Why we need to support and value #digitalinsurgents in our organisations

How can you imagine potential digital futures if you are not experimenting and experiencing them yourself?

There has been a significant focus on improving the the way the public sector uses ‘digital’ to modernise the interface between services and users but far less focus on how management within the sector is using modern digital technologies to improve personal, team, organisational and system wide productivity, effectiveness and collaboration.

The NHS England Digital Maturity Assessment (DMA) seems to make no distinction between patient facing and internal management systems. It appears to focus almost entirely on the systems that support patient facing interactions with only one question on collaboration which has probably been interpreted within the context of patient management rather than organisational business.

Local Digital Road Maps (LDRM) are part of the Strategic Transformation Plan (STP) but the guidance focuses solely on ‘Point of Care’ and makes no reference whatsoever to digitally enabled management. So are we going to see implementation of STPs and LDRMs using email and attachments I wonder? What is the digital capability and capacity that is required to underpin successful delivery? How many STPs and LDRMs have been developed using modern collaborative digital technologies?

In many NHS organisations that I work with, there is a growing dissonance between the day-to-day experience of internal digital management systems for staff at all levels and the rhetoric and reality of patient-facing digital tools. Too often senior management speaks in a self-deprecating and apologetic way about their personal use of IT — formed by a set of self-limiting assumptions and poor experiences of IT — rather than acting as digital champions, mentors and pathfinders.

At individual level email overload, crowded back-to-back electronic calendars, complex shared-drive structures and intranets siloed within teams and organisations reveal a lack of investment in training and equipping our staff to survive and thrive in a digital world. The blanket application of Information Governance policies designed to protect sensitive patient data to internal management processes does not help either.

The assumption that staff can use the basic office tools most commonly available effectively is often misplaced if the PowerPoint presentations, Excel workbooks and Word documents I see are any evidence. The first thing that gets cut is internal training and how many organisations test proficiency in basic digital tools when recruiting or at induction to determine training needs?

I suspect that a simple MS office ‘driving test’ with failure leading to withdrawal of the ‘driving licence’ would see most applications removed from staff’s PCs and laptops. Some carry significant risks — for example the inability to design and maintain Excel workbooks properly. How many meetings actions are captured on the fly to a task management system (Outlook tasks for example) and delegated and tracked rather than laboriously transcribed to a Word table?

Many NHS desktops have only recently migrating from Windows XP. HTML5 compatible browsers are slow to be rolled out. A PA trying to book me onto a NED course run by NHS Improvement was unable to access the Eventbrite booking site as her browser was not compatible and the IT team were unwilling to load a current version of Chrome to allow her to do so.

With the proliferation of tablet and large format smartphones documents are still formatted for printing on A4 rather than viewing and navigating easily on a mobile screen.

At a time when system wide co-design, co-production and project transparency are essential to the development and implementation of STPs, Vanguards and new types of partnership email and attachments still seem to be the primary method of collaboration. Where collaboration solutions are in place they seem to be document collaboration rather than project collaboration — a focus on writing stuff rather than doing stuff.

But there are rays of light in the gloom. Individuals and teams are experimenting with and bringing into use new digitally enhanced internal business processes. Some of this is official. Some of this is happening (riskily) ‘below the radar’ driven by frustration at the gap between what is available as a matter of organisational policy and what is becoming more commonly (and cheaply) available elsewhere. There are examples of individual mastery of email and calendar overload by acquiring new personal ‘habits’ that need to be shared more widely.

Which is why we are trying to bump-start a #digitalinsurgents community for individuals and teams willing to share their experience of using digital tools to support personal, team organisational and system wide effectiveness, productivity and collaboration in the Public Sector. The intention is to build a portfolio of case studies, shared learning and peer support on a platform of common digital tools such as YouTube, Trello, Slideshare, Twitter and any other platforms you might recommend.

It’s early days — so if you want to be part of the initial Guiding Coalition pulling the concept together tell us why you should be part of it.

The Princess and The Pea - Or 'Taking the Pea'

The more I work with senior teams and wider systems the more it becomes apparent that the quality of behaviours and relationships are linked not just to the highest things of shared purpose but just as much to some of the basics of self-organisation and personal disciplines. 

