Engineering Relationships for Health w/ Mark Ebbens

Mark, what was the biggest eye opener you had with a client?

It was working with the customer recently that had no idea exactly what they wanted to do or how to do it. They just needed help.

Hi, my name is Adam Durrell and I'm the host of the Account Experience podcast. My sphere of operations is really in the demilitarized zone of Account experience which has disputed borders on CX land and the country that they account management. And that, my peace loving friends, is why we call it MXperience. And every week on the podcast I make further incursions into this territory by talking to an industry leader who really opens up on best practices and tips to help you develop your Account Experience program. Out of interest, I am also a father of four, a founder and fantastically interested in human relationships and I love anything that furthers the quality of business relationships. And today I'm talking to a remarkable individual. His name is Mark Evans and he spent most of his career helping organisations transform. And the industries include manufacturing to aviation, from life sciences to healthcare. So it's a pretty interesting range we get through today. Mark has run the consulting businesses for two of the largest global medtech businesses. You'll know the names GE Phillips, they've been helping. Also, he's been helping large hospitals and healthcare groups transform the way that healthcare is delivered by harnessing technology, digital and change. I mean this affects all of us in this world. At some stage we all go through the healthcare pipeline and I'm captivated by his passion for the challenges that these healthcare systems face and I'm really looking forward to digging into finding out why it's often so difficult for organizations to capture the value of the frankly huge investments that they make into digital transformation. Mark, hello and welcome to the Account Experience podcast. How you doing?

I'm good, thanks. Hello Adam, thank you so much for having me on your podcast. I'm really looking forward to this chat.

Well, thanks a lot. I wrote, you know, I did a lot of show notes on this and you know, was trying to go into this with guests and what I wrote across the top in big letters was hello, amazing transformation guy. Which makes you sound a bit like a magician I think, but I mean you've had quite career and pretty big companies. I mean, why don't you just bring us up to speed on, you know, color in some of the roles that you've had in industry?

Yeah, well, I mean I was, I always say I was an engineer from about the age of four when my dad came home with my first LEGO set from one of his travels. And I was so sort of taken by the idea of making things work that I just was destined to be an engineer when I went through school and study and all that kind of thing. And I cut my teeth in really heavy industry, the steel industry in Wales. You know, you can't get much heavier than that. But then it gradually got more and more kind of precise. You know, I went into manufacturing, I went to Japan, I went into aviation with ge, dream job on the biggest aircraft engines in the world. And then someone said, can you come over to healthcare? Okay, why would I go to healthcare? I'm an engineer. And then I realized it's because the skills that I developed in transformation, improvement, reimagining and redesigning the way businesses work were completely transferable. And in fact, healthcare needed it desperately, that kind of skill. So I said, I'll give it a go. And I started up with GE Healthcare with about two or three of us trying to build this consultancy business. And it got much, much bigger. And I did some amazing things and was part of amazing things with customers, and then got tapped on the shoulder by Philips and asked to do the same with them. So I really sort of had a bit of. Yeah. If you look at my resume, you'd say, wow, this guy does everything, but what is he? And I think you started to try and capture with the common theme of transformation, really.

I really want to dig into this. I've got a personal passion for quality and the quality of relationships. So if it's okay with you, Mark, I'd like to dive into that a bit later on. Let's add a little bit of detail to the roles that you did. So, for example, let's take ge, for example, and the work that you did on consulting. Can you describe a typical day at the mri? Face. I suppose I was going to say coal face, but it's more. Say something.

You're not far away with the term coalface. Because I always used to say that consulting and health gear is a bit like going into combat. Consulting is a contact sport. I truly believe that as hybrid as we are, you can't deliver real change remotely. You have to be close to the people and almost hand in hand with the people that are trying to make this change happen. And we were living and breathing that every day. You know, we were in some of the most challenged hospitals and health systems in the uk, Europe, Middle east, wherever it might be. And it's only then that you see that they're surrounded by fires that they need to put out. I guess this will keep coming up as we chat, is that you can have the best design, technology, digital app, whatever it might, product, drug, whatever you might be offering to the healthcare system. But most healthcare leaders are thinking, that's great, but how am I gonna get through today or tomorrow or next month? You know, it really is that stressful and that complex and dynamic that you have to see it, to believe it and then to understand it. You know, to understand the problems that people face and how to get over them. And technology is only part of it. You know, products are any part of it. It's the real change that people have to go through in these huge, they're organic organizations. Really.

