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Turning to One Another

Margaret J Wheatley

©2002 - 2009
Access to Excellence Co Ltd.
Upload Version ATE107
November 2008

Books reviewed are available from
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Steve Unwin

Steve Unwin is the founder and director of Access to Excellence. Steve is an enthusiastic and committed Business Excellence advocate, well known and respected amongst the Business Improvement community.

Before founding Access to Excellence, Steve was Head of Business Excellence for BAE Systems (formerly British Aerospace), the UK’s largest exporter and the world second largest Aerospace and Defence Business.

During his time with BAe Steve was responsible for the development and deployment of Business Excellence throughout the business. His work was recognised in 1999 when the Military Aircraft & Aerostructures business of BAe won the UK Business Excellence Award.

“I am immensely proud to have been a part of BAe during a time of some great achievements. Quite apart from the technical excellence of the products, during the time from our adoption of Business Excellence in the early nineties, the business was transformed literally from the brink of bankruptcy to a role model business. This transformation was achieved through a co-ordinated approach with many components, but the role of Business Excellence in creating a culture of change can not be underestimated.”

In line with the aims of Access to Excellence, Steve shares his time between development of Business Excellence approaches and working with client organisations.

In addition to work with a wide range of Public and Private Sector organisations, Steve  commits a significant portion of his time to a broad range of development activities. He for example played a key part in the development of the EFQM Business Excellence Model. He was a UK member of the international Model Deployment Team of the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM).

Steve has been a Senior Assessor for the British Quality Foundation (BQF) and is well known amongst the UK Assessor community as an expert trainer and speaker at assessor events. Steve is also a prominent member of the UK Assessor Group

Other key roles include being a past member of the British Quality Foundation Executive Committee, Award Jury Member for the North West of England Excellence Awards and a Business Excellence expert witness at the Bristol Royal Infirmary Inquiry.

Recently Steve has devoted much time to capturing his experience and ideas in the forthcoming book ‘The Explorer’s Guide to Business Excellence’ as well as contributing to a book on Agility in Healthcare.

Steve is a Chartered Engineer and a member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, the Royal Aeronautical Society and the Institute of Quality Assurance.

Outside work Steve is a passionate supporter of Nottingham Forest Football Club and along with his two boys is a season ticket holder. Hannah is already looking forward to joining us for the 2007/2008 season - honestly.

Kathy

Supporting Steve by running the Office and Administration activities is Kathy. Originally trained as a legal secretary, Kathy blends her office technical skills with the organisational talents honed on the challenge of managing a family.

Kathy’s is the voice at the end of the phone when you contact us and her role is to ensure the smooth running of the office and the thousand and one things that this entails.

Our Approach

Steve Unwin, a founder of the company, has over ten years experience of creating successful change.

“In that time I have seen and worked with many organisations. I’ve witnessed and been involved in dramatic business transformation that have achieved national recognition and success. Overall however I’ve felt that the achievement of real change is far too infrequent with many organisations consuming vast effort with little benefit. Too often the change journey is seen as an initiative day-trip, to be quickly implemented and dispensed with in equal haste. Day-tripper organisations thus develop voracious appetites for initiatives, but successful change isn’t achieved through initiatives.
The change journey isn’t a day-trip, it’s an exploration, and successful organisations are those who develop the skills of the explorer to find their unique solutions.”

Our approach is founded on a belief that all organisations have the ability to perform better, what is more the people within organisations want to be a part of a better organisation. I see our role is not to attempt to be more expert than the organisations we work with in their specialised area, rather it is to help the organisation see and remove the obstacles that prevent this improved performance.

By using business excellence thinking the benefits of being outside the organisation, free from the organisation’s assumptions and beliefs, can be exploited. Our aim is to help the organisation focus its expertise and direct its knowledge at creating improvement, not as is often the case, the forlorn and blind adoption of someone else’s improvement approach.

Hence we aim to open up understanding and provide Access to Excellence.

For organisations tired of being sold the next initiative to implement, we offer an alternative of helping organisations discover what are the right next steps for them.

We believe that Business Excellence is a thinking tool, its power comes from organisations thinking, questioning and thereby raising understanding. Some aim to help organisations by saying ‘You don’t have to think, we’ll do the thinking for you’, this may be well intentioned but is mistaken. It’s like saying to an athlete ‘You don’t have to train, we’ll do the training for you’. The training isn’t the objective, it’s what you become by doing it. ‘The Explorer’s Guide to Business Excellence’

We believe and are absolutely committed to the principles of Business Excellence. However whilst we see it as the means to enable dramatic improvement in an organisation’s performance this is not achieved simply through the introduction of Business Excellence approaches and tools. When used in this way it has little advantage over other initiatives. The key to unlocking the power of Business Excellence is to understand its use as a means to question understanding and challenge the organisations beliefs.

We support organisations to use this understanding to develop their unique route to improvement. We call this exploration and contrast it with the day-trippers search for the perfect initiative, the instant answer to all problems.

Whilst initiatives can be neatly bundled and planned to prescribed time-scales, exploration is an ongoing process reflecting the nature of continuous improvement. We provide support to organisations as they undertake their improvement journey helping the identification of prioritised improvement actions that will form the best next improvement steps to deliver real performance improvement.

Capability

We aim to be at the very forefront of the effective use of Business Excellence and our business strategy provides a balance between the development of Business Improvement thinking, the communication of new ideas and tools and the deployment of this work to create improved performance for our client organisations.

Our development work, we believe, places us at the very leading edge of Business Excellence understanding. Our aim is to share this learning to create insights for organisations that will allow them to access their potential for excellence.

You will find further details of our work on developing and deploying Business Excellence thinking, throughout our web-site.

In Our Approach you will find an outline of some of the types of work we undertake.

If you require further information please visit our Contact Us page.

Clients

Our aim is to work with a small number of key clients who can share our commitment to the principles of Business Excellence and exploration. Through long term partnership based relationships we work with these organisations as they improve performance and progress their journey towards excellence.

Our clients include private and public sector organisations in the UK and Europe and include organisations in the defence, construction, government and health sectors.

Partners

Where appropriate we work with a small number of carefully selected partners to supplement our resources and provide unique additional capabilities in each of the areas of our operation.

Partners are only involved in client based work with the express agreement of the client.