What if we knew the future could be different!
The story of Sarah, a senior University leader with passion for improvement
Sarah was a member of a senior leadership team in a highly ranked business school. She was in charge of international student recruitment and on her travels around the world, she has developed a great sense of empathy for all those young people and their families taking the leap into the unknown embarking on a prestigious University degree in the UK. Sarah understood the applicant journey extremely well as she had gone through the same process several times herself. She knew how scary and exciting at the same time that journey can be. She felt for every single candidate who came to her exhibition stand or attended an interview with her. It was up to her to paint that picture of the unknown and create that dream future vision of studying abroad. At time she felt the pressure and she knew she had to be true and honest, yet positive and also fast in responding to any little query that came to her inbox.
“Something doesn’t feel right”
The sense of urgency met with Sarah’s dedication to making the application process as smooth as it could be. She was just freshly out of her MBA and was looking for a new challenge. One day she decided to ask for more responsibility and her manager was delighted when Sarah put herself forward to lead the admissions team. “I will turn this around, no more endless waiting for a response, the applicants will hear in less than 10 days!” From four weeks to less than ten days became her motto and her drive. Her focus was fully on delivering the best value for applicants. She cared about nothing else but to provide the best applicant experience, as she saw it.
You may be thinking that she was a perfect example of a lean management enthusiast driven by the value for the end user of the admissions process. She would be really pleased if you thought so as she was a lean maniac. Her house was organised in a lean way preventing any shortage of a nicely chilled White. Post-it notes and flowcharts dominated her office walls and she would not hesitate to preach lean to practically everybody in the business school. Sarah’s recruitment team loved her. She carefully selected every single of them and created that team from scratch. Her empathy for applicants and the importance of fast response was drummed into the team from the early stages. Many of them came from outside the education sector and brought customer service experience with them. If you imagine a group of happy, innovative and upbeat individuals, that was Sarah’s team. Lean never featured on their agenda. They were breathing change on a daily basis. They had open conversations about things that went wrong and they celebrated their successes. Sarah was often the first one to come clean and own up to a messed up innovation that she was happy to scrap and rethink.
The culture Sarah and the team co-created was focused on the value for the applicants and the value for the academic teams they supported in recruiting the best students for their programmes. They put a lot of emphasis on relationship building and understanding what their support should look like. They worked on the planes, in the hotel lobbies, in the taxi journeys to the airports. The time difference meant that their applicants were awake 24/7, and so were they. Sarah knew that the organisational culture is an important aspect of any effective operation and she put a lot of effort into building the ethos of openness and trust with constant ideation and review of the processes.
The admission team was, however, in a very different place. They had just lost their manager and inundated by thousands of applications flooding the CRM system on a daily basis, they had no option but to put their heads down and wade through the treacle. The CRM system was cumbersome and the automatic messages sent to the applicants would put off anybody who has a tiny bit of sensitivity in them. Your application has been deactivated! You haven’t paid the deposit! You no longer exist! Sarah couldn’t wait to fix this. She felt invincible. Equipped with her fresh MBA degree where she specialised in operations management, her many successes with her recruitment team and her own ability to achieve almost anything, she set off on a new lean journey that was going to become a crusade. Her focus never slipped off the applicants’ experience. She was ready to combat the CRM, the long queues, the negative tone of automated emails, the lot! She knew the future could be different…
“What is it that doesn’t feel right?”
Sarah created a culture in her team that enhanced creativity and the underlying condition was trust of the team members who were at ease about admitting mistakes and constantly reviewing their practices. These characteristics fit perfectly with continuous improvement but they are not as common in the Universities as we may think.
Organisational culture provides a context to the team behaviour and cannot be ignored when considering service delivery and process improvement. It has also been recently debated as one of the main obstacles to lean initiatives. Teams and departments create their own subcultures, which is even harder to navigate. As in Sarah’s case, the two interdependent teams, student recruitment and admissions, operated two very different cultures driven by the objectives of their remits. Understandably the admissions team where mistakes can cost a UKVI licence are much more risk averse and often petrified of making or admitting an error. In the HE sector there are further complexities between the academic culture and the culture of professional administrative teams. The HE sector therefore is very heterogeneous from a cultural perspective and research from the financial sector by Maul et al. (2001) points out that in this cultural climate it is not possible to introduce homogeneous quality improvement programmes.
Morgan & Murgatroyd (1994, in Billing 1998: 151) related the desirable culture characteristics to service quality and customer satisfaction. They propose six aspirational cultural characteristics that enhance service quality:
- Innovation is valued highly
2. Status is secondary to performance and contribution
3. Leadership is a function of action, not position
4. Rewards are shared through the work of teams
5. Development, learning and training are seen as critical paths to sustainability
6. Empowerment to achieve challenging goals supported by continued development and success provide a climate for self-motivation
Now how do you know your team has these characteristics and how can you raise your awareness of the context you operate in?
Pause, raise your own awareness of the culture around you
Before we start thinking about how the future can be different by implementing a lean initiative, an awareness of the culture we operate in will be essential. Sarah took it for granted that the new team will be just the same as her innovative and highly reflective student recruitment team. She skipped the importance of the initial pause and evaluation of what’s around you. A very useful and intuitive framework — Cultural web — developed by Scholes and Johnson (2011) can help any lean enthusiast with the first steps towards a successful lean project. This simple but powerful way of looking at the world around you will give you the starting point and will set you in the right direction towards one of the key lean mantras — respect for people: meaning the colleagues you are about to invite to your lean party. And as a good party host, you will do your best to know what makes them tick, what gives them the shivers and how will you be able to take them with you.