Most of you will be familiar with the story of the Princess and the Pea. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is really just a psychological expansion of this fairy tale.  

It is apparent that most of us still cope at work with some persistent ‘peas’ - discomforts, even though we have layered them  with the mattresses of avoidance. As a result while it is not at the forefront of our minds - because we are spending a lot of time looking for the next best memory foam mattress as useful distraction to treat the symptoms - it is actually always there as a nagging and debilitating discomfort. These peas detract from performance, attention and behaviours. They are thieves of our time and concentration, of our mental wellbeing and of our relationships at work and at home.

And yet they have become embedded and justified - with a raft of habits evolved to cope rather than to resolve. Which is why, even though my main focus is on supporting complex system change, I also run a blog series called 'Making Time To Think’. Because you cannot hope to change the system if you are not 'the change you want to see in others’. 

An end to meetings - what your calendar is really for

I am constantly hearing clients struggling to find space in their diaries months ahead and a consistent refrain of 'I will work on that during the weekend'.

So here is a question for you - what is your calendar/diary for? Have a look through your next three months. What does it tell you? If your answer is ‘for arranging meetings’ - and of course for most of us our diary is full of meetings - then that may be the source of a lot of your tribulations. Do you rule your calendar or does it rule you?

Lets start by trying to change the tyrannical mental model we have about that ubiquitous Outlook, Google or Apple calendar being for scheduling 'meetings'. Try thinking of it like this:

Your diary/calendar is for scheduling your life - personal and for work. Not for scheduling meetings.

Lets pretend for a moment that there is no such thing as a ‘meeting’. There is only work you do on your own priorities sometimes with others to help you and work you do with others to help them with their priorities.

Lets set ourselves some rules

1. You are going to avoid as far as possible scheduling a 'meeting' or accepting an invitation to a 'meeting' - you are only ever going to ‘work together on…’. 
2. When asking others to join you to work on a task you are always going to be specific about what value you are asking them to add to the session  - and when someone else asks you to join them at a ‘meeting’ then you will always ask them to be specific about what value they are expecting you to add to the session.
3. Never schedule work into your time-off - that is an oxymoron. 
4. All sessions where you are working with others will start on time and finish on time. Arriving late is a gross discourtesy to the host and overrunning is a gross discourtesy by the host. Which leads to:
5. How does it look if you rush into a meeting directly from another meeting ill-prepared and take 10 minutes to settle in? How does it look if you rush out of a meeting with someone on the way to your next meeting without taking time to reflect and process? How does it feel if you have no time between meetings to pause, reflect on the prior session and gather yourself and prepare for the next session. So no back to back meetings - ever. You should ensure that there is a minimum of 15 minutes between meetings and 30 after or before longer sessions not including any travel time (except perhaps on a train when you can use the time effectively). Make this a clear instruction to yourself and your admin support. You can start by shaving at least 10 minutes off the finish time of meetings you have already set up.
6. Can you use technology more appropriately - Skype for Business, Webex etc to avoid the time and cost of travel?

