Defining capability

Another question I have spent much of my professional life pondering: What must a business capability of any kind have in order to create success?

Quite a lot of experience of service management suggests this basic model.

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Capability management cycles

I have spent a long time studying capability management - the active creation of a integrated approach to continuous improvement that goes beyond localised incremental change.

This diagram summarises my current view of this process.

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What makes a good manager?

Five minutes ago a junior project manager in the company I am currently consulting to came to me and asked me a simple question. What makes a good project manager?

I asked him why he wanted to know, and he said, ‘Because that’s what I want to be, and you’re an outsider who knows about this stuff’. So this is what I told him. I think it applies to other kinds of manager too.

Master the basics

There is no substitute for doing the basics and doing them well. Planning, risk management, dependencies, team-working, and all the rest. And make sure that you really do them well – that issues and actions are routinely tracked, that you write formal work packages rather than just assuming that what you have said is clear, and so on. Qualifications are nice because they provide a structured model for management, but just learning to do the basics properly is a matter of attention, responsibility and commitment – virtues without you will never be a good manager.

Be professional

You can acquire any number of professional qualifications and certificates. But for other people to think you a professional, you need to be worthy of the name.

For example, when I recently gave a course on delivery management and suggested that the project manager’s ultimate responsibility was to make sure that the benefits our colleagues hope for are really achieved, one very senior manager responded with ‘That’s not my job’.

Well, no, if you define your job by your formal job description, maybe it isn’t. But as Max Weber – the man who practically created the idea of professionalism – said, an employee is someone you pay so you can tell them what to do, whereas a professional is someone you pay to tell you what to do. I’m pretty sure that a good project manager is a professional, not just an employee, and I cannot imagine how a project manager could ‘tell me what to do’ without understanding what, ultimately I was trying to achieve.

So if my plan says ‘meet these requirements’ or ‘deliver this system’ then I don’t doubt that I will fail if I don’t. But I cannot see how I can really succeed unless I understand the benefits you think these requirements and deliverables will give you, and make sure that I work towards them too.

There are a million other things a professional manager does as a matter of routine. Many of them are not unlike being a consultant. Indeed, I don’t think there’s much difference between a good manager and a good consultant – they tend to merge in direct proportion to their maturity. Think big, take pains, even all do those clichéd things like ‘going the extra mile’. And do not think ‘outside the box’ – just recognise that there is no box unless, out of fear or ignorance, you put yourself in one.

Master the corporate management system

The third (and probably biggest) item is harder, as it is not in the individual manager’s power to do much about it. It’s the corporate project management system – that can make more difference to being a project manager than anything else. In fact I regard it as the litmus test of my own work building management systems – that managers don’t have to do anything but manage. All the rest – the petty bureaucracy and standards and elementary tools, techniques and templates – are all provided in easily used form by the policies and systems and training I create.

On the other hand, if your system isn’t quite that friendly, it is still open to the good manager to take a hand. Except in the kind (happily rare) organisation where authority is either so rigid and draconian that you would be far better off getting another job, the reason the management system doesn’t support you is usually either because you don’t understand what it is trying to do or the people who manage it aren’t telepathic and they did not know that it was causing you problems. If it’s the first (and regretfully, it often is) then once you understand the problem (hopefully) goes away, but if it is the latter, then what is stopping you getting them to change it?



Ultimately you will know when you are a really good manager – it is then that working really is more fun than fun.

Taking quality back from the bureaucrats

I have spent a good deal of my career around quality management. Be it pure ISO 9000- and TQM-style quality management, more tangential activities such as methodology and process architecture or innovation and research management, I think I have done pretty much everything in this field.

One persistent theme in all this experience – and in most organisations this seems to be as true today as it has ever been - is the tendency of quality to degenerate into bureaucracy. For serious professionals quality should be the sexiest thing on earth, but in fact most people find that quality management is a tiresome chore of jumping hurdles, filling in forms, being subjected to irksome and apparently pointless audits, and being admonished to do better by tiers of senior management who plainly haven’t a clue about what your working environment is really like.