What Sarah did next…
I know you want to know what happened with Sarah. She did have a bumpy journey, you guessed correct. Her previous experience with the recruitment team meant that she was prepared to openly admit that processes were not fit for purpose and she expected the team just to get on with improvements. Not this time. At one of her presentation of an admissions value stream map full of red crosses symbolising process failure, one of the team members who normally rarely spoke, put his hand up and said: “Most of the red crosses are pointing out the areas of my day to day work. If we get rid of those tasks, what will I do?” Sarah paused and cheerfully said: “Well, you can do something more exciting, like taking part in calling campaigns. You will love it, you will actually get to talk to people rather than just staring at the screen.” She was pleased with her answer and moved on with her visionary presentation. The same hand went up again: “But it is not a part of my job to do that. I don’t want to talk to applicants on the phone. I am paid to review applications on the system. That’s what I do.” Sarah’s lean world full of positivity and never ending change collapsed in front of her. She finished her presentation and went back to her office. She felt angry, tearful and frustrated. But this was the reality of her lean initiative. Some of the team’s comforts were to be replaced by innovations or simply got rid of if they brought no value to the applicants. It made perfect sense, you couldn’t argue with her faultless and detailed analyses. But as her operations management teacher pointed out to her, “these processes are delivered by people, not machines. You cannot just switch them off. “
“We cannot go on like this!”
The lesson Sarah learnt changed her approach to lean and she decided to pause a bit. She abandoned the processes and improvements and organised a team away day. She took the team to a beautiful old manor house in the mountains where she had been with her MBA course on a mindfulness retreat. As the team members walked and talked, she listened. They talked about their pets, cousins, house extensions, children, and she listened. She allowed the team time to get to know one another and time to think. She allowed herself a luxury of getting to know her new team as human beings, not as broken clogs in a broken process.
The away day gave the team some space to think about who they are, what they want their day to day work to be and feel like, what they are worried about and what they love about their jobs. It gave them the time to think about what if the future could be different. The team came away with their own understanding of the value of their work and a clear team charter detailing their values and behaviours they wish to live by at work. They reinstated respect for one another, which brought about much higher respect for applicants. Sarah realised that resistance to change meant they cared. They showed commitment and dedication and also exposed their fears of the unknown. The process improvement was about to change their jobs, their routines, and their known was about to be challenged. Appreciation of a lean initiative as change has been beneficial for Sarah. She has since always focused on value for both the end user and the process owner. She is still a lean enthusiast but she has found better head and heart balance. She is still seeking perfection.
Pause, create ease
It is time to pause and digest what e have learnt from Sarah’s story. Even though the HE sector is in a constant state of urgency, creating space and time to think does pay off. People at ease perform much better, are happier and joy to be around. Many lean practitioners start with a clear voice of the customer in their head. That voice becomes their focus and so it should be. However, as we have seen from Sarah’s story, lean is also about respecting the people who deliver the service and every lean initiative follows an organisation change pattern.
The organisation culture assessment and the readiness for change is a useful initial indicator of how the people will react and embrace the change. The feelings and stories around change will disclose the organisation’s memory of change and the appetite for lean. The dilemma between prioritising the voice of the customer and the people involved is a common conundrum for all lean practitioners and there is no straightforward answer. The combination of coaching techniques and lean may be one of the approaches that could facilitate potential tension. Coaching brings a non-judgmental and exploratory angle to process improvement and explores the human feelings and anxieties in an open and positive way.
Lean as originally designed in the manufacturing context is very process oriented and even though it does emphasize respect for people, making the process flow well and effectively is a priority. In our educational context we are surrounded by processes but all these are designed by people for people and it is paramount to see the human element behind the process. The definition of value in this context becomes multifaceted and it will add an emotional dimension to any educational lean initiatives.
There may be frustration, anger and tiredness and it is worthwhile to acknowledge all of this before we launch into any further actions. The sensations accompanying a broken process may be negative to start with and the awareness rising of what lies behind it all is crucial. Is it a poor IT system that is ruling the process or could it be the organisational culture that is interfering with smooth operations? The awareness stage requires more research, data gathering and understanding of what is happening, who is involved and what are the potential hurdles to overcome. Only then we can start mobilising the energy and acknowledging the need to act, to start the change with a shared vision.
If you are itching to get stuck into a lean initiative, we are proud that with this story we have enthused you. But, please, pause….allow yourself time to think about what if the future could be different, for you, your colleagues and most importantly for your students.
(This is an adapted Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Global Lean for Higher Education: A Themed Anthology of Case Studies, Approaches, and Tools on 17th July 2019, available online: http://www.routledge.com/9780367024284.)
References
Kline, N. 1999. Time to think. Listening to ignite human mind. London: Octopus Publishing Group Ltd.
Billing, D. 1998. Quality Management and Organisational Structure in Higher Education. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 20(2), 139–159.
Johnson, G. 2001. Mapping and re-mapping organisational culture: A local government example. Exploring Public Sector Strategy, Harlow et al.: Pearson Education, pp.300–316.
Joyce, P. and Sills, Ch. 2018. Skills in Gestalt. Counselling and Psychoterapy. London: Sage Publications Ltd.
Smircich, L. 1983. Concepts of culture and organizational analysis. Administrative Science Quarterly, 28, 339–358.
