with a couple of lines, columns, where it's like backlog, doing, done. Again, you can make them more sophisticated over time.

But what you want to do is when your people have ideas, you want them to go somewhere, and you want them to feel that they're actually going to go somewhere and be looked at. So that then, once you have something like that, then it becomes a place where the ideas can go. And then you can think about, oh, well, how do we work out, prioritize these?

How do we work out how to size them and to put them through the pipe, essentially, to work out what you're going to what you're going to work on. But the thing is, is definitely don't try and get it perfect at the start, just begin with something.

[Philippa]
Yeah. So when your capacity is constrained, it's really important that you don't try and do too much all at once.

[Jeremy]
Yeah.

[Philippa]
So you're saying start with something easy, get some runs on the board, and use the improved capacity, capability and energy of the team to move on to something more ambitious.

[Jeremy]
Yeah, 100%. And the thing is, don't worry about failure, because if you, let's say you assign some work and work's too busy, and you actually didn't make much progress over the week or whatever, as long as you have a system where there's a review process, people can learn from that and go, oh, actually, we need to get better at this. Maybe we need to get better about how we're defining our ideas or how we're prioritizing or how we're assigning tasks.

All of that stuff, you will learn how to get better, but you just got to start moving.

[Philippa]
Yeah, absolutely. It makes sense. So, OK, once you've got some initial wins, you can get more sophisticated with your approach.

But what should teams do when they're ready for that next step?

[Jeremy]
Well, you know me, PT, so I'm a big fan of the end-to-end process review. I think that gives you a really good, much more complete picture of your challenges, the opportunities and how to address them. It has so many benefits, it's awesome.

And we probably don't have time to talk about it, but I think it's a key, actually, if you're looking to integrate new AI into your business processes as well. So, yeah.

[Philippa]
Nice. I love a good end-to-end process review, so I fully endorse that approach. But is there something else in terms of who are the teams that are still in the fire, so to speak, need to do right now?

[Jeremy]
Look, I guess if there's just one other tip, I would say, and there's all sorts of things you could talk about, but it's about routine. So, it's easy to come up with the idea, it's an easy to start, but when you're so busy and you're just under those capacity constraints, it's so easy for things just to fall off. And actually, I should say as well, if they do fall off, again, don't punish yourself, right?

You just notice, wait for an appropriate time, you know, and then just try and start again. But I would say try and create a bit of a routine. There's all sorts of, you know, continuous improvement and methodologies out there.

But even in its most simple form, you can go back to what's called the Deming model, which is just plan, do, check, act. So, you don't want to just say, here's an idea, I will go and run with it, see what you can do. You want to be thinking about, OK, well, how are we going to do this?

And then once you've tried something, you want to sort of check and learn and then kind of go, well, now what do we need to do in response to that, right? And then it's sort of this cycle. So, you need some kind of a structure.

When I was in the bank and I was running the show, what we did is we just had even just 10 minutes or 15 minutes every week, just focused on CI. And the content of those meetings was different and sometimes we went faster and slower and better, but we kept the momentum and we had some super impressive results, right? Because we stuck it, we stuck through with it.

[Philippa]
So, I can see that you really love this stuff, Jeremy. And I'm pretty sure that you could talk for a lot longer about other things like visual management and the role of AI. We're just running out of time.

So, let's quickly summarize.

[Jeremy]
Yeah, sure. OK, so this is, as I said, it's for those managers that are particular or workers, anyone in the team who's just really feeling the squeeze right now. It's about thinking about what's your headspace at?

What's the inner narrative? What's that story going on in your head? How is that contributing to stress?

How might you reframe that and be able to change gears so that you can make sure that your mind is thinking as well as it can be to challenges? It's about the whole team coming together, supporting each other, showing up every day, having each other's back and really embracing this idea of everybody, every day, everywhere. And with legs, it's about priming people to notice waste.

It's about setting up the system. Remember, I was telling expectations, reinforcement, capacity, all of those things are critical to actually making empowerment work. It's about setting up that selection tracking system, empowering people by showing and asking and not just telling and establishing that routine.

So, those are the key things. Hopefully, you've got something out of that.

[Philippa]
Yeah, that's a fabulous summary. Thanks, Jeremy. I think we've got some questions, so we're going to move on to them now.

[Jeremy]
Sure, OK.

[Philippa]
Right, so we've got a few questions that have come through based on what people said as part of the registration process. So, the first one is you haven't really talked about AI. How does AI fit into all of this?

I know it's a big topic.

[Jeremy]
Yeah, yeah. Well, actually, first, I'd say just remind people, if you're listening right now, we have limited time, but you are welcome to add some questions in the chat if you'd like. I'm keen to throw them out if you've got something.