The steps in managing your calendar rather than vice versa

1. Schedule your key personal moments - holidays, school plays and sports days, anniversaries. They are sacrosanct and what make you a rounded sane person. It is also about setting an example to those around you. Overwriting these is a cardinal sin. Only in the case of disaster do you overwrite these with work. Anything else is just telling you are unable to manage your time and tasks effectively and/or you are unable to delegate (probably because you have not spent enough time selecting and developing the people you work with).
2. Schedule a personal rhythm of work - meetings with yourself. Start with the twice daily fixed  1 hour slots to do your emails, convert the emails that need follow-up to tasks or delegated tasks,  review and prioritise your task lists and schedule your tasks for the next 14 days into your diary - giving yourself a minimum of an hour for a group of tasks (do not scatter gun them around the edges of meetings - you are only productive when you focus on the tasks in hand for a sensible period of time).
3. Schedule in the time to work on your own projects - the 'meetings with yourself' where you need to devote a substantial chunk of time to think, brainstorm, write or review. Again these should be a minimum of an uninterrupted hour. Not, I repeat not, at weekends or evenings when you should be with your other half or doing stuff that makes you a balanced person.
4. If you want someone to join you to help you on one of your projects or tasks - then you can find a slot to schedule in the people you want to help you with your project/task. Avoid using the word 'meeting' - try something like ‘work on redesign project principles together’. Be specific about what value you want the others to bring to the session. If you cannot be specific about what you need from them then do not ask them. Never, never - 'Meeting to…’ 
5. Next - accept invitations if appropriate and relevant from anybody who wants you to come to work on a project/task with them and where they can define what they need from you. If necessary always ask ‘ what is the value that you think I can add to this session? Let your team and peers know that you will give priority to invitations that are specific about the task and your requested contribution. If it includes the word ‘meeting’ it will go to the bottom of the pile.
6. And finally - meeting invitations from the uninitiated! You will ask yourself very carefully what value you think you can add or you might get from these requests. And remember - attendance in itself is not adding value - it is wasting your time.

This might all seem a little drastic - but you should get the principles. Think about it. Run your own small PDSA test cycle for the next two weeks. What is the outcome?

Time to make your time your own. 

Why your meeting space is really a 'Black Hole' for creativity and energy

The way we design physical working space has an enormous impact on the way we engage, behave and think. Imagination, creativity and energy can be enhanced by well designed, simple space. And yet rarely a day goes by when I do not walk into a meeting room or potential workshop space that is the antithesis of all these things - all I see is a 'Black Hole' for creativity and energy.

Last year I designed and ran an Accelerated Event for a national project. To make best use of the space we dispensed with any tables (I long ago binned the obstacle course of the cabaret 'dense pack' layout), set up group work areas or 'pods' around the perimeter of the room (created by mobile partitioning - Screenflex is great), with a cluster of chairs outside each 'pod' for plenary briefings.

There was no seating in the pods - just  a coffee table for resources and plenty of wall space for working on.

Groups were self managing - they were set tasks, a timeframe and told that when they had finished they could break for refreshments.

What proved interesting was the difference we observed between the groups that moved the chairs into the pods and sat in a semi-circle and those that simply stood and clustered  around the walls to work on the task. The latter were out and having coffee a good 10 to 15 minutes in advance of their seated colleagues. The difference in energy, engagement and indeed imagination of outputs of the different approaches was noticeable. 

Research at Stanford 'Stanford study finds walking improves creativity' provides more detailed evidence to underpin what we simply observed.

The design of the spaces we work in is something we all too often ignore. I walked (nope- sidled crab-wise is more accurate) into an Exec's office recently. 70% of space was a single big meeting table with minimal clearance even for chairs. With another 6 people in the room movement was impossible let alone getting up to work on a whiteboard. Nothing like the space below...

Next time you walk into a meeting room make a quick mental calculation of how much of the space is occupied by table and chairs. 

• Do you have to creep in around the edges of the table and chairs to get to your place? 
• How much space do you have to be able to work as a group on a run of wall space? 
• Do you have useable wall space or is it covered in fine portraits of your founders or pictures of your latest building development? 
• Is there plenty of whiteboard space or space to stick instant white board
• Is over 50% of the available wall space available for working on? Are you actually allowed to use white-tak on it?
• Is there a resource pack of working dry-wipe pens, large post-its (not the scrotty little squares or rectangles), bluetack.
• Can anyone send their laptop or mobile device screen to a projector or big screen without wires (Apple TV, AirServer)
• Take a picture of the table before you start, then one part way through the meeting an then one at the end. What do you observe? Not a pretty sight I guess.

Carefully designing space - whether it is for a workshop or in normal meeting rooms - is something we often overlook and yet its impact on the way we engage and think is significant. Are we trapped or do we have room to roam? Are we locked in place or can we cluster? Are we working with uncluttered space or are we sitting around a rubbish tip? Are we giving ourselves the space to be creative or are we restricted by our own physical orthodoxy? 

Poorly designed space is a black hole for energy, engagement and creativity. Tables create table behaviours - even round tables. It is better to have no table than one that has been shoehorned into a space it was not designed for.