Time and time again on the podcast we talk about this. You know, it's not a technical solution that people could bring in. It's. It's that culture change. So if we take one step back, you know, I didn't mean to joke about the fact that you're the transformer guy, but there is something in that transformation is so important. So maybe you can also characterize how you describe transformation in the business.

Yeah, I'd love to, because I sometimes get people saying, oh yeah, well that's not real transformation, that's just improvement, isn't it? You're just doing process improvement. And I say, no, actually I don't want to just do process improvement because I learned many years ago that you can incrementally improve and keep improving, keep improving, but never really get over the wall. You know, we used to talk about in six Sigma terms, we used to talk about the four Sigma wall, which is that you can, you can polish a thing so much, but I'll never get any better because it's constrained by other parts of the ecosystem or other parts of the organization that just aren't allowing it to get much better. And so you have to then transform. And transform really means either you change your business model or you introduce a completely new technology or way of doing something that's never happened before. And always it involves organizational, cultural transformation. The companies that have done this really well, we all know and talk about, you know, you think about Uber transformed what was a day to day taxi service. They don't have taxis, they don't even have people. Yeah, but they transformed the business model of how you get a lift from A to B. You think about a lot of it's been done at Airbnb. They don't own bricks and mortar, they don't even own hotels, or they've just become a broker. So they've transformed how you can spend your money to get a place in the sun by changing that business model. And I think transformation is really. How do you take that leap over the wall? And it doesn't always need to happen. In fact, it rarely happens successfully with a big bang, it's usually, okay, I can see an opportunity, I can see technology will help me, but I have to be led by what is the journey I'm going on as a business, what's my North Star, and what steps do I take to get closer to that?

Let me just restate that. I think you'd put that very succinctly, but I just want to make sure I've got it. So there's only so far you can go by improving process and you call that the Four Sigma wall. But to really bust through and to be a transformative business, you've almost got to throw the rulebook away and do something crazy. Is that right? You've got a Johnny Rotten IT or something like that to get through?

Well, I think, yeah. I mean, in essence, yes. But I mean, there's a lot of risk. You know, companies, 90% of digital transformations fail in some way or other, you know, which is, you know, that doesn't mean they don't eventually succeed, but they fail maybe because they go way over budget or take much longer or.

Yeah, yeah. The impetus runs out and somebody comes in and they change situation. That's what I've seen.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And usually it's because that they've bitten off more, they can chew or more often than not, that technology has been, you know, we've got to have AI or we've got to implement apps for all of our users to access our service. And they've lost sight of why they want to do that, what is the business goal of doing it, you know, and it. And it really is interesting to see that, yes, you have to throw out the rulebook in the sense that if you really want to transform, you've got to think very differently about your business model. But if you don't manage the risk of doing that, you know, the governance, Nike, for example, they, they bought out, I don't know if you remember, they brought out the fuel bands, which are the sort of forerunners of Fitbits and great, great bit of technology. And yet that was in their space in the sense that they sold sports clothing, but they tried to do that all themselves. And they don't build devices with software embedded in them. So after three years it failed and they don't make them anymore because it wasn't their sweet spot. So I think it's the governance and management of risk is also really important because you are taking a leap of faith in a sense.

I think that. Yeah, that's it. I was talking to a former colleague earlier on today from I worked at Sony Electronics, a company I hugely respected back in the early 2000s, but that was a company that lost its weight. It was superb on analog electronics and electromechanical stuff. You know, the Walkman we all remember and love that stuff. But it missed the boat on the software revolution. And it has, to my opinion, I think, continually struggled to keep up with that. They didn't realize that the beauty of the experience became in the software, rather in the build of it. Which is a shame in a way, but, you know, reality.

Yeah, yeah. A lot can be learned. A lot can be learned from the failures as much as the successes. I think I'm going to go back.

