Can a 1-day workshop shift mindsets to be more customer-focused?

I am quite lucky. Privileged really. I've had the chance of helping people out because they trusted me to do so. The problem often is, when you jump into a problem and intervene, you do not always see the outcome of your work (a classic issue in consulting, unfortunately).

So when I had a chance to hear about the outcomes of a 1-day workshop and its impact 8 months down the line, it was a great chance to reflect and learn from this. Lessons that I want to share with you here.

Back in July 2019, I started discussions with Freddy Ortega, the Director of Finance at SDN Childen's Services, a large Sydney-based not-for-profit delivering early childhood education and child care, children's therapies, and family support services for over a century. Freddy saw how his Finance team was really effective at delivering what was being asked by the business - but also how years of tradition had led this function to work with a transactional mindset.

Freddy asked whether I could help make the team more service and customer-oriented, using design thinking as the vehicle to stimulate this change. With SDN Children Services rolling-out a new strategy, Freddy recognised that a new strategy cannot be delivered by working the old ways: his team needed to evolve.

We spent the next few months exploring how this could be done, knowing that the team had to deal with a constantly high workload. But we knew that constantly working hard would not stimulate the changes we wanted to see, and the team needed to take a step back to address how it worked. We needed to run some short interventions which would not disrupt the team's productivity, yet would start to shift how they approached the concept of productivity itself. We went through several iterations, refining the why, the who, the what of the program.

In February 2020, we held an in-person 1-day workshop (remember those days?) with his team. We discussed why people joined the organisation. We listed what the team actually did today, and mapped those activities to the evolving business needs. The CEO dropped in to present the new strategy. We explored what unique skills the team leveraged to deliver value to the business. We mapped stakeholders and explored what their side of the story looked like.

By the end of the day, we had:

• Better alignment on the team's purpose.
• Better understanding of each other's core motivations, and a reaffirmation of their contribution to the higher purpose of the organisation itself.
• Better visibility on what the team did, which activities were delivering high impact while others were high-workload but lower impact.
• Better knowledge of Finance's internal customers and where their frustrations might come from... but also a realisation that in some cases, we tend to assume rather than know what issues our customers are facing.
• An action plan to explore ways to better understand customers' needs and deliver more value to them, leveraging the team's unique skills.

Then the pandemic hit. Everybody went into lockdown. Childcare services copped it hard. Financials had to be rethought amidst growing and long-term uncertainty. Fun times...

In June 2020, we caught up for a follow-up with the team. We revisited what we learned from the February workshop, and how it stood the test of time amongst all this uncertainty.

And you know the beauty of getting a team to move away from transactional thinking and focus on understanding their customers, their customers' issues, and exploring ways to deliver value to them? The team adapted well to their customers' changing needs.

Was everything perfect? Sure not. It never is, and you can only strive to learn and improve constantly. But this short intervention led to a shift. As Freddy put it:

"The team’s mindset towards challenges evolve[d]. They are now asking more questions and looking for solutions." ~ Freddy Ortega

When times are tough, you need teams to adapt, question what is asked, and look to solve the problems that matter. You need people to know what skills they bring to the table, and explore ways to leverage those skills to deliver more value.

It was just a 1-day workshop, but its effect was visible to the rest of the organisation:

"There is now a greater demand from the business for corporate services to support growth and sustainability." ~ Freddy Ortega

So how did that happen?

1. First, you need a courageous leader who is ready to disrupt the way their team works and introduce new thinking to help individuals grow.
2. Second, you need a good team! I was privileged to work with this group of kind and open-minded individuals, who came along on this journey towards customer-centricity.
3. Third, you need a carefully crafted intervention. Not a 'vanilla' session of "design thinking 101" that is disconnected from the challenges at hand. Not a post-it note fest that leaves you high on energy but low on outcomes. Not an open-door workshop for anyone to join and the session's impact is devolved. Do yourself a favour, get some help to design a custom session that works for your team(s) and your need(s), takes into account your local and macro-contexts, and builds on your own language and codes: the result will be much more impactful.
4. Fourth, you need to take the time. Go slow to go fast. Personal mindset changes and group culture changes are long-term games where it pays dividends to invest meaningfully, but where short fixes are unlikely to last. It does require a leap of faith by those courageous leaders to get started on this journey.

Wait. What? This was just a 1-day workshop with a follow-up, which delivered mindset changes that were visible 8 months later! How does that square up with saying "short fixes are unlikely to last"?? Read this story again! This 1-day intervention was the result of months of preparation (not full-time, admittedly!) which enabled ideas to mature and be tested, for the workshop design to be iterated, for the attendee list to be refined... and with this initial success, SDN Children Services' Finance function is only starting its journey towards customer-centricity.

"I envisaged the role SDN finance could undertake to further support our services' priorities. We have started this transformation by engaging Reframed Thinking to assist the SDN corporate services team with defining business partnering role. The SDN corporate services team appreciated the opportunity to explore how we can design the support and see this as an exciting journey." ~ Freddy Ortega

Thanks to Freddy Ortega and the SDN management team for trusting me to contribute to their journey through Reframed Thinking's consulting services.

Need help on your own journey to unleash the potential of your team - be more strategic, innovative, customer-centric? Drop me a note on [email protected] !