So next time you run a meeting or workshop where you want people to work creatively, with energy and engagement - get rid of the tables (even if it means you carry your own screwdriver!). And to the cry of despair 'But where do I put my stuff?' the answer is 'leave your stuff, bring yourself'.

The office digital maturity check-list

So a couple of days ago we found out that patients at a NHS HIV clinic in Dean Street London had details of their attendance widely broadcast because someone used cc rather than bcc in an email to patients www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34135866

The commentary rather misses the point - nobody should be using the bcc option for a mass email whatever the case. It is idle, incorrect and just like this is error prone. What it really highlights is that nobody has taught the staff at the clinic to use the basic features of MS Office - in this case email mail merge. All over the NHS and more widely I find staff at all levels using what are now commonplace office tools without the basic training to get the most out of them. This leads to errors and a significant loss of productivity. 

So here is my own basic office digital maturity check list (or pet-hate list) - what are yours?:

You are in an office and all you can hear is the ping of the notifications of incoming emails and people's eyes sliding to the screen while you are talking to them. Because they have not been taught how to switch off notifications and how to change scheduling of send and receive. I suggest twice a day - programme time in diary to do review and action mail twice a day. Otherwise switch it off. It will transform your productivity. 

You get sent a beautifully colourful spreadsheet but you are unable to analyse or manipulate the data or use it for a mail merge. That is because nobody has been taught to use the basic 'Table' (used to be called a 'List' in older versions) functionality of Excel to capture data fields and records in simple databases which you can then use Pivot Tables to analyse or just filter it for simple analysis. Oh - and you can use it as a mail merge database source. So something that is taking someone hours can be done in minutes.

You get  sent a PowerPoint presentation which needs to have the font colour changed to suit the projector and lighting in the meeting room but you have to change the font on each slide in turn (and there are 40 slides!). That is because nobody has been taught how to use and apply Masters and Layouts. Just choose any slide and select Reset and see what happens. Or modify the Master slide font colour and see what happens to the whole presentation (usually very little). 

You get a Word document that needs to have the font and headings restyled to meet a house style but need to go through it line by line to do so. And it is impossible to generate a Table of Contents. So this person has not been taught how to apply styles consistently across a document or indeed how to modify them if necessary.

You sit in a meeting and the action list is laboriously recorded for the minutes which are published a week later and only then do people remember the actions required. Alternatively they are captured and allocated there and then as they emerge by the Chair or project lead as delegated Outlook tasks   So people leave the room with a trackable task list they can integrate into their workflow. (I might be hoping for too much here I know).

Your inbox is flooded with large attachments and you completely lose track of the email trail of comments, revisions and versions. Because this organisation is not using a document sharing tool and if it is you and other key stakeholders cannot access the document to view and contribute. Indeed if they are using 'shared drives' then it is likely that different offices cannot see the same documents. How about using Box!

And as for project collaboration...only one person can see the project as a whole and that is the project manager on his version of MS Project who prints off Gantt Chart art once a month. Because this is not an organisation that believes in project collaboration, transparency and agility and has blocked access to any of the project collaboration tools widely available in the 'cloud' so teams cannot experiment and evaluate for themselves.

Oh - and they still have XP on the desktops and non-HTML5 browsers!

Nobody can learn about any of this or how to do any of this because access to Youtube is blocked. You can learn to do all of this in short-order because you are not alone. There are 1000s of useful, short 'how-to' and intro videos on the web about how to do these simple things. 

Email bloody email - oh how I laughed (and now regret it)

Oh how I felt superior and laughed when, as an early email adopter (compuserve - remember that?), I was told that a colleague was getting his emails printed out and brought to him in a file twice a day. What a dinosaur! How wrong I was…bloody email!

How very prescient he was even if he did not know it. The younger amongst you may not know that Royal Mail used to deliver twice a day. The mail arrived, was opened by your secretary, sorted and then provided in an incoming mail folder to you at about 1000  and 1430 each day. Another folder might have come in alongside it with any internal memos.

Each document had an action and distribution box stamped on it or stapled to it. If the letter had a reference then it came attached to the relevant file if it was available. Junk was sorted into a separate file which you could glance at if you had the time - or dump it in the bin.