A couple of paragraphs, if I can, to the point that you said about who leads the transformation in the business. So slightly off beam on this, but can transformation come from the middle of the business or from the ground? Or does it always come from the top? Is it always top? Have you seen quite a lot of this? Where have you seen success and failure?

Yeah, it's a really, really good question because I think that you have to have a. You have to, like I said earlier, your transformation, you have to have a goal that really is sort of your strateg strategy is aligned to that, that direction and that people can see the vision as being something they want to get behind. But actually transformation, you know, and I'll talk to talk about healthcare because that's where I've spent the last 15 years or so. The most successful transformations happen from the ground. What I mean, they don't always have, you know, people don't. If I'm a nurse, I'm an expert in providing care for the patients that I serve. I'm not an expert in digital transformation, but boy, you cannot do digital transformation in healthcare without the nurses with you and guiding you and saying what's of value to them and their patients. Because, you know, simply speaking, who am I to say that this is going to change the life of your patients? I'm not clinically trained, but I do understand how to marry a very good piece of technology or technique or methodology or whatever it might be with a problem that needs to be solved. But I don't try and be the expert in their world. I try to be an expert in their problems, but not their world. You know, the staff are the lifeblood of transformation. The staff and the employees in the system. And you know, I'm sure you'd say of course that the people experiencing that. So sometimes it's not patients even it might be we're all consumers of healthcare now. You know, we're all customers. We all like to just click on our phone and understand that, you know, how long am I going to live, do I need to change my diet, you know, that sort of thing. So I think really understanding that successful transformation depends on it being maybe top down visioned or aligned with the business goals, but driven from the organization itself.

Well, and let's find out a little bit more on how you've gone into understanding that at the Coalface. As you said. We'll take a short break and we'll come straight back and quiz you some more on this one.

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We're back with Mark Evans, who's had an amazing career as a transformation specialist. Mark, before we went to the break we were speaking a little bit about how you can understand what's going on with the coal face. Now you've gone through the whole GE line and Philips. I mean there were massive net promoter shops. So I'm guessing that taking the pulse of customers and the people you were talking to was part of that. But I Mean, is that how you learn? Is that how you transform? Come on, let's really get to the grip, get to grips with the truth of the matter here.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I learned the hard way, I would say, because at my service consulting role, literally, when I joined GE Healthcare from GE Aviation, my first week, I was up in Edinburgh with NHS Lothian, one of the biggest health boards in Scotland, and I was thrown into. You're now leading transformation for NHS Lothian. The event starts tomorrow. You're up front sort of thing, digging a bit deeper.

Mark, you're on the front line. You've been parachuting in with these people. How were you able to understand what they think about the program? Are you, to use a better word, are you taking surveys or how do you get that feedback into your program?

Yeah, so the interesting thing was, I think you're right in that companies like GE embraced net promoter scores very early on and so did Philips. It became the be all and end all single metric for customer satisfaction. So we said, well, how do we apply this to the consulting work we're doing in healthcare? Because we're in amongst the muck and bullets with the staff. And not every day is a happy customer satisfaction situation. Quite often you're getting them to go through a really uncomfortable change that they don't necessarily think is going to make their lives better. They haven't paid for you to come in. Some CEO has got you in. You're the guys in suits. Although we didn't tend to wear suits, you know, we wanted to differentiate ourselves. So it was really important for us to understand what are the moments at which we can capture a good representative measure of customer satisfaction. And so we started to attach our, you know, collected mps. We collect. We always used to issue an NPS form at the end of every event. So if we did a training event, a change event, a design event, a, I don't know, a value stream analysis event, we would, at the end of every one of those collect MPS. And it would be a series of 10 questions, always with the last one being, would you recommend this consultancy to your colleagues? And we found that really successful. And guess why? Because at the end of those events, we'd whip them up into a frenzy. You know, our customers were thronging our names, you know, we always put them at the front and we always gave awards and everything. And we'd found a recipe for really capturing and bottling the energy that we created in that moment. But I used to go away thinking, yeah, I'll be gaming the mps. Process a little bit there because we're sort of saying, don't answer the question until you really feel good about us. But it was a really good indicator, really strong indicator of just how we were making people feel. You know, the old phrase is not what you do or how you do it, it's how you make people feel. We were making people feel good in doing this change process. And I often used to ask the, the chief exec or the client executive, what, why do you choose us? I know you're very satisfied. And they say, oh, well, you're different. Well, how are we different? Well, your guys, you know, we can tell your guys when they work with us from anyone else, because you're. They know they're stuck. They're reliable, they tell us the truth. They, deep in, in our world, they go over and above, they always deliver, and we're always in a better place when you finish. And, and so that equates to me to we're not just making them feel good. We deliver on what we say we're going to deliver, and we do it hand in hand with your people. So then I said, well, how can we make sure that's not just a flash in the pan? How can we go back and make sure, like in a month's time, two months time, three months time, a year's time that they still feel good about what we did? And that's when I got into the idea of postpartum mps, you know, which is we've been away for three months now. And I'd always do this with a phone call, by the way. It wouldn't be a, wouldn't be a survey or an email. I'd phone up the guy or the lady again and say, it's me again, feeling good about us, feeling good about it. And you know what often it would lead to, yeah, we are, but we need some more help.

