The Time Based Organisation

Credit to - Bob Barker

"Lets assume that you are a director or manager in a manufacturing company, or a local council, central government office or the national health service. You want to reduce costs, be more competitive, improve service levels, reduce waiting times and use the brains of all of your employees to transform your organisation.

You have heard about something called Lean and a range of other things like Agile, Scrum, Business Process Re-engineering and Six-Sigma so you train a team and call them Black Belts. You then throw the team at your organisation to radically improve things and the attempt to apply those tools in every department. But there is resistance to change and all the different departments cannot see or understand the global picture or development plan. Then negative statements like "That will never work" begin to circulate. History shows that in such cases change is slow and transformation fails.

Why, you might ask is the transformation plan failing? You want a new type of organisation structure, one that adds value faster yet consumes less time and cost. Well, in terms of organisational design there are two critical things missing.

The first is analysis. Or to be precise, analysis of the existing organisations value adding systems and processes prior to any improvement actions. In order to emphasise this point lets look at an analogy, if you were sick and went to a doctor and the doctor without any examination said I think we need to amputate your arm, you would be horrified. Or indeed would you let a doctor prescribe you every type of drug in the pharmacy without any prior examination of your problem. The answer is no. The fact is that attempting to apply solutions before you know what the problem is, can have a very negative result. Also what happens in practice is that during the early stages of attempting to restructure the organisation, managers and employees all hold different ideas and opinions about what is wrong. There is no doubt that without a clear view and focus upon what is really needed, there will be confusion and a dilution of energy and commitment.

The second thing that's missing is a model, or more importantly a time based model that allows analysis of value".

How to recreate and transform existing organisations when the only tangible metric is time. Case studies show that time based organisations often become large bureaucratic empires, stifling human contribution and thereby limiting the value of its people.

“dismantling bureaucracy means dismantling traditional power structures. As you may have noticed, people with power are typically reluctant to give it up, and often have the means to defend their prerogatives. This is a serious impediment, since there’s no way to build a human-centric organization without flattening the pyramid.”?

―?Gary Hamel,?Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

This week, using The Arbinger Institute toolset from Developing and Implementing an Outward Mindset and with Gary McCormack MSc CEng FIMarEST setting the context my team spent 5 hours on Thursday unpacking and exploring how they could add the most value to Royal Navy Availability. We now have a plan of how to increase our value.

Did we achieve that after 5 hours? no, of course not, we have spent the past 18 months deeply analysing our Purpose, Our Outputs, Our Operating Practices, Our Skills, Qualifications and Experience, Our Personal Development, Rewarding Successes, Driving in Ownership, Accountability, Curiosity, Permission, Trust, Honesty, Teamwork and Communication.

I extend gratitude to my team, Paul_Ottewell for training my team and I on The Arbinger Institute toolset to Robert Barker for his fantastic book The Time Based Organisation, to Gary Hamel,?Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them and to Frances Frei and Anne Morriss for The Unapologetic Leaders Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You.

A leaders toolkit must be extensive and expertly used because unlocking people does not come with a skeleton key.

On that note, anyone in MOD interested in learning more about The Arbinger Institute toolset, here is your opportunity.

https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/activity-6892336144718073856-m1N5