So at 1000 and 1430 (after your lunch which was not at your desk) you sat down with a coffee and biscuit (which normally came with the correspondence) and worked your way through the mail and internal memos. 

In between you normally had a pile of files in your in-tray (you had marked them with a bring forward (b/f) date which your secretary had put in her diary. You worked through them until the in-tray was empty and the out-tray ready to be emptied when the mail came in. A nice immediately visible workload measure. Have another look at the picture at the top of this post - which is easier to work with? A neatly ordered set of files and folders or an email in box full of attachments and obscure subject headings. Be honest!

Days had a rhythm to them. A colleague who was head down in a pile of files was probably not going to be keen on being disturbed. On the other hand if the in-tray was empty and the out-tray stacked then that was normally a good indicator that there was space for a chat.

So how about just doing your emails twice a day? Book an hour in your diary twice a day to ‘do the mail’. Switch off automatic send/receive, push-email (a terrible tyrant) and any desktop email notifications. If you want to be really tough on yourself then remove the email app from your phone!

Here is a tip - you can get an immediate gauge on office and personal productivity based on whether you are constantly hearing the pings of new email notifications or seeing those little notification icons appearing on the screens. Try talking to someone whose PC or phone is constantly pinging or popping up notifications in eyeline. 

Go on - get some proper work done.

PS - this is what appears below the signature block on my emails:

I review my inbox twice a day. If it is time critical ring me!

PPS: Try removing your email accounts from your mobile phone and just using your laptop or PC. It makes an amazing difference - stops you endlessly idly fiddling with your phone/tablet during the day to check emails.

Raising your sights - imagining digital futures for the NHS

Updated 21 July 2015:

So the NHS has hired Martha Lane-Fox 'to boost patients use of digital technologies'

. Might I humbly suggest that she also think about boosting NHS staff's use of digital technologies as well! The NHS is incubating a culture of low expectations and self-limiting assumptions about the possibilities of digital technologies whatever the central rhetoric and the proclamations of the proportionately very small and incestuous group of  NHS 'twitterati'. 

The NHS has always been safely far enough behind the digital curve to avoid early adopter risks but given the pace of digital development has fallen even further behind what is possible. For example a significant proportion of the NHS is still using XP desktops and non-HTML5 compliant browser which severely limits access to modern digital tools on the web.

Out of date desktop software combined with restrictive security policies prevent access to, and experimentation with, tools that are increasingly pervasive within the private sector such as web-conferencing, project collaboration tools and communication tools such as Slack. The ability to use technology to work collaboratively and agilely across organisational boundaries (and to engage patients and service users) is almost non-existent. Email is still seen as the default collaboration tool! 

The result is that NHS staff have insufficient grounded experience of what is possible to be able to imagine or articulate an ambitious vision of what the digital future could look like. Staff have also grown increasingly resigned to the limitations and constraints of local IT infrastructure to the extent that they are governed by self-limiting assumptions about what is possible. The contrast with how they experience technology in their private lives simply amplifies this dissonance.

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The original post

I have just come off a Skype call with some folks from a NHS Strategic Clinical Network. By their nature these are widely geographically dispersed set of participants who are often under a lot of time pressure and whose ability to get together in one place is limited.

We were talking about ways they could improve collaboration using some of the tools that are becoming more familiar to the private sector but less so to the NHS. I thought I might summarise the discussion here - both as a note for their benefit but also for anyone else who might be thinking about exploring similar opportunities.

The first thing is to get out and experiment with what is out there. Actually really I mean play. Until you and some like-minded adventurers actually get hands-on with some of this stuff then you will not know what is possible and from there be able to be more articulate and demanding about what you need to do your job better. 

If you want a diagram then here is one. If we simply project forward from past (usually poor) experience in the NHS then our aim is going to be low and we are going to miss a lot of opportunities. If we can provide some new insights and experiences we might be able to lift our sights and imagine different futures.

