Business area:

International Corporate

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Client:

Business Improvement Director

 

Overview of the Situational SoundWave programme:

For those involved in, and intent on, improving routine organisational processes such as tiered meetings. Situational SoundWave improves process flow by improving quality of conversation. 'Conversation is data'.

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Issue:

The business was making good progress in contributing bottom line benefits through the application of continuous improvement projects. On a bi-monthly basis, colleagues involved in these local CI projects would meet in a regular CI Forum to share their experiences in order to ‘improve the improvement process’.

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Whilst the intention was good, the meeting process was failing to achieve its goals. The meeting was insufficiently structured (a problem in its own right) but more importantly, the conversations that were needed, and the levels of participation required, were not happening. It wasn’t at all clear that the Forum was anything more than an interesting place to convince colleagues that all was going well. With perhaps thirty people attending, it was also expensive!

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Desired leadership outcomes: 

• The desired outcomes were to have achieve wider participation and an acceleration of continuous improvements made through holding conversations in the CI Forum that went beyond a passive form of ‘sharing’  and ‘updating’ (inputs that were often received in near silence) to ones which drove learning through good inquiry, critique and challenge.

 

Level of participants:

From divisional directors to front line team members, across all sectors of the business.

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Overview of the Situational SoundWave intervention:

Four stages:

 

1. Diagnosis - a series of CI Forum observations that highlighted the limitations of the existing meeting process - running out of time; a lack of curiosity and good questions, limited dialogue and little consolidation of learning. 

2. Participant socialisation - participants of the CI Forum were introduced to the notion of ‘effective conversations’ through a series of workshops. The principal leaders of the Forum also received 1-2-1 coaching to more deeply equip them for the radical change in orientation of the Forum.

3. Re-design of the CI Forum - identifying a simple three phase meeting process, clear roles for each type of participant and phase together with strong guidance (just short of ‘scripts’) through which the application of the SoundWave voices would steer the conversation in the right direction

4. Trialing the new process - over a period of two months and on three occasions, the new CI Forum was delivered and observed allowing for practice and modifications to the format as the rubber of its design hit the road of the real Forum and associated interaction of participants. 

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The outcomes:

1. Participation increased by a factor of three.

2. Conversations were significantly more challenging, with participants identifying publicly where and how they could improve their approach to improvement projects.

3. SoundWave voices that had previously been absent were now conspicuously present - challenge, critique, inquiry and probe. This made the difference to the quality of the conversation and to the learning.

4. Fewer improvement projects discussed at each meeting, allowing for deeper conversation and the resolution of more substantive issues.

5. After six months, the volume and pace of CI projects increased.

 

What people thought:

“This is really great. We set out to achieve some changes and we’ve made it happen really quickly - you can see it happening in real time!”

(CI Manager)

 

“I hadn’t realised until now just how many questions I ask people when I only I only meant to ask them one. It’s an easy change I can make.”

(Technical Manager)

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