Oh, right. So that was a really good way of getting some more business in.

Yeah. Every cloud has a silver lining. And sometimes I get the message that, you know, none of it stuck, but it wasn't you, it's us. You know, we're not really dealing with the change very well. And that would lead to us coming back to support, to support more. But again, every, every, every one of those instances was a learning experience about how was our customer really dealing with the way we operate.

You know, I mean, to sort of like do a mini sum up on that. It sounds like you really had some great content with your team. You probably picked some really good team members. And that seems to be part of it. But I like the way that you were describing how you kept the energy level up through the interactions, you know, and that I, I don't think it's. I don't think you were necessarily gaming the score. I think you were. You were creating moments of magic through it, which, you know, that to me, should be taken away by many consulting organizations as a way of going forward. So I like, I like. Yeah, unconsciously it seemed to really work. If you were to, you know, you've done a few consulting geek, so to speak, are you able to contrast what worked well in one and what worked in the other? You don't have to mention any names on this, but again, I want to get some of the backstage gossip.

Well, I mean, one springs to mind, which is, I led a really extensive transformation of a troubled trust, healthcare trust in the East. East London.

Yeah.

Which were kind of, you know, I'll paraphrase this for simplicity, but they were kind of bottom of the hip parade, and they needed to be top of the hip parade or near the top.

Yeah.

And you don't ever want to be bottom of the hip parade, whatever. It's for, you know, performance or financials or whatever in the nhs because you get a lot of extra friends turning up. So we helped them. We helped them through a series of small and then gradually growing instances of intervention. You know, we supported them actually, over about a year and a half. By the end of it, I had about 30 people coming and going from my team to help this trust, and they transformed. Now we codified what we've done with them, you know, in that this is how you transform emergency flow in a troubled hospital in the uk. And I took that to a health board not so far from where I live and launched a program there with them. And I have to say, it was nowhere near as successful. And the difference is not the challenges they faced, not the approach we used. It was the culture. And it was an organization that did not want to change.

Oh, yeah.

And I learned something about. And this is by no means running down that organization because they're a great organization, they do amazing things and they perform very, very well in a lot of respects. But I learned that it lives and dies by culture. You know, you can find organizations that will reject the transplant, you know, that will say, yeah, I don't want you to come in and tell me how to do what, what I need to do. We'll do this ourselves. You know that we used to call it the not invented here syndrome. Which is an external to come in and tell me that I should move more patients out the back door or I should optimize my flow through operating theaters. In a sense, they really did need help, but they didn't want it. And I'm really sort of paraphrasing. You know, there's a lot of complexity in that program, But I have to say, I don't think it was successful. And I think in a way, it was a waste of their money. Not because we didn't do a good job, because it was almost destined not to be successful because there wasn't the buy in there.

That really resonates with me. First of all, thank you for sharing that story. It really resonates with me because often when we're called into an engagement, one of the first things I will ask, with radical candor, I will say, I don't believe you as an organization are really capable of this change. Is this a journey that you're prepared to go along with us? And it should be one of the first things that anybody asks in this situation. I don't also know how you really tease it out, because probably most people go, oh, no, we're completely ready to do this. But it's actually when you. When you hit the wall with people, it is really hard.