So what can you do...? Lets be honest about this - if you go to your IT department first you are likely to be told 'All too difficult' (ATD). Its the easiest answer in a risk averse system still locked onto XP desktops and/or out of date browsers. You are going to need to do your homework first - and you may need to go into 'insurgent mode' to do so...

• Find a small group of like minded adventurers, friends, colleagues. People with a spirit of inquiry. People who relate to words and terms like  'discover', 'explore', 'play', 'experiment', 'disruptive', 'there must be a better way', 'insurgent'. These words also allow failure as a learning opportunity as well as successes.
• Be prepared to go 'off-grid' for a while. Use mobile devices (iPads and iPhones) which do not have as many access or browser restrictions. 
• Try and get a modern browser on your laptop or desktop (if you are locked to IE7 will they let you have the latest version of Chrome?)
• Or be prepared to test if at home on your own PC or laptop over a cup of coffee one evening.
• Find people (like me) who are down this path, are passionate about opening up new horizons for people and ask for some pointers (but you are going to have to Skype me or ask me for a Google Hangout to do it - regard it as your first challenge). Put out an all-points call on Twitter or other Social Media channels. You might find others who want to experiment with you.
• Be prepared to change the way you work in order to test the potential of these technologies - a simple example is to start using shared and delegated task lists to track progress. This can be quite a leap - most people and organisations do not use the core task functionality of Outlook for example. So during a workshop or meeting try and log and allocate actions as they arise direct to your collaboration tool.

Some basic tips that might help:

• HTML5: An internet browser standard. Almost all modern cloud based collaboration tools need a compatible browser to work if on a PC/Laptop. So you need IE 9 or above or current versions of Chrome or Firefox or Safari. Mobile devices should be fine. Do not take no for an answer from your Trust IT department - I bet they have it on their desktops!
• Connectivity: almost all this stuff works well off a normal broadband line or 3G/4G. But if you are using Skype, Hangouts or any other stuff the requires you to stream 'up' as well as down then remember that many connections have slower upload speeds than download. Check your connection speeds up and down using Broadband Speed Checker
• Access: If at work or connected through a work VPN then check the access restrictions. Can you access streaming media such as YouTube, TED or Vimeo - there are lots of useful help videos on the web? People like you explaining useful stuff. All the stuff you are going to test has useful help videos. Learn from them. How can you share and learn if your Trust actively prevents it? Does your Trust prevent access to anything that looks like a File Sharing site - which usually covers all Project and Document collaboration tools on the web?
• Always debrief - if you are going to test something then always take time afterwards for a shared learning session. What worked for you might not have worked for someone else.
• Online: Get everyone who are experimenters onto Skype or even better onto Google+ so you can use Hangouts. Its a great way to collaborate on-line face to face - and you can even broadcast workshops and seminars live through Hangouts Live. A Google+ account is really useful. You can sign up for an account using your current email address - you do not need a gmail address.
• Twitter: Get everyone on Twitter and choose a hashtag - build a wider community around your experiments.
• Choose the platform to support the community. Choose one simple collaboration tool to hold you together as experimenters while you experiment with other tools. Maybe a free Basecamp trial or Asana.
• Sharepoint warning: If someone mentions Sharepoint then reach for the baseball bat....or run a mile! Don't even go there...
• Email: Is not a collaboration tool. Why make your lives worse by adding to the email pile while you are working on this together?
• Agile: You might want to explore different ways of working on projects and how these tools can support more effective project delivery. An example is Agile - additional posts on my blog cover how Agile can be translated from the software environment to change projects.

Here is some stuff you might like to start with (links to Basecamp and Asana above):

• Trello - a simple visual way of organising a project
• Realtime Board - an online whiteboard for real time collaboration. Virtual post-it notes, draw, comment
• Mindmeister - collaborative mindmapping
• Google Hangouts - voice and video calls for team collaboration

SEPs and SLAs

As we begin the journey of recovering control of our time lets divert for a moment and reach for our copy of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Somebody Else's Problem (SEP)

The late and great Douglas Adams described the concept of the

Somebody Else's Problem Field (SEP).

In Douglas Adams' The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy Ford Prefect describes a 'Somebody Else's Problem' as:

An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem.... The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won't see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye.

