Out Of The Soup

If you concentrate on changing the culture rather than the business, you'll end up in the soup.

A long time ago I was doing a Master's degree and my thesis concerned the implementation of a manufacturing planning and scheduling system in a food factory. The system took customer orders and worked out which machines did what and when and with which ingredients to make for the order. In theory, the order came in to the factory and at the alloted time, the right materials in the right amounts arrived at the right machines and were turned into baked beans.

In theory.

In practice, the stuff was late or the materials were wrong or the machine was busy or the order couldn't be traced and everyone knew that the cardinal sin was to leave a machine sitting idle - so they kept some stock back so that if the worst came to the worst, they could make the standby product: tomato soup.

So their warehouses ended up stocked with (I kid you not) three years' worth of tomato soup.

This was not a viable way to proceed.

The company had spent millions on the system and had millions tied up in unsold tomato soup (you could just imagine the eBay auction now, can't you: 'For sale: 100 million cans tomato soup, no reserve'). Part of my project was to design and deliver the training necessary to equip the business to work in the new ways - without treading on the toes of the folk doing the technical and systems training.

Anyway, I was delivering a workshop on the importance of managing inventory correctly at 4am in the morning (permanent night shifts are a very strange world) when it struck me that many of the problems we faced were because we were confusing two kinds of change. What I christened 'first order change' were things like the installation of the physical system; 'second order change' was the change needed in the organisation and the individuals who had to work with it. Addressiing one without equal emphasis on the other was a recipe for disaster.

This was the heart of the company's problem. It needed the system to do what it was supposed to do: what they were learning (at great expense) was that getting the system right is much easier - and is much less important - than having people to do the right thing. What we ended up doing was using the system as a vehicle for changing behaviour - and changing the system as a result.

This distinction has stood me in good stead ever since. Now, whenever I have to oversee implementation of a system or a physical change in an enbvironment, I immediately seek to understand how people need to work differently as a result - and strive to make the work we put in on the people side is a real and as specific as that on the systems side. At the same time, I am with Herman Goering who made famous the quote from Hanns Johst, "Whenever I hear the word 'culture', I reach for my revolver." In other words, change does not happen simply because we seek to 'change the culture' - the only sustainable way to change the culture of an organisation is through delivery of real things that require people to work differently: workshops don't do it.

In short, don't spend money on systems without spending equivalent time working with your people on helping them to work differently - and don't waste money on training to improve culture unless you are implementing real, physical change in the work environment.

For example, currently I'm working with a team developing a two-day workshop to change attitudes - so we are making it a 90-day programme to deliver real change, with two days' of training at the start.

Simple, really.

- Mike