But yeah, so AI is the elephant in the room. It's the hot topic. You're talking about doing a seminar on efficiency.

You know, why is this not the top thing you're talking about? So, there's a couple of things I just want to say about this. So, I could say about it.

So, firstly, I am an advocate of AI. To some extent, I use it and get great value out of it. I'm always thinking about how I might be able to integrate it into what I'm doing.

If you're interested, I know Allen and Clarke has done some really good past webinars, which do go into some specific tips that you could apply. So, if you're looking for those really practical, give me some examples, please watch that content. One of the reasons why I didn't want to make this conversation too AI heavy is because at the moment, it just feels like AI is so everywhere and that's everyone's talking about.

And I just, it's too easy to become a silver bullet solution. And actually, I was trying to remind people that there's actually quite a bit to think about, like, other than that, like, that actually really contributes to the picture. And also, you know, what are you pointing it at, right?

Like, do you understand what your biggest problem are that, you know, the problems are that you're needing to solve? And it goes back as well to that comment I made about the end-to-end process review. So, a lot of organisations, you can have your AI policy in place, you can have tools in place, but how are you ensuring that you're integrating AI into your processes in a way that's standardised and optimised, right?

I see that there's like, quite a big gap out there where that hasn't quite been worked through. But if you do an end-to-end process walkthrough, you can get consensus and you can get people to realise, oh, these are the specific use cases, right? These are some things we can agree as a team that we're going to trial and test, and then we're going to come back and go, given the fact we did four different things here, what's working, what's not, what do we want to do?

And then you can begin to build it into process. So, I see that that's a great opportunity. And of course, you've got the people talking about the agentic stuff as well, but just keeping it into the thinking particularly about those processes where it's more about augmentation.

So, yeah, sorry, that was a bit of a long answer.

[Philippa]
No, that's great. Thank you. We've got another question here.

So, with so much change going on, on top of your everyday work, your BAU, how do we cope with all of these things all of the time?

[Jeremy]
Yeah, I think you've got to, I mean, people talk about self-care and stuff, but I do think it is really important to look after, I guess, your own mental health and remember what's important to you and really do make sure you're prioritising that, like family and things. It's really easy to get absorbed into the work. And I know myself, sometimes I'd go home and just, I'd be physically present, but mentally I'd just be really checked out.

And that actually can put quite a strain on those around you. So, definitely actually getting your priorities right. But I would say these things that I've talked about today, they can actually really make a difference.

Now, people say, oh, maybe you're just tinkering at the edges or this is incremental, but you can just, you can look it up yourself, right? Like the story of Toyota, what they did, they began with it from a very rough starting place, very poor, but they applied these processes and even though it was overwhelming, they actually transformed things. So, you know, you can talk about so much change going on, but these things can really help.

Maybe the other thing I'd also say is that some organisations actually don't have a good visibility of what, I guess, their change landscape is. So, I've done some work with organisations where they essentially created heat maps, where you'd create an understanding of the different business units and their peaks and their natural peaks and troughs. And then you would look at your change programme that you've got on and then you can kind of layer that over the top and actually then you can think about being really strategic.

So, I'd like to think that those organisations that are working in change programmes, they're doing something like that so they can work out, you know, when they want the different initiatives to land, when they'll be wanting to run their training and things, when they need to be timing it. I think the onus is on a lot of those people to be trying to make those smart decisions and to respect the pressures that the BAU people are working under.

[Philippa]
Yeah, I think that leads nicely into the next question as well, is how can we prioritise better? All of these things.

[Jeremy]
Yeah, so, I guess, I mean, a lot of times when people talk about prioritisation, right, they'll say you want to have some, you know, you get a, there's a tool, multi-criteria decision analysis, you know, you want to get, you know, the different criteria you've got and you can weight them and you can score things and there's plenty out there content talking about that. But I guess I would add, I would probably add a couple of things. I'd probably say think about, think about that example I gave where I was talking about the 10-page report versus the two-page report.

Sometimes we're making assumptions about what the task is but actually maybe what's required is a little bit different and if we can get clear on what done actually is and what's really required, sometimes that issue can take a lot of the heat out because you realise it's actually not that much, right, there's so many assumptions here. Another thing that happens is like the false dichotomies, right, oh we need to do this thing or this thing, which one do we prioritise? But again, maybe with negotiation you can work with people and actually you can come up with some kind of flexible options where one's like well actually even if you just did 50% of this by this time that would actually be okay because that's all I need for me, that's all I need for Monday and then you can do the rest next week and actually thinking about it just really creatively, I think there's a couple of thoughts that I have there about it and also just pushing back. So we come up with these deadlines and things and they feel like they're just so fixed but sometimes the people who said they didn't really actually mean to put you under that much pressure, they were just like well it felt like a good date and I needed to have a date and then actually just having an honest conversation about where things are at actually it's really worth it because if you can get that person to say oh actually yeah it's fine if you take another three days, that can take all the pressure off.

