Turning things on their side

Life saving

Do you ever have micro-obsessions?

I don’t mean full-blown life-absorbing ones, like cycling or wine or video games. I mean very narrow interests that last only a short time.

For me, this week’s micro-obsession has been cat programs in prisons. These are formal programs where prisoners serving long sentences are offered cats to care for. Cats sleep with the prisoners in their cells, they wander freely in the prison buildings, and are treated by prisoners who’ve learned basic veterinary skills.

When the program was first mooted, people asked, “But won’t these hardened criminals mistreat them?”

The short answer is, “No”.

In the words of one prisoner, Craig, “For once in my life I asked for something, instead of taking it, and they said yes." This is rehabilitation at its finest.

Watching several videos on these programs got me wondering about the simpatico that exists between prisoners and cats. Here are my theories:

a) This program works so well because it triggers empathy in prisoners, an emotion rarely experienced in the jail environment.

b) Cats are aloof until they trust you, which is similar to what is demanded by the prisoners’ social and gang backgrounds.

c) Like many of the prisoners, the cats have cheated death: they’re all shelter strays who if they weren’t in the program would have been euthanised. The prisoners can relate to that.

Question: What ‘interventions’ can you set up that create productive emotional responses, or relationships, with or between your customers?

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Molasses

The most common question I get asked by CEOs is along these lines: “How do we become more strategic?”. A variant is, “How do we lift our focus so we stop just reacting to stuff?”

You know that org chart you inherited (or maybe even created)? The one that looks like this:

Well, it’s that hierarchical monster that goes to the heart of my answer to the question. It’s the reason executives aren’t strategic. Because they’re guarding their own patch.

Instead, the answer is this:

This isn't just prettier – it's a whole new picture. Here’s why:

1. It's all about the customer: Those vertical columns? That's where your real value (and money) comes from.

2. Support that actually supports: The horizontal layers? They're there to serve the value creators.

The key insight is this: Horizontals only exist to serve verticals.

How, then, do you get your internal services actually ‘servicing’? Here are three tips:

a) Your best judges of how they’re doing aren’t your GMs, they’re your team-level leaders. They’re your best diagnostic of ‘pain points’ and will readily tell you if IT, or Finance, or P&C are slowing them down, or helping speed them up.

b) Your horizontal leads will need both overt skills (framing a service level agreement, managing their technical functions, providing assurances) and covert skills (juggling competing demands of Services A, B and C; juggling inconsistent or incoherent offers made by fellow horizontals).

c) Each of the horizontals needs a ‘mini-strategy’. This should focus on (i) fix (reacting to current pain points); (ii) build (diagnose the biggest efficiency drivers across the business) and (iii) grow (strategically plan with the verticals to understand their opportunity set and contribute ways to realise those).

One of my large clients who hasn’t done any of these three things yet refer to their support services as ‘molasses’: anything that falls into them gets lost and takes forever to recover! By separating them out, you can remove the temptation

Question: How do you turn your ‘molasses’ into a true internal service culture?

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Forced shortage

A while ago I was running a strategy retreat with a client and we got to the final session where we discussed results: what future success would look like. The only problem was that I’d run over time - and we had a mere half hour remaining.

So, I suggested something risky. I said this: “We have 30 minutes. I want you to use half of that time, in groups, to propose four — just four — assurances that you, as a board, want to see. You don’t need to specify measures, or targets: just say what success looks like”.

This was an organisation that prevents youth homelessness and they came up with the following assurances:

1. Hundreds of young people have stable tenancies.

2. Government increases funding for youth homelessness.

3. Our clients are deeply satisfied with how we support them

4. Young people housed by us go on to education and employment

One group, within 15 minutes, even came up with measures and targets!

This ‘forced experiment’ told me that insight-driven strategy is not just possible, but preferable. Since then, I’ve used this artificially time-constrained approach with dozens of clients, ranging from universities, to legal services, from hospitals to an entire state’s justice department (if you want to know the four headline assurances for each of these, drop me a line, and I’ll tell you).

But, why does this work? It turns out that people love simplicity, they thrive on the clarity of minimalism, people who are drowning in data, and over-burdened by reportables.

They love rising above all that and focussing on what really matters.

Question: What are the ‘big four’ assurances that you want to lay claim to as an organisation?

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This week, try two things:

a) Your own "forced shortage" experiment: Give yourself just 15 minutes to define your organization's top 4 success metrics.

b) Develop a micro-obsession: Look deeply into a very narrow topic.

You might be surprised at the clarity these bring. Until next Friday, keep thinking differently and finding inspiration in unexpected places.

And, please do click the heart - I appreciate it when you do.

Andrew