Spring clean
There's a spring cleaning gene in humans. As the days begin to lengthen, and it warms up outside, we get an urge to wipe away the grime of winter and brighten-up our surroundings.
Wikipedia: ... cleaning a house from top to bottom in the first warm days in spring ... synonymous with any kind of heavy duty cleaning ... a person who gets their affairs in order before an audit or inspection could be said to be doing some spring cleaning.
From somewhere on the web: "a custom left over from times before electricity, when everything was covered with soot from candles, fireplaces, kerosene, and lamp oils used for heat and light during the winter. By the spring, every inch of the home had to be cleaned to rid it of the layer of soot."
House and home, yes. But what about where you work? Is it - we're getting there - time to spring clean the systems that govern how you function, and especially those that most affect the value of what you do? A spring clean of your quality systems!
From somewhere else on the web: "The nation's largest spring clean is underway - 5,000 operations staff, 2,000 local contractors, 2,000 bearings to be replaced, 2,000 vats to be flushed and 60,000km of piping to be checked - that's what it takes to get 26 dairy manufacturing sites in 'peak' condition for the new dairy season, according to Fonterra's Brent Taylor".
This magazine has a very diverse readership. A spring-cleaning cookbook would be a waste of time - generalised enough to apply to everyone, it would be so vague it wouldn't have value to anyone. So let's be high-level and generic.
In many, maybe nearly all, enterprises, what happens day-to-day is a collection of practices and has grown up over time - the grimy accumulations of winter. Stuff is added, sometimes stuff is taken away, but a lot of what happens 'has always happened'. The reasons why are lost in years of staff turnover, and embedded in the organisation's culture. There may be some shiny new health and safety systems, a compliance regime - perhaps one or more of the ISOs - but there will be lots of business as usual.
If that's you - or even a little bit like you - then now is a really good time for a spring clean. But let's be a bit strategic.
For many years I've done parcels of work for a client in Malaysia. Originally it was adding impetus to a re-branded Baldrige program that was failing to thrive. That morphed into one-off assessments of individual companies, in concert with a panel of CEOs and GMs. This year we're talking about high-level snapshots of individual operations modelled on Baldrige-like organisational profiles.
An OP is one way to be strategic about a spring clean - informing the necessary discussion about desired end points. Before we throw anything out, let's be clear about what we want left. Or if everything goes, what we replace it with.
But before we get to that, another diversion. I've long thought that Central Otago's seasonal fruit - cherries, apricots, nectarines and apples - should be branded so that buyers, here and in our export markets, pay a premium for its unique attributes. We've finally got a project going with branding guru Brian Richards, searching for the 'origin' and 'provenance' stories that will engage buyers. It's much more about the story than the product - the world is full of good fruit, but only we have our unique story.
A recent book by Simon Sinek caught this idea nicely. In Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, Sinek uses a simple illustration to make the point that people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it.
insert figure
Why is purpose. How is principles and values. What is about results, how you bring your purpose and values to life. It's a circle when viewed from above, but in reality it forms a megaphone for broadcasting your message to the marketplace. Any organisation can explain what it does; some can explain how they do it; but few can articulate why. In Central Otago we have really compelling why and how stories about our fruit (and our landscapes, lifestyles and values) that will motivate buyers - we just have to design the megaphone.
Back to the theme. The cleaning up and throwing out is up to you. Informed by a thorough review of your why and how, perhaps with an OP thrown in to co-opt the senior leadership team, all it takes is courage and leadership!
What about refreshing what's left? Here's another idea to think about. I've said it before in this column - and hope to develop it in new Otago Polytechnic applied business excellence course work next year - there's a consensus emerging about how an ideal organisation functions. A century of work on 'quality' that began with Henry Ford and Taylorism and took a variety of pathways through two world wars, the mid century resurgence of Japan, and the TQM revolution of the 70s and 80s, has begun to converge around a few simple concepts.
LEAN, also known as Systems Thinking, is a crystallisation of that century of progress. We're not quite at the Holy Grail - there's still some work to do on the tool heads - but enough consensus for the previous paragraph to be uncontroversial.
So if you're amenable to advice, here it is. Have a conversation about purpose and values, and if you need to, codify them. Be very clear about your strategic context. Then embark on a LEAN intervention. You'll save more than you spend from week one, and never need another spring clean.
Malcolm Macpherson
Monday, August 2, 2010