The narration then explains:

The technology involved in making something properly invisible is so mind-bogglingly complex that 999,999,999 times out of a billion it's simpler just to take the thing away and do without it....... The "Somebody Else's Problem field" is much simpler, more effective, and "can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery."

This is because it relies on people's natural predisposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain.  In this case, the Starship Bistromath ("a small upended Italian bistro" with "guidance fins, rocket engines and escape hatches") has been hidden from the crowd watching a cricket match at Lord's by an SEP field. People may see it, but they take absolutely no notice of it due to the shielding mechanism that does not allow them to view the unique structures of the particular bistro.

Humour aside there is a sound psychological basis for the SEP field. Whether cognitive dissonance or optimism bias or the perfect solution fallacy we all have blind spots. And like any blind spot we have to change where we stand and how we view the problem to uncover the real dimensions of the challenge. 

Self Limiting Assumptions

In some cases we did actually notice the problem initially but because we did not think we could do anything about it - a Self Limiting Assumption - we devised workarounds that allowed us not to notice it any longer. This is even though the 'cost' of maintaining the workaround is still there in psychological and physical terms and is greater than if we had 'named' the problem and taken ownership of it until something was done about it. Whinging about 'bureaucracy' and not actually getting a grip and doing something about it is a classic example.

In other cases we are not equipped with the correct lens to see through the SEP field. We have no alternative reference points. Again we use Self Limiting Assumptions - helplessness, lack of curiosity, 'We are unique' and 'Not Invented Here' syndromes to blind us to the art of the possible. In this case we have to break out of our singularity and ask ourselves where we might find other analogous examples in other industries or organisations or how fresh eyes might see our challenges and possible solutions. We need to ask ourselves how we can best get a good 'triangulation' on the challenge. And we need to 'have a go'. Nothing ventured nothing achieved.

The solutions are remarkably simple:

• Name the problem out loud and keep it firmly in view - own the problem. 
• Share the problem - rally others to your cause. It is easier to tackle this in company rather than alone. 
• Ask yourself how other people in other organisations might tackle this successfully? You are not unique and there are 1000's if not millions of people who have been faced with the same or analogous challenges. 
• Have a go. Do something about it..what will your first PDSA cycle be? Once you have got through three of four PDSA cycles you will be surprised about how you will feel more in control of the context rather than vice versa. Once you break the chains of SLAs and bring the SEPs into clear focus then you are well on the way to feeling a damn site better about yourself.

But of course you might be really happy on your wheel so why bother...

Knowing how we are doing - the Dyson inspiration

If we are going to find the time to think differently then there comes a natural but oft overlooked question - how do we know that we have succeeded? Lets be honest about this - would you invest your money (or your organisation's money) in a project that could not demonstrate its return on investment both quantitatively and qualitatively? So how often do we as individuals set out to do something differently without considering how we would be able to measure what we have achieved - and indeed demonstrate it to others? 

Here is a question for you to consider. What is the key feature that has made the Dyson vacuum so successful and has been the one that virtually every other upright vacuum maker has adopted? Take a close look at the picture below. 

Of course the technology is important but not earth shattering whatever anybody says about cyclones and bag less cleaners. Nope - its the psychology of the user that has been so carefully handled in the design. Still cannot spot-it? That's because it is so obvious you often miss it. Look again at both of the devices above. They are transparent - you can see the amount of dirt you are picking up - transparent measurement in action. You can measure your success, get that warm feeling of achievement as you see the dust (and in my case the labrador hair) fill the container. Next time you use your hoover - think about how you feel as you see the results of your labours build up. How the objective measure of achievement influences how you feel about the effort.

So sit back and watch Mike Davidge telling us more about Measurement for Improvement. You are going to be your own Improvement Project. You are going to learn and apply the techniques to yourself that you can use in any improvement project.

Cannot see the video because your organisation has blocked access to YouTube? Then do something about it - challenge, kick and sort. I will be talking about Self Limiting Assumptions (SLA) and Somebody Else's Problems (SEPs) in a later post..

Finding time to notice...

As we begin the journey of becoming our own personal improvement project it is worth considering what we stand to gain once we regain control of our time and priorities.