Well, we start. I mean, I learned from that experience, Adam and I. I then started to do change readiness surveys when I went into an organization, and they would cover both your capability, your capacity, and your willingness.

Yeah.

To go on a translation journey. And even that is a little bit. You know, all surveying techniques tend to be a little bit inherently. I wouldn't say biased, but they kind of either end up with ambiguity or ambivalence or you get kind of. They definitely don't want to do this, or they seem to be ready, but it was a step in the right direction. So I just used to do. You just said. Which I'd ask them straight. I'd say, I don't think your organization is really up for this challenge. Well, yeah, we are. We're paying for all the software. I said, no, it's not that you're paying for the technology. It's not that you've decided this is a great change from a business strategy. Your people aren't ready to go on the journey with you. And if they're not going to, it is not going to work. You cannot push transformation on people. So great kudos to the individuals who said, I'll take your advice. I'll shake your hands and call you when we're ready. But quite often they call back because that respect you get from being honest and open and transparent is immense.

And that sort of transparency and radical can do. I'm not going to let go of this quite yet. Go back to the first example you had of that troubled healthcare trust that was at the bottom of the heat. What was the special ingredient that made them, made it work for them? Could you identify that? The benefit of hindsight.

So I think there was a. I'm thinking back now, I mean, a couple of things happened. One was we uncovered very early on that they were even worse off than they appeared to be.

Right.

So you dig into the dark corners and you lift up rocks and have a look underneath and you realize that things are maybe even worse than they appear. And after a candid discussion with the CEO, he had a call to arms where he got all of his leaders in the room and he stood up in front with me next to him and he said, here's the music that we've all got to face here. And by the way, this is not an operational problem, it's not a clinical problem, it's everyone's problem. So if anyone's not sure of their responsibility to commit to us changing, let me know. Now, this is quite a small room with the door open in case anyone felt like they wanted to leave something. So I was impressed that he really threw the gauntlet down.

Yeah.

And you know, that gives you a massive boost as consultant coming in to know that you've just been openly endorsed by the leadership. So people knew they had to get on board with the change. And then I would say it really was back to small successes quickly. Yeah, I don't mean quickly as in they happen overnight, but I mean that don't, you know, we would say, what are we going to solve first and in what sequence and how are we going to make sure that we build on the previous success? So in modern agile terms, you talk about the next target condition you want to reach, rather than let's go for the three year program, what's the next? But back then we were saying, okay, the first thing we've got to solve is this, let's all rally around that together. And we would work tirelessly. I used to say we'd be there in the morning, turn the lights on and we'd be there at the end of the night turning the lights off because we work round the clock with it. And staff could see that we were as invested as they were making the change happen. And as soon as they felt that something had changed for the better and they were making traction and then we're getting rewarded. Not financially, but, you know, the CEO was really genuinely giving thanks to them for the efforts. Then it just gathered momentum.

Really.

Yeah.

But I really like that. Thanks for shining light a light on that. It's, I think, some really good lessons in there for every consulting trainer. I'm going to ask you to blue sky for a second. You've been involved with the healthcare business for quite a long time and, you know, I was even listening to the Radio for Today program this morning about healthcare issues in the uk. I mean, if you. How do you see the future for healthcare in the uk, for example, what transformation does it need to do? Or what would you. If you had a magic wand, what would you be doing? Mark?

