Vision Building – What It Is And Isn’t

From our work we’ve gleaned the following do and don’ts around Vision Building:

1. Don’t have a Vision and a Mission. We’ve never seen an organisation successfully communicate both of these and show how they can function interdependently. Also when you ask people to quote one they often quote the other. A good vision will do all you need it too.
2. No numbers or dates. Something that states £100m by 2015 is a goal not a vision.
3. Visions are aspirational and as much about the journey as the destination. They are for the long term, something that needs changing or can be achieved in 5 years is probably not long term enough.
4. Creating a future that a vision captures is where the real benefit is. There is nothing more motivating for someone than to have a future articulated to them that they would like to become part of.
5. Don’t confuse visions with marketing strap lines, clever word play or alliterative statements. Sure, you’ll want to distil it down to a short phrase, but start with the long version, otherwise it’s just a word-smithing exercise.
6. Where does a good vision come from? It comes from a passionate point of view of what someone or some team wants to create. Vision building is not a technical, tick the box exercise, it should come from the heart, a clear expression of a future state which is different from the current state.
7. If it’s done as in point 6 it becomes a statement of intent. It should be directional, broad enough not to be restrictive, specific enough to allow options to be discriminated for and against.
8. Finally, the most important point, vision building is a deep act of leadership, you're offering people an opportunity to take part in taking others (customers and employees) on an exciting journey together.

See Values and Goals for the other two components of an effective Purpose Framework.

Predaptive help organisations build and implement effective Purpose Frameworks; for more information please contact us.

Values – How They Underpin Everything An Organisation Does

In building an effective Purpose Framework how you approach Values is critical to get right. Below we summarise the main points:

1. Culture is expressed values. Values are the basic building block of what it feels like to work in a particular organisation. If you want to change the culture, change the values.
2. A values driven organisation needs fewer rules, its values act as a touchstone for guiding peoples' actions and behaviours.
3. Values are not ‘common sense’, or ‘unnecessary because we all have values’. An organisation without clear values will not be able to offer any kind of ethical, contextual or behavioural framework. Whilst your personal values may be obvious to you they are not obvious to me. See MPs expenses for more context.
4. Distilling them down into five or six maximum is a good idea. Ten or more values is too many for people to carry round in their heads.
5. The whole focus should be on the behavioural expression of those values. You are not making a personal comment on an individual’s values, but on their visible behaviour - either positively or negative, as it relates to your values. The key here is to develop behavioural indicators.
6. You are not asking people to leave their personality at reception and become an organisational clone, indeed one of your values might speak to originality or creativity. An organisation does not have dominion over what people think or feel, but it can motivate people to behave in certain ways and proscribe behaviours it deems unhelpful or antipathetic to building its vision.
7. Values must always be viewed as a set. Never allow selective quoting, and never play ‘top trumps’ where one value is viewed as being superior to another.
8. A values-driven organisation feels inclusive, people are more positive about giving their discretionary effort, customers notice the difference.

See Vision and Goals for the other two components of an effective Purpose framework.

Predaptive help organisations build and implement effective Purpose Frameworks; for more information please contact us.

Securing Your Future - Setting Strategic Goals That Deliver

Given your organisation has its Vision, it now needs a set of Strategic goals that will drive its activities, priorities and decisions towards making that vision a reality. It’s in the Goals you find out how serious the organisation is about creating a future that is more than just a larger set of financial numbers than it's currently achieving.

1. Strategic Goals don’t normally number more than 10.
2. They will be clearly articulated, easily passing the ‘water cooler’ test of being understood by everybody.
3. Although simply stated, they will have significant detail underneath with a clear plan of how they will be achieved, with milestones and accountabilities clearly labelled. Strategy is essentially the mechanism for delivering the Strategic Goals.
4. Strategic Goals need to be masters (not servants) of, and integrated with, the current year’s business plans.
5. They should be more than just about financial growth. Profit is an output of doing something, so making more profit is a function of doing different things. The most effective sets may cover such things as:
   - What it is you are selling?
   - How you intend to engage differently with customers?
   - Expansion, where, how, when?
   - Solo or by making new partnership or alliances?
   - Organic or acquisition?
   - How you intend to use and develop your people capital?
   - Technology, a disruptive focus or just a condition of play?
   - Intellectual property development?
   - Innovation?
   - New markets and/or new segments?
   - Challenging existing orthodoxies?
   - New/emerging value chains?
   - New costing models?
   - New routes to market?
   - Optimising or transforming – or both?
   