Hence the collapse into bureaucracy. If I can’t/won’t join up all the dots, then some of them will have to remain mysteries and I can only get you to do what I want by simply ordering you to do it. It doesn’t have to be a direct order – I can just create a system of bureaucratic controls and reports and you will do as you re told anyway.

Well, that’s the theory. But as every real manager knows, it just doesn’t work like that. In fact, if I wanted to design a system for stifling commitment, creativity, and passion, that’s how I’d do it – replace a real understanding of quality with a bureaucracy.

So how to take back quality from the bureaucrats? Not easy. Perhaps, ultimately, not possible. But here are three steps that should take you some way towards that goal.

Step One – Define quality as excellence

If you want passion, commitment and creativity, then your quality management system absolutely must nurture professional, managerial and operational excellence. If you want to create a culture in which everyone wants to do their job and then some­ - the basis of every truly triumphant organisation – then there is no alternative.

But is this not already the norm? Although there are many preliminary definitions of quality (e.g., as compliance with specification, as fitness for purpose, as customer satisfaction, and so on) surely everyone in quality management would probably like to define quality as ultimately about excellence?

True so far as it goes, but as so often, it’s not far enough. The problem is that these definitions tend to stay on the rhetorical level. In the absence of a genuine culture of quality, it is extremely difficult to move quality on any further. So what is needed to make that move? What is needed is a practical definition of what excellence is. I would suggest the following key elements that, if accepted, provide a basis for practical change. In a sense this is quite simple and already very familiar.

For example:

• Excellence must be the explicit, overriding goal. Not conformity or standards or even customer satisfaction.
• Your organisation can only excel as a whole. Privileging supposedly ‘key’ functions is self-defeating.
• Excellence can only be known through practical results. These results must be defined in terms of achievements, not activity.
• Excellence must be driven. Leadership should be the goal at every level – corporate, functional, individual. To achieve this, innovation must be actively pursued and external research, benchmarks and resources vigorously exploited.
• Excellence is suffocated by ignorance, distraction, trivia and noise. Excellent people need excellent leadership, processes, systems, skills, tools, information, and support.
• Excellence is founded on a personal desire to excel, not a bureaucratic procedure. Translating a corporate plan for excellence into a personal desire for demand recognition and reward, for contribution to every level.

All quite familiar, really. But how many of these are embedded in management systems that facilitate accomplishment, development and leadership? In my experience, very few. And they are almost invariably confounded by the presence of countervailing forces, such as the standard ‘Not in this financial year’. ‘Not in my backyard’ and ‘Not invented here’ syndromes. There is seldom any investment in standing back and looking at the organisation as a whole or in looking to what other have achieved, and little reward for creating change.

Step Two – Mapping your management system onto your definition of excellence

Hence step two – creating the management system that will actually communicate, support and track this translation of corporate goals into local objectives. Here are some basic elements of such a system:

• Quality is defined and measured by intrinsic values – delivery, satisfaction, ROI, etc., not formally correct ‘quality metrics’.
• Quality management is recognised as a key investment, not just an overhead or cost.
• Quality is a cultural value. Not only does everyone routinely ask ‘How can we do this better?’ but there are regularly meetings and improvement systems for making sure that they really do get better.
• Your management systems are intrinsically adaptable – and regularly adapted. That is to say, they are rigorous but not rigid, and driven by explicit objectives that are traceable to real corporate goals.
• The Quality System itself is driven exclusively by identifiable risks, not by formal models or methodologies. If you can’t say what risk your management system is responding to when it makes me follow some formal routine, then what is the point in my doing so?

The management system is owned by its users and stakeholders, and no one else. The ultimate test of this is that your management systems are valued by its users, not imposed from without.

Again, not exactly startling. At least, I hope not, after a couple of decades of consultants like me ranting on about this sort of thing.