Well, thank God I'm not the person that has to decide what to do next for their healthcare in the uk. But there are two or three things that immediately spring to mind. One is that there is a real impending. Well, it's not impending, it's here and now and it's going to get worse, which is the staff challenge in healthcare in the uk. There's not enough people coming into the discipline, there's dwindling numbers, there's more people leaving to get better pay elsewhere. You know, they can go to Portugal, Spain, Malaysia, you know, Philippines, go to wherever, you know, the US and get paid more money. So it's really challenging the workforce crisis and it's a perfect storm because at the same time, the demand on healthcare is getting bigger and bigger and our personal demand on it, you know, our consumerism again says we want it now, we want it remotely, we want it at a cliff, want it so. So the challenges are huge. So the technology can definitely play a part in the workforce challenge. Not to create more bodies, but to more efficiently release time to care, is the phrase I use because so many healthcare provide caregivers spend their time proportion of their time not actually providing care because they have so many other things they're expected to do. The other part of it is there is a massive investment in healthcare all over Europe in the digital transformation and they're solving the foundational challenges of digital, which is how do we unify the platforms that allow us to share data to accumulate it. There's less focus, I think, on how you manage the application of technology. So back to my original theme, which is transformation technology and digital means in healthcare are far outpacing healthcare's ability to change. And so how do you harness that in A way that in small ways rapidly puts that at the point of care, point of use, where it can be valuable and capture that value.

I've got two good examples from where I come from. One is in the Netherlands where I live and I've had some health interventions recently and I've been massively impressed by the way that they're able to pass the data around from physician to the various hospitals. And I felt really looked after. It was well organized, alerts to go to the hospital, easy ways of doing this. Digital portals I think seems like a great model and I'm certain that's being adopted also in the uk. I was really impressed with that. And then the other one I really liked to hear. We have one of our clients who runs a set of urgent care centers across the us so it's giving targeted urgent healthcare to some of the very poorest communities in the US where they're often not covered by insurance, so has to be very easy and quick and relatively inexpensive to provide this. And they're also focused on net promoter and what they do is they, they know that the biggest driver of net promoter and actually they've pegged it to healthcare outcomes is being seen quickly. So it's a bit like you're saying Mark, it's tightening up on the efficiency of the waiting process or seeing it actually has a bearing on healthcare outcomes. Patients are happier if they get seen quicker or at least you know, the time to time to doctor visit and the efficiency of that makes a big difference to them and they have better healthcare outcomes. So I agree, I think the reducing waiting times would probably make a big difference I think to some healthcare outcomes in the UK, for example.

Oh, no doubt at all, no doubt. I mean we did an interesting bit of work when I was in Philips with, in Japan. So we went even further with some of the Japanese healthcare providers that were serving rural communities and they say, well, we can't get all these patients out of their homes to come to a monolithic epicenter that we call a hospital somewhere. So we trialed remote guided driverless vehicles that would go to the different locations, take medication, take certain sort of basic diagnostic equipment without trial. Still running now. I think we're some way away from having, you know, some, a drone line, a drone land on our front lawn and you go out and you get your blood pricked and you, you know, it says okay, here's some tablets. But it's, it's a conceivable future that technology isn't the pacing item for that. It's Literally, how do you design. Yeah, a safe, reliable, high quality care pathway that is enabled by technology. I think it's really exciting. But I also think I also, on the other hand, get that sort of, I don't know, feeling of, wow, that's going to take. You know, we talk about transformation. We would really need to transform the way healthcare is delivered and how we perceive healthcare to take full advantage of that.

Need some courageous steps forward, I think, to do that.

Yeah.

I just want to switch gears for a moment. I'm going to dig into your engineering background and I want to think about how you engineer relationship experiences. And I've got this theory that many companies are very good at quality the back end, and then lousy when it comes to the relationship domain. You know, so they're all ISO 9000 and we must get the quality right. 16. Right. And then when it comes to how they deal with customers, they're all, well, they don't have a. They don't have a clear way of doing it. And I wanted to dig into that and find out has that been your experience and what lessons you learned again with your Six Sigma black belt background?

Yeah. Well, I've got a great story for you, actually, which might relate a little bit to what you're asking. So, way back when, when I was in ge, we used to serve British Airways as a customer. It was our main customer, in fact, the British. The GE overhaul facility where I live in Cardiff used to be a BA overhaul facility back in the day after the war. And then GE bought it. And anyway, so BA was the biggest customer and we used to measure our performance for that customer on how long does it take us to deliver your engine back? So almost like your lead time.

Yeah.

