The Five Worlds with Benjamin P Taylor of RedQuadrant Tool Shed (Drop in session)

Okay, well, good morning everybody to our latest Friday morning drop-in session. So as you know, quite often, or at least once a month, we try to bring something a little bit different, something outside of the usual score content. Content that we deliver each Friday. And so this morning I'm very pleased to introduce Benjamin Taylor from Red Quadrant. I'll let Benjamin do a bit of his own introduction, but just a little bit of background. So Benjamin and I actually met over LinkedIn, and Benjamin has an extensive library of really, really interesting tools that you can use for managing complex change and transformation programmes, and he very kindly shares those on a regular basis through social media, particularly on LinkedIn, and that's certainly where he came to my attention. I love a lot of these sort of tools and models that you can use, which are all around how we make the complex easier to understand. So very similar to what we do with SCORE. And so I was keen that Benjamin came on and shared with our community here some of the tools that he has available, and also a bit more information about how you can potentially access some more of those tools in the library that he's built up. So at this point, I'll hand over to Benjamin, and I hope you'll find this as fascinating as I have in the past. We'll obviously be recording this and sharing it later on, and I'll repeat this at the end again, but I think I shared Benjamin's LinkedIn profile on the community. We certainly will do after this again. I would highly recommend that you connect or follow him. LinkedIn to just see some of the fascinating things that he posts. So without further ado, Benjamin, over to you.

That's great. Well, thank you so much, Craig, and thanks for the opportunity to be here. And I wouldn't mind if, since I don't know any of you, if people could just type into the chat, you know, name where you're from, what you do, and one thing you're interested in today. So something about that, just so as I'm presenting I can scan and get a little, little understanding of, you know, who's in the room and what you're all about. But I take it that you're all engaged with business process work in various ways, and so that's the perspective that I will be coming from. So I'm just going to share screen now, so hopefully you can see the slideshow. Yes, so drop in the chat if you don't mind just what you do and what you're interested in. I'm going to talk today very quickly about a model we have called 5 Worlds, and Craig was very kind to introduce me. I've got a lot to live up to now. To be fascinating is a challenge on a Friday morning, but I think this model is a useful way of illustrating some really important points in business. This is a busy slide that introduces me because I am fairly busy. I run Red Quadrant, a network consultancy in public services, the Public Service Transformation Academy, and I do a lot of things in systems complexity and cybernetics thinking and sharing and learning and all of those kind of things. So I won't say any more. I'll send— I'll make all these available as a PDF to be sent around to everybody, and all of those links I think should be clickable, but that's the kind of range of things that I am involved in. And so, funnily enough, I start talking about the 5 Worlds by talking about this kind of classic trope of training. Nod on the screen if you've seen or heard about the blind men describing an elephant before. Is that familiar to people? Couple of nods, yeah, 3 nods, 4, no, some nos. Well, anyway, it's a classic story, it's disablist in its language, so Sorry about that, but it is from the 16th century, where for various contrived reasons, a number of blind men find an elephant. And the story is simply that they're all trying to characterize and understand what the elephant is. So the one at the front says an elephant is like a spear. It's sharp and pointy and dangerous, and it's a huge risk. And this is a kind of, you know, very, very aggressive creature, and we need to look out for it. And the one at the leg says an elephant is like a brick wall. It's really solid and heavy and can't be moved, and it's obstinate, and, you know, it's beyond our power to kind of deal with. The one at the back says elephants are like kind of ropes or maybe snakes. And actually they smell really, really bad. Okay, and so in, in a lot of kind of personal development thinking and in a lot of kind of naive process optimization work, um, there's a kind of assumption that, um, we can all, um, see, uh, our own bit of the elephant, but if we just drew a picture of the whole elephant and we weren't blind, um, or if we could really compare how they connect, then we could see and understand the organisation as a whole elephant, as a whole interconnected thing that would all make sense and all work together. There's a couple of risks to that, and that's what really what the 5 Worlds is all about— working with the dynamics of the risks of being blind men describing an elephant. So let's be clear, when we go in to do any kind of improvement, organisational change work, we are blind men, we have our own particular way of sensing and understanding based on our profession, our track record, our own history, our own expertise, and we're only seeing a bit that we are focused on, and we build a mental model of how all the rest works. But if you're at the sharp pointy end, your mental model is going to be that the whole thing is sharp and pointy, and if you're at the shitty end, you're going to have certain perspectives on the elephant. One risk is that this is what's actually going on, that we all blithely think