But again, how much of this is real in your organisation? Have you ever looked? Have your ever gone about your organisation, in disguise like a medieval prince, to see what life is really like for the teeming masses? You don’t believe your own subordinates’ and HR department’s protestations that all is well, do you? You don’t read Dilbert? Ye gods…

Step Three – Make it happen

Finally, some basic mechanics of a management system that will deliver all this. There are endless things that could be done, but I always feel that these are the most directly useful.

• Insist on black-box management – it's the ideal way to combine empowerment with responsibility. But make sure that you define all four 'outside' sides of a black box - the expected output, the standard inputs, the underlying infrastructure and information sources and the overarching context information that tells your team what they are contributing to - but also the 'inside' side - the basic standards, frameworks and tools for doing the job. Otherwise you will end up with everyone making it up as they go along.
• Promote your best to managing the management system itself. Respected individuals with vision and imagination who really get things done.
• Make a stint in some form of quality management a precondition of promotion. You might be astonished how must there is to learn from a simple exercise like conducting a quality audit or building processes.
• Build systems that explicitly connect your strategic goals and tactical activities together. And make sure that they work both ways - top-down and bottom-up.

What we can still learn from Mao's Little Red Book

I am old enough to remember Mao’s Little Red Book. It was a collection of advice, analysis and sayings, and if you were a leftie in the Sixties there was no chance you hadn’t at least got a copy on your bookshelves. (No need to actually read it.)

I remember quite a few of the spectacularly unconvincing sloganeers that demonstrated more the chasm that separates Chinese from English ideas about language than anything specific about Maoism. My favourite was ‘Peoples of the world unite and defeat the US aggressors and all their running dogs’. I so wish I had said that.

So what has all this to do with management? At about the same time there was a story in the British media that seems to have been published primarily to ridicule Maoist revolutionism. It was about a lathe operator in a factory somewhere in China who had said that once he had read the Thoughts of Chairman Mao his lathe had turned three times as fast.

Of course everyone in the West laughed. What a fool. What a typical piece of irrational propaganda.

A little later another journalist found the man and took the trouble to ask him what he had meant. His answer was illuminating. Before he read the Little Red Book, he replied, he has simply come to work each day and followed orders. He had known all along that there were things wrong with his lathe that could easily be fixed but he did not think it was his job to do anything about t it. Just obey orders. But once he had read the Great Helmsman’s book he realised that it up to him to do something about it. So he did, and lo and behold, his lathe worked a lot better.

Not really very astonishing, of course. Yet I spend my life surrounded by staff and managers – often quite senior managers – many of whom would rather die than challenge the way things are done. And no wonder – after all what would happen if really they took the initiative and did something on their own authority?

Perhaps I can answer that slightly rhetorical question by my own recent experience. I recently attended a long offsite management meeting led by my immediate boss. He’s a good guy – I like him, and he once told me that he had chosen to work in this company precisely because he was tired of bullying corporate cultures.

So far so good. But in the course of this same meeting we happened to talk about whether the company's managers are empowered. Of course they are empowered, he insisted. I have told them they are. Of course they aren’t, I replied (over and over again – it was perhaps not the most constructive of discussions) – not until both the means and the authority are explicitly put into their hands. Which they had not been.

We came to a bit of an impasse, and started to talk about another subject. As he spoke my boss gave a little dig to one his other team members about a project that had overspent without his permission, and how the project manager had had a dressing down as a result. The amount the project manager had overspent was a small fraction of the total project costs, but this allegedly empowered project manager was in trouble. Most absurdly of all, my boss made it quite clear that, had the manager in question simply asked for permission to do what he did before he did it, he would have been authorised to do it anyway!

Apparently empowerment meant empowered to do things that work, but not things that don’t. Bearing in mind that empowerment is of significance only when you need to make a serious decision, this puts the project manager in an impossible position – damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

I think I would rather have been Mao’s lathe operator.

What happened when I asked the Board to let their staff think

A few years ago I was Head of Consulting Services (and Quality Director) for a medium-sized public sector consultancy in the UK. I was a member of the Operating Board, and tasked by the MD with making the organisation's services and capabilities more dynamic. After quite a lot of thought and quite a lot of talking, I started to home in on the idea that the best people to decide how to do this were their own consultants.

