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Turning to One Another

Margaret J Wheatley

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

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We strive to create partnerships with client organisations to support the achievement of their improvement goals.

Vision

To be a recognised leader in the development and promotion of Business Excellence and a partner working with organisations to create real sustainable organisational improvement.

Our approach achieves a balance between development activities and the deployment of our capability.

Our development work is illustrated in the work on The Explorer’s Guide to Business Excellence. Here we describe how we use the same principles of exploration in the way in which we operate.

Client Activities

Our work with clients is underpinned by the underlying principles of excellence. These principles call for the application of the continuous improvement process to everything we do. This iterative process comprises the four steps of Plan, Do, Check, Act and sits at the heart of all continuous improvement activity.

Our commitment to this process ensures that it forms not just the structure of the solution provided to clients, but also the structure of our approach to providing support.

Our approach to working with organisations is always tailored and unique to the organisations needs. There are no standard lists of products and prices and our work with clients is thus always driven by the challenges and aims of the client, not products we have for sale. Our aim is to support the exploration of real change, not pander to the day-trippers urge for neatly packaged initiatives.

Whilst we do deploy some standard tools, this is always in support of a thorough understanding of an organisations change journey; its objectives, current position, culture and activities. Through this understanding we deploy or develop standard or tailored approaches to work with the organisation to create the next steps of the organisation’s change journey. These approaches include elements to plan and create change, to measure performance and to review effectiveness.

Whilst we may deploy a range of different tools our work with organisations is not directed at the delivery of tools. Our approach is to work in partnership with organisations using our knowledge of Business Excellence to help provide insight and understanding.

Example Areas of Support - Our Services

• Senior Management Team Excellence Awareness Workshops
• Business Planning
• Implementing a Continuous Improvement Strategy
• Assessor Training
• Assessment Tools
• Process Understanding and Development
• Organisation Assessments
• Preparing Assessment Documents
• Process Improvement
• Understanding Excellence Principles
• Understanding The Excellence Model
• Understanding and Exploiting Improvement Tools
• Understanding The Balanced Scorecard
• Customer Satisfaction Awareness and Improvement
• Team Building and Fun Events
• Being the Best - Motivating for Improvement
• Equal Opportunities and Diversity

All of our work with organisations starts with an open discussion of the organisations aims for its improvement journey and an understanding of the journey so far The above list therefore represents examples of the outcome of some of these discussions, that each began with a blank sheet of paper.

Being the Best

We believe all organisations can be the best. We define being the best, not as beating others, but as the challenge to be the best that you can be and continuously better than you have ever been before. (Do this and you will soon be beating the others).

We believe that real sustainable improvement is achieved through an ongoing process of questioning and challenging existing processes and practices, reviewing achievements and planning targeted achievements. Thus change is an ongoing journey of steps and our role is to help organisations make their journey.

Every organisation is unique, as is its change journey, and we therefore apply this open questioning approach to organisations we work with, with the questions firmly directed at how the organisation can improve performance.

Though improvement is often described in terms of initiatives and tools, in our experience, the application of standard tools and approaches is invariably inappropriate, unless they have been clearly identified as the most effective response to this questioning process.

Improving Ourselves

In order to help organisations change we believe it equally important that we constantly challenge, review and improve the approaches and techniques that we deploy. Our business is clearly subject to the same improvement demands faced by the organisation we work with. We therefore budget to spend at least 30% of our resources on the development of new Business Excellence ideas and approaches and their communication to ensure our position as a leading source of Business Excellence expertise.

In addition to articles, conference presentations and support of research work we actively support the UK Business Excellence Assessor Group, the UK community of Business Excellence assessors, and are members and active supporters of The British Quality Foundation and North West Excellence.

Our Philosophy

Our approach flows from our belief that the opportunity for excellence exists within all organisations. Our role therefore is not to claim to know better than an organisation how it should work better, but to work with organisations to help them discover how to achieve improvement.

We are committed to the principles of Business Excellence, perhaps best known in the form encapsulated in the Business Excellence Model developed by the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM). We believe that Business Excellence encapsulates a broad range of key beliefs that, if appropriately used, can generate real sustained organisational improvement.

Whilst far from being alone in advocating the use of Business Excellence, our commitment is to the underpinning principles rather than the implementation of specific tools or assessments. In our experience much of the work undertaken in the name of Business Excellence mechanistically implements tools in ways that actually run counter to the principles of excellence and add little value to organisational improvement.

Creating changed organisations requires the exploration of new ideas and opportunities. We see Business Excellence as the key to changed thinking. In contrast its use as a mechanical assessment, scoring and planning tool fails to recognise its inherent power to challenge and change thinking and often gives little improvement return for the time invested.

Successfully used as an exploration tool, Business Excellence can form part of a process to create real improved performance

Explorers and Day-trippers

Although many organisations claim that they aspire to be better or the best and much effort is directed at improvement, the net result is often disappointing. The return achieved on the effort expended is often very low.

Whilst some point to the failings of the tools used, we believe that success or failure in achieving change is not simply a function of the tools used but more fundamentally of the attitudes and mindset of those using them.

In order to help communicate some of the key facets of successful organisational change we have developed our ideas using the characters of Day-tripper and Explorer. We contrast the change journey as seen through the eyes of these two characters.

The Day-tripper seeks to create change and to create and become the best without venturing far from the well trodden path. For Day-trippers change must be pre planned with the outcome guaranteed. They step into the ‘unknown’ only when confident of guarantees of how long it will take, what it will cost and where it will lead. Understandably this limits their journey to paths they have already walked and their change is necessarily limited in scope and stunted in its impact.

Day-trippers .... the comfort of being busy and the illusion of creating change.

The Day-tripper loves to be sold initiatives which provide the sense of importance, the comfort of making them busy, and the illusion of creating change. The lack of real improvement is disguised by the regular replacement of initiatives with new versions.

The Explorer recognises that being the best, better than you have ever been before can not be achieved without doing new things in new ways. The Explorers guarantee is not the sure knowledge of where change will lead, but the sure knowledge of where the lack of change will lead. Equally the explorer knows that to

Explorers .... a discomfort with things staying as they are .... a craving for improvement.

stand still is to move backwards in a changing world. There are no guarantees of tomorrow, but the process of exploration, of challenging what is done, collecting evidence of results, reviewing what works and  doesn’t and why, planning and implementing change provide the best means to create improvement.

A major publication project nearing publication, ‘The Explorers Guide to Business Excellence’ develops this theme. In this book the ideas of explorers and day-trippers are themselves explored to provide a rich resource of information and ideas to help organisations use the principles of Business Excellence to create real change.