The Opportunity
Our client, a large city council with over 10,000 employees was concerned about the lack of innovative and joined up transformational thinking across the council’s departments. Change was slow, ineffective and nowhere close to delivering the significant and necessary budget savings. Some success had been achieved through a staff ‘ideas’ scheme; however, mostly these were either ‘passing the problem to someone else’ ideas or those with relatively low level impact and savings.
The Tricordant Approach
As with the majority of our work the starting point for this assignment was to bring together a cross section of the organisation in a design team to better understand the root of the requirement and subsequently develop the custom design simulation.
From this understanding, the outline of a possible simulation scenario was worked through and tested with the design team with the Tricordant consultants then fully fleshing this out into a workable programme, with some interesting complications and twists, which became a 3 day event that included a mix of teaching, working on the simulation and initial learning set development.
Very purposefully each programme, and we ran six, comprised of a mix of staff from across the council departments. One of the biggest learnings for attendees, was connecting with people whose faces or names they may have known but had no idea what they did.
The teaching element focused on the fundamentals of improvement methodology based on the work of W. Edwards Deming and included having fun with ‘Red Beads’ and ‘Funnels’, alongside further input on change management and dealing with resistance.
The Outcome
For attendees there was significant learning; however, for most, the experience of working with others from across the organisation to develop new and radical solutions was the major win for them; and also for the council. Each took this back into their day jobs and within a short period of time were working on, developing and implementing significant changes in their real world.