After all, as I used to put it, our clients pay us £35,000 every day for advice about how to improve their organisations - so why don't we ask the people they trust to help us too?

The reaction was fascinating. Or dispiriting.

At one extreme was the HR Director, who suggested that it would simply degenerate into navel-gazing - an interesting response from the one person you would have expected to have a little faith in people. In the middle was doubt that they would come up with anything saleable. And at the other extreme was the common demand that directors be present, to make sure that they worked on whatever it was the directors (basically, as in most consultancies, a bunch of overpaid salesmen) thought important.

No, I argued, the last people you want in the room are the directors. They can get a team together to respond to market demands or their latest bright idea any time. What I wanted my innovators to work on was their own ideas. After all, they are the ones who spend their lives thinking about how we do things, they are the ones who know what the biggest problems our clients face and they are the ones who have spent their lives developing solutions for dealing with them. If they don't have any ideas we could develop, what on earth were we paying them for?

I found it very hard to get a toe-hold on their imaginations. A couple did not seem to mind, and I would swear that the chairman (who thought no-one but he understood our business) was only neutral in the pleasant expectation that I would fall flat on my face. So begrudgingly, they accepted my proposal, with a very strong undertone of scepticism.

Fortunately there was one notable exception to this symphony of indifference and cynicism: the Managing Director himself. We started innovation management the very next week. It worked too. And yes, practically the first question the teams asked themselves as soon as they had a decent idea was, Who can we sell this too?

What you think when you're not thinking

I spend a lot of my time training people in management. One thing that always surprises me is the ease with which people stop thinking about what they are doing and start to introduce key phrases that are simply shortcuts to failure.

Politicians and 'leaders' of other kinds seem to be especially prone to this, so it's much more than a peculiarity of naive managers - I can only imagine how often phrases line these came up around Bush's Cabinet table while they were 'planning' Iraq.

So, if you hear others – or yourself – using any of these words & phrases, something’s very, very wrong…

‘Pragmatic’
You only have to glance at Wikipedia to have a bad feeling about pragmatism. There it is defined as 'behavior which temporarily sets aside one ideal to pursue a lesser, more achievable ideal' - which is only to say, pragmatism decides in advance to settle for second best.

But for many in business, being pragmatic is itself the highest ideal. It's strictly an ideal for people who want their inability to think beyond their noses to look like a virtue. If they are being 'pragmatic' they are preparing for mediocrity.

‘Hopefully…’
Hope is indispensable to life, but a poor basis for delivering results.

Relying on hope alone is like driving into dense fog and assuming that there’s nothing in there you will regret smacking into head-on. As soon as you substitute the word ‘hopefully’ for specific thoughts about exactly what it is that is likely to derail your hopes, you have more or less committed yourself to failure. Regretfully, but quite hopelessly.

‘Obviously…’
For example, the Earth is obviously flat, it obviously stands still, and the Sun obviously goes around it once a day.

If you are relying on the obviousness of things to save you, then you are ignoring the fact (obvious enough) that the whole point of most useful effort is to deal with fact that what used to be obvious doesn’t make sense any more.

‘It’s only common sense…’
Common sense is what we think when we are not thinking. It was common sense that got us where we are today. If common sense were enough, we would not be trying to change things.

I once had to manage a supplier to whom we were paying £16 million to deliver a major new system. He was useless, and perhaps the clearest sign of his uselessness was the fact that he would defend all his recommendations with the words, “It’s only common sense”. Eventually it got too much for me, and I told him that if we weren’t going to get anything better than common sense for our money, he could go. The project was a massive failure, not least because it turned out he didn’t have any ideas that weren’t common sense.

Of course, it's hard to resist common sense, since you have to dig it up by the roots and deny that a lot of things we all take for granted are worth anything. Even worse, common sense is what Antonio Gramsci called 'the practical ideology of the ruling class' (sorry to intrude politics into management) so when you attack it you will usually find that you are stepping on someone's toes - someone bigger than you. Make sure you have lots of equally big friends when you do this!