6. Leadership is critical to the process of developing effective and mobilising Strategic Goals. Without a point of view about the future, linked to the vision of what your organisation isto become, your Strategic Goals will not drive anything.
7. The best time frame is 4-7 years.

See Vision and Values for the other two components of an effective Purpose framework.

Predaptive help organisations build and implement effective Purpose Frameworks; for more information please contact us.

Why Culture Change Is Not Understood – With A Short Guide To Greater Understanding

The recent past has forced many organisations to confront a painful truth. There was something amiss in their culture which meant either they didn’t see the problems coming as the clouds of recession gathered and/or their culture is inhibiting their ability to respond effectively to the new economic realities. Hence the need for culture change.

The problem is that for many organisations they seem not to understand what they are trying to do. Their terms of reference are ill defined and their ability to articulate the cultural current and desired states is poor. There is also confusion over timescales. Often you will hear managers talk about cultural change taking ‘many years’ which its tantamount to saying the culture can’t be changed, whilst others will talk about a three month culture change project.

This is why culture change fails.

To help organisations approach culture change more productively we have prepared a prompt guide to at least try to organise your thinking and process of examining culture change more productively:

1. Firstly a definition. Culture is expressed as a set of behaviours that are viewed by the organisation as normal and expected - what is often referred to as ‘the way we do things round here’.
2. Next, values are not a synonym for culture. Values (what you believe in and stand for) inform the way you behave, when those behaviours normalise you have an expressed culture.
3. So if you wish to change your culture you need to think about what your current values are. By values we don’t mean the laminated 6 phrases on the back of a company swipe card, but the things the company really believes in.
4. By proper examination of the values you can begin to decide on their appropriateness and think about changing them but you need another compass bearing before you can set a new direction.
5. The organisation’s vision. What is the organisation’s purpose? Again a real vision isn’t a marketing strap-line on a business card, but a much more fundamental expression of what you are trying to achieve.
6. As these two concepts start to germinate and synthesise (don’t worry about also needing a mission- we’ve never seen an organisation satisfactorily manage a vision and mission in any added value sense at all) you can focus on the catalyst for cultural change - the organisation’s and individuals’ behaviours.
7. Behaviours are the visible manifestation of values. By focusing on behaviours which are both definable and controllable you can start to shape a new culture.
8. This is where we can answer the timing point. Many behaviours can be changed in the very short term which will give you a quick win but they won’t (yet) be unconscious; they will easily revert unless the process is vigilant. This is the longer term perspective.
9. To affect permanent behavioural change a key component is an organisation’s consequences model. There has to be consequences, both good, bad and indifferent, for a person’s behaviour to permanently change; and this must be separated from their performance. If good performance creates license for bad behaviour any culture change stops right there.
10. Finally, never call it a programme, project or campaign, and never use the word launch. Culture change is a process, a journey, not a destination, it is organic and constantly present.

The Absence Of Values In The Credit Crunch Meltdown And Why They Are Really Needed

As the credit crunch unwinds and we can better see how much toxic debt resides where, the question comes to mind, how did these organisations values inform the behaviour and decisions of the relevant executives? Predaptive’s trawl of the publicly available data indicates that virtually all of the UK and US banks involved have at some time either spoken about or published material about their values (what they believe in and stand for) or their culture (the behavioural norms that inform their actions).

This turn tends to be largely rhetoric rather than anything of real substance.Let’s take a common term used – Integrity. How should integrity translate into practical action? You can’t talk for long about integrity without coming to trust, perhaps a bank’s most important asset. For a bank to jeopardise its trust with customers, commercial or retail, would be as crazy as a doctor making diagnoses for personal rather than patient gain, but that’s the equivalent of what the banks did.