What's the performance of the engine and what it costs? You know, you must be happy because we're hitting all those numbers. And we found out the BA really weren't happy with this and doing contract renegotiations. So we carried out, again, it's a quality tool. It's called Quality Function Deployment qfd. And in really layman's term it says, what are the wants of the customer on a matrix? You know, they're across the top, what they want, and then down the side you have how do we deliver to those ones? And so all the things that we were delivering, how well do they relate the strengths of relationship with the. The things the customer wants? And you do this with the customer so you really understand what they want and then you find out whether we're really strong on how we meet their expectations and their needs and what are we doing that actually they don't care about that we're plowing a load of money into, for example, or what are the stuff we fall down on. So anyway, we went through this process with BA and we found out that actually the length of time to deliver the engine was not the most important thing to them. Whether it's 60 days or 70 days or 80 days, they don't care. What they cared about was on time delivery. Yes, deliver. When you say you're going to deliver. And why? Because to change an engine on an aircraft, a Boeing 747, for example, they have to put the aircraft on the ground for a couple of days. Now that's huge amounts of lost revenue. If you're say you're going to deliver the engine on Monday and you send it actually four days earlier because you think you're delighted by sending it earlier, you really mess up our scheduling and cost us a load of money. So suddenly our top, we call it ctq, critical to quality for that customer to keep them satisfied was on time delivery. And actually it didn't matter if it took us longer. Just say, you know, deliver when you say, and their customer satisfaction went up, you know, I won't say overnight, but over the next 12 months, hugely. And guess what, signed another long term contract with us and made negotiations a lot easier. But I always cite that example because you only really know what's going to satisfy your customer if you know their world and you speak to them and get it in their terms because you can't verbalize for them what's of value to them.

I see that so often in industry. In the CPG business, it's the same thing. You know, we deal with brewers and they need to deliver beer and it's like just, we just want to know when it's going to come. You know, it's keeping your promises on that that's fascinating. It really is. What a great look over your awesome career before you leave us today. On the business side, what tips can you give for somebody in the midst of a transformation program? Can you give away some of your secret sauce?

Oh, I don't know if I should give away my secret sauce, you know, but so in the midst of a transformation program, so the first thing I would say, and I think I mentioned this before, is that the goals of the transformation should be business based. So what is it we're actually trying to achieve by doing this? Forget put technology to one side, put, you know, new product Design one side, what are we trying to do? Are we trying to increase revenue, improve customer satisfaction, win more market share? It has to be business goal led. And if you're really clear on that, and back to my days as a Six Sigma black belt, if you describe that in a way that's quantifiable, measurable, that it has a very clear sort of what success looks like, then everything can always be referred back to that. So transformation people would say, that's obvious. Of course, you need a goal. But I've seen many transformations launch saying, we just must implement this. And then the second thing, I mean, I could list about a hundred things. The second thing is before you start any transformation is what I call the discovery part. So I learned a lot about design thinking and the fact that you start in design thinking with empathizing with the people that are really going to experience this transformation gun, breathe, live, understand, experience their world. And really it's a human, it's a human activity that you do before you start planning your transformation. And people tend to skip that because they say, we know what the problems are, let's just fix them. But unless you've walked in the shoes of your customer, you can't possibly really understand and empathize with where you've got to go.

Oh, that's a really nice way of leaving it there, Mark. So you've got a lot of knowledge to tap into. If somebody wants to find out more about the Mark Evans transformation way of life, how do they reach you?

Well, I'm on LinkedIn, as you'd expect, and all my contact details are there and I'd be delighted to hear from fellow evangelists and people that want to share and compare because I really am passionate about this particular healthcare and I'd love to work with others who share my passion.

That's great. And frankly, that's for the greater good of mankind. So I really wish you all the best in that and I look forward to tracking you as we go forward. Mark, thank you so much for spending time with us today. I really appreciate it.

It's a pleasure. Thank you, Adam, for having me.

Everybody, thanks for listening to this episode of the Account Experience podcast. If you enjoyed it, do be sure to check out some of our other episodes. Some of my recent highlights included an episode on the four factors, Practice of Trust. I really learned a lot from that one. And another on the the author of the jolt effect, Ted McKenna. You can get all of these in your inbox when you subscribe and if you do rate us a net promoter 9 or 10. Then do please like or subscribe and do help spread the word. Thanks. We'll catch you.