As you hurtle from meeting to meeting, or one person enters your office as another leaves, or you plough through the email backlog (more on this in later posts) where do you find the time just to walk, think, look and listen? When did you last walk the corridors of your hospital at 0200 hours looking and listening? When did you just set aside an hour to wander the wards? When did you last notice something great or poor - and do something about it there and then?

Remember:

You have to be the change you want to see in others

Hamsters Anonymous

As I work with the NHS I am increasingly convinced that it is not money that is the critical scarce resource - it is time. The time to think differently about the future, the time to experiment with doing things differently, the time simply to stop and think. Diaries full for months ahead. Unable to get people together for more than a short period thus missing the opportunity for high value conversations. And when people do get together finding that you are repeatedly covering old ground (two steps forward and one step back).

And yet my sympathy is getting stretched. Let me repeat something I said in the previous blog in this series. You need to accept something fundamental - this is your problem, not a Somebody Else's Problem (SEP). You are born and then you die. And in-between those two events the  seconds, minutes, days, months are yours, nobody else's. You have control, you may choose to give some of that time to family, rent some of it out to employers. But it is your own time and you are the one with the choices about how to use it.

Let me ask you some questions - think about them, jot down both the questions and the answers on a white board or a piece of A3 paper and keep it somewhere you can look at it and remind yourself why you are doing this.

• what is the physical and psychological cost to you as a person of not being in control of your own time?
• What is the cost to those around you whether family or work colleagues of not being in control of your own time?
• What is the cost to your organisation of you not being able to realise your full potential at work because you are not in control of your own time?

So.......

Getting Started

There is good news and bad news.

The good news first. You are not alone and there are many others out there who have been in the same place and have regained control. There are others who are in the same place and like you want to find their way out and would find it easier to do it with others - Hamsters Anonymous if you like. And there are lots of simple things you can do which will make a difference not only to you but also to those around you. So:

Step 1: Tell your colleagues, team, peers or friends that you intend to regain control - that they can join you, help you, provide feedback or just watch with interest.

Acknowledging you have a problem and sharing it with others is an important first step. It improves the chances of you doing something about it and it is a lot more fun and less lonely doing it with others. It also prepares those around you to expect some changes from your normal patterns of behaviour and work-style.

And now the bad news. You have to make time to do this. You have to get off your hamster wheel  and find the time to make yourself your own improvement project. The moment you do that and do it regularly then you are on your way off the wheel.

Step 2: Take control of your diary and put in an hour a week for your personal improvement project. It will be difficult to find the space to start with but get it in there.

Not in your spare time, not in the car (please concentrate on driving). And it is not for you to catch up on emails, return calls or catch up on reading. It is for your space for you to plan each step in your journey. To review what you have done differently and to decide what you are going to try differently next week - your personal PDSA cycle.

And a handy tip - give your personal improvement project a name so it stands out in your booked time. Try this link for something different

http://online-generator.com/name-generator/codename-generator.php

 Project Angry Moose or Project Aberrant Tuba anyone?

Progress at a glance

In the next post we are going to talk briefly about measurement - knowing how you are doing. But you can start with one now. Draw up a simple table - 4 columns and 10 rows. One cell per week. Stick it on a wall where you or anyone else can see it. If you managed to keep that hour in your diary for your project then put in a large green tick (or if you moved it to elsewhere in the week but still used it). If you did not then put in a red cross. How many weeks since your last red cross?

Making time to think differently

Time is the single most precious resource that we have - not money. And yet I increasingly observe that it is the resource that at work and especially in a hard pressed public sector that is most poorly managed. Yet the solution lies entirely within your grasp - because your time is yours. You live and you die and in between those two immutable points all those seconds, minutes, hours, days and weeks are yours and no-one else's. You make the choices - you are the one who can make the decisions to regain control, how to allocate that time, who to rent it to in the case of work; who to donate it to willingly in the case of family and friends and how much to keep for yourself.

Do you feel like this day after day?:

This blog series is dedicated to helping you think differently about how you can regain control of your time within the working environment. And if you can do that then there will be huge knock on benefits to the other parts of your life.