[Philippa]
Yeah it's a great answer Jeremy because I think that's probably happened to all of us that yeah we have a date that we've been given and there's a little bit of flexibility in it. But I'm just going to go to some live questions that we've got through now. So we've got a question from Jutta, so how do you make people and leaders interested in change when most of them feel overwhelmed and don't have or make time for the conversation?

[Jeremy]
Yeah so one of the things I would say, and this is what I try to do particularly as a manager, is there was so much noise right. Every initiative, every change program, they're sending out their own comms and you're trying to keep your head over it. So I certainly know that one thing that can help is to really try and simplify it.

So as a manager I try and protect my team. Sure they would have access to seeing all those emails, but I would say in a team meeting like oh by the way guys this is the short, too long to read kind of thing, summary of actually what it means for you. So actually there's just, I know that there's 10 pages of content out there, but there's four things you really need to know right now.

So I think even just doing, giving people that clarity, that removes some of the overwhelm. Yeah there's quite a bit more I could probably talk on that, but let's because I see we've run limited time, but hopefully even that helps.

[Philippa]
Yeah great answer. So we've got another question from Sheridan. So teams are made of individuals and some will respond well while others will remain stuck.

So the people that are stuck, how do we get them out of that place?

[Jeremy]
Yeah that's a good question. I mean, maybe I just said too much to the good people, but I'm a great believer that people don't want to be stuck. I don't think anyone goes out and says I don't want to be a non-performer, but we can easily, as particularly as managers, you fall into that paradigm.

You know I was once in a place where it felt, yeah like really created these particular mental models about it which I don't think are helpful. And actually as a side when we're talking about mental models, I'm a person, I'm a former change manager, but I hate the term change resistance for this reason as well, because it creates this mentality. But in terms of how to get people stuck, I think it's about trying not to be too aggressive, understanding the world, but also understanding what's actually going on.

So I once had a staff member that was in this space and I used that what would it take question to actually uncover what the real thing was, because I was like you are super capable, you've got the skills, you know how to do this, but I'm noticing clearly, you know, there's been several times now where it's just not sticking, you know, it makes me wonder like what's really going on. So I was like well what would it take for you to do this? And then what came out, it was actually a motivational problem, and that they actually were really pulled to actually do something quite different, and weren't feeling that energised about work.

So we actually, through that conversation, they actually ended up pursuing something else, which I think was really good for them, but it was the right thing for them. But it wasn't me in any way trying to like push them out of performance management, it was just a really good quality conversation.

[Philippa]
Yeah, so it was having that conversation. We've got time for one more question, we've got a question from Holly. So any tips for dealing with the issue of low capacity across the team is making it hard to dedicate time to upskilling.

Learning and development tends to go on the back burner when the increasing workload takes priority, but that sometimes results in rework or inefficiency.

[Jeremy]
Great question. Yeah, 100%. And I'm sure if I think about this more, like I'll give you a much better response.

One thing maybe I would say is, well A, what I'm talking about right now, if you can begin to get some quick gains from what you're doing, that can begin to create capacity. There's also opportunities in terms of how you assign work, like we have these models about what capability development is and what it needs to be, but sometimes it's not necessarily going on the course, it could be like on the job and it can be sort of broken down into bite size. So that's that.

But another thing is, I think teams actually are really quite, still quite siloed. And I think, you know, I would love to see a world where there was more flexibility so that individuals would have capacity. So if you've got one business over here that's entering its trough time, that they could be able to lend one of their people to another team.

I know that doesn't tend to happen a lot, but you know, in my ideal future state world, I think that having a scheme like that where you can really scale up and scale demand, because you've got, tend to have fixed capacity, but a really variable demand, like how can you actually create that space? So I know that's not a very comprehensive answer, but if you want to book some time with me, I'll be happy to talk it through in more detail and have more thoughts.

[Philippa]
Excellent. That's probably a good time to place to wrap up. So thank you so much for staying on and all for your thoughtful questions.

This is the kind of discussion that makes these sessions valuable for everyone. And remember, if any of today's discussion has sparked ideas for your own work, we are always happy to continue the conversation. Just click on the button on screen.

Thanks again for joining us. We really appreciate it and enjoy the rest of your day, everyone.