‘But in the Real World…’
But if you are starting out on any undertaking of any consequence, the ‘Real World’ is the problem! The Real World doesn’t work. I’ve been to the Real World, and I can tell you, it's six inches too small on each side, the light is bad and it has a slightly cheesy smell you would not want to live with if you didn’t have to. So don’t accept it just when you have the chance to change it!

‘That’s all very well in theory, but…’
The underlying problem with the idea of the Real World often seems to be the far more destructive idea that ideas are ‘just’ theories, and theorising is no more use than navel-gazing. Even worse, too much thought is widely believed to stifle action.

Which will come as news to what are probably the two most productive activities humanity has ever devised, namely science and mathematics. The latter is nothing but theorising, and the former is only happy when it has a good theory at its centre.

In fact, if you don’t have a ‘theory’ about what you are going to do and why, then you don’t know what you’re doing. Literally.

In summary?

• A mirage is not a vision.
• A wish is not an objective.
• A slogan is not a plan.

Unless you’re invading Iraq, of course.

Bureaucracy is wonderful

Why do people hate bureaucracy so? I love it.

Bureaucracy is humanity's greatest invention. It's what holds the building up. It's what put the building up in the first place. It put the lights in and keeps them lit.

So what is a bureaucracy? It is an organised and controlled flow of explicit information and decisions of demostrable quality and value, designed to manage the flow of resources, materials and results. What could possibly be more important to any society? Nothing.

Bureaucracy is far more important than writing or even fire. Or at least, it is around here. After all, the Incas managed to have a perfectly good bureaucracy without writing, but I doubt that any great society has ever existed without bureaucracy. And in an industrial society, the vast majority of people only have fire because they first have access to bureaucracy. We get it through vast gas and electricity supply systems, none of which would be thinkable without the organised flow of information and decisions, which is all that bureaucracy is.

Most paradoxical of all - and I make my living out of this paradox - is the idea that we can get rid of bureaucracy by replacing it with computers. But what else is a computer but an electronic bureaucracy? And why else do computers fail in supplanting bureaucracy than for the same reasons that bureaucracy itself fails, namely because we fail to adapt it to its users' needs? Just think, if only bureaucrats had learned to find out what their users needed and then adjusted their systems to that, there would have been no management consultants.

Who could possibly object to that?

Principle 2: Urgent vs Important

In most organisations, the urgent will always be dealt with before the important. Urgent means pleasing someone important right now, while the important is usually only important in the long run - when we will all be found out, but it isn't today.

If you allow the urgent to overwhelm the important, everything will soon become so urgent that the most important thing left in your professional life will be keeping your head above the rising tide of bad information, bad decisions and bad products.

The only means I know of of making sure that the important has as loud a voice as the urgent is by creating an independent function staffed by respected experts who report directly to whatever level of management is accountable for both the urgency (typically project delivery) and the importance (typically product quality).

This is what a quality function should be. But usually it isn't, because:

1. They're seldom staffed by the best. The credit, the kudos and the money all go to the people who do the delivering. The people who made it possible for anyone to deliver - the people who build the processes, create the methodologies, create the training, the environment? Not a peep. Yet in an organisation with, say, thirty project managers, a 3% improvement in efficiency in the system as a whole would be the equivalent of adding another manager absolutely free of charge. Yet the people who do this (and a 3% change is about as small as a change can be and still be detectable) get no credit at all. No wonder quality management and its various adjuncts attract such undistinguished individuals, or that quality departments tend to decline into a plodding bureaucracy whose raison d'être is not professional principle but bureaucratic rule. Certainly of all the many quality management specialists I have met, few seemed to came to work in the morning relishing the prospect of raising everyone's game, not just doing a day's work.



2. The individual to whom they report is usually a lot more committed to the urgent than to the important. The reason for this is simple - the vast majority of managers grew up in an environment in which the urgent is actually more important than the important. And while someone was almost always standing over them with a whip to make sure things were done on time, few people, especially in business, have really considered the principles of their procession. As a result, in most organisations it is relatively easy to circumvent the rules in the name of some short-term goal such as appearing to deliver as promised.