They did not behave illegally (so we assume), and seemed to stay within regulatory boundaries, but not within any kind of meaningful values framework. What were the belief systems these banking executives were using to inform their strategy? Well, now we know. How to make the most short term money (with personal bonuses to match), by leveraging their capital base many times over.

Like a drunken dancing, it only makes sense whilst you’re doing it, looking at it from any other context looks ridiculous and unsustainable. And when most of your peers are also doing it, affirmation that you look cool is easy to come by.

UK Savers made a simple assumption when they put their money into Icelandic banks. That all banks’ risk policies and governance procedures were the same, so savers put their money with the Icelandic banks simply because they offered the best rates. The banks weren’t working to a values framework and neither were the savers.

There has been a lot of speculation that ethical banking will do well post-crunch. Yet this ethical definition is usually taken to include their policies around environmental and exploitative practices. In the future it will be worth testing their values on a much broader basis connected to their fundamental way of doing business, caveat emptor indeed.

What this demonstrates is there is the market space to create a real competitive differentiation. To be a commercially focused, values driven organisation, by demonstrating the public rejection of certain types of lending and related financial instruments.

Change - Sitcking With It

Change programmes fail far too often. In response organisations spend plenty of time planning the change (a sensible idea), launching it, communicating it (another must do), but still find themselves losing enthusiasm when the excitement of the new change has worn off and the daily reality of making the change work becomes the focus.

Change programmes don’t often fail publicly with an ‘abandonment event’, they simply run out of steam and the people who cynically claimed they would ‘believe it when they saw it’ or ‘wait and see what happened before getting excited’, smile and say ‘I told you so’.

What change requires is real effort over an extended period of time. This week has seen some fabulous examples of people who have refused to give up and have reaped the rewards. I gave up on Andy Murray when he was two sets down against Richard Gasquet, but he didn’t give up on himself and went on to his best Wimbledon performance ever. Federer didn’t give up against Nadal in similar circumstances and whilst he may not have won an extra button for his cardigan he certainly reinforced his reputation as one of the finest tennis players ever.

Thomas Voeckler may not have gained a stage victory on Sunday but he ended the day with his polka dot jersey, not something anyone would have predicted a week ago. He’s not the most talented rider in the Tour de France, but he is one of the most determined and resolute, and given his 2004 performance he may keep the jersey for a few days yet.

Whilst opponents span their way through the rain and into the gravel at Silverstone, Lewis Hamilton got on with the grim job of staying on the track to work his way up from an awful qualifying round to take the win. It wasn’t pretty but it showed determination, resilience and spirit, characteristics which serve organisations well in times of change, particularly in tough market conditions.

What these sports people have shown, whether they ended up as winners or not, is what can be achieved if people set their goal and stick with it, in spite of hecklers, doubters and fierce opposition.

Laminated Or Live?

We often visit organisations with clearly articulated values. They’re easy to spot, they have posters with the values on in reception, and often employees each have a handy little credit card sized version of them to carry around. Some even wear their security passes on values embossed lanyards.

We occasionally visit organisations with a well embedded set of corporate values. They sometimes have those values on posters, but what is striking is that the people throughout the organisation exhibit those values all the time in everything they do.

The second type of organisation is far less common. We often find that values are simply seen as a marketing or HR project that will go away sometime next year when the next initiative is launched. We’ve experienced selfish sales behaviour rewarded in companies with ‘Teamwork’ as a core value, and incredible rudeness and discrimination as the norm in an organisation with ‘Valuing All Our People’ printed on the mugs on everyone’s desks.

So how do organisations make the transition from laminating their values to really living them?
We’ve found that an important early step is to express those values in behavioural terms, making clear how those values can become a part of everyone’s role at every level of the organisation, every day. This allows people to think about how they can personally make a difference.

Another key feature of organisations that really live values is open discussion about them. This can be hard to engender, particularly where upward challenge is not the norm. An effective route to activating debate is 360° feedback around the values behaviours, giving people a structured and safe way to give and receive objective, behaviourally based feedback. Once people begin talking about values based behaviours, they quickly engage with them and build the confidence to challenge not only the behaviour of others, but what they personally are doing in values terms.

360° feedback also gives the organisation a view of its collective strengths and areas for development, allowing targeting of interventions, and identifying any pockets of excellence.