Principle 1: Quality vs Risk

A basic conflict that arises again and again is that between quality and risk. It does not often show up in quite that form, though. Often it takes the form of a manager wanting to ignore some kind of established practice – a procedure, a standard, or whatever – in favour of anything from a well thought-through alternative to the gung-ho ‘Just Do It!’ sloganeering that has served Nike’s marketing department very well but is otherwise all but designed to cause you to screw up royally.

And I have lost count of the number of manager’s who heroically declared that they were willing to ‘take the risk’ of proceeding without the right review, with half a dozen fatal flaws outstanding, and so on. As if it were they that was taking the risk at all! Surely it is their employer who is taking the risk – after all it’s not likely that the manager will have to cough up for the mistakes they make.

But there is an important principle here. There is a real issue that, because most of us work in environments we don’t really understand, there is a marked tendency for work to drift to one of two extremes. Either rules are followed slavishly or they are simply disregarded. The latter is especially common where there are no mechanisms for actually tracking and enforcing compliance with the rules – which seems to be the norm for most organisations, outside truly hallowed ground such as filling in timesheets. In both cases –and in most of the intermediate cases, such as simply pretending to comply – is a huge amount of squandered effort. It serves no one, and we all hate and despise it.

So what is the underlying principle that allows us to extricate ourselves from this dilemma? It is simply to acknowledge that quality (and with it all those tiresome policies, rules, standards and procedures) exist solely for the sake of risk management. If a standard exists it is because it cannot be assumed that achieving that standard will happen as a matter of course. Conversely, if I can demonstrate that the risk a management control is designed to control either does not exist in my case or is better managed by other means, exactly why should I comply? If the keepers of your rules – the quality department, the accountants, and so on – cannot tell you the answer, then they aren’t doing their job.

An example may explain this better. Some years ago I was involved in a handful of EU quality management projects in Poland. This was just after the fall of the Soviet Union so the place was in a pretty bad state – so much so that I was warned that the local electricity supply was so flaky that it would damage my laptop. At the same time I was warned to take my own loo roll, because toilet paper was such a precious commodity that it was invariably stolen from offices. Neither of these are issues I would expect to have to deal with in a project in western Europe, North American or on most of the Pacific rim. But if I was to assure the ‘quality’ of my work to Poland in the early 90s, then the rule was simple – no laptop but lots of loo roll.

On the other hand, by the time I had (regretfully) stopped working in Poland, neither was a problem any more. So this particular quality management procedure was now obsolete. But in how many companies, I wonder, would it have continued to be enforced for years afterwards?

So, a question. Can you actually say you know what risk each of your management controls is designed to control? Do you really know? And if an exemption is asked for, is the answer ‘Certainly – if you can explain how your proposed alternative will manage this risk better than the standard approach’?

If the answer to any of these questions is No, then you don’t have a management system. You have a bureaucracy, in the worst sense of the word.

And how many of them have long since ceased to solve any significant problem? Many years ago I worked for a major global consultancy. Part of my job was to manage the engagement reviews conducted by partners on one another. After building the basic administrative database, I started to look at the checklist the reviews were expected to complete. They had lots of strong points, but also quite a few of major defects.

1. One was that there were four different checklists, even though they did not seem to serve different purposes. But no one ever complained.
2. A second was that many of the question were simply repeated – in one case the same question was asked three times. But again, no one ever complained.
3. Finally, it soon became clear that the answer to quite a few of the questions was always Yes. The checklists were worded in such a way that the ‘right’ answer was always Yes, so what this told me was that we were constantly harking on about things that simply weren’t problems.

So I revised them very thoroughly. In fact I got 7 pages of questionnaire down to 1½ pages and one diagram. And no one complained about that either. Because the result was perfect? No, because they didn’t know what the new version was for either – they just did as they were told. And this was, as I say, a vast global consultancy whose principal service is being more clever than other people. But not as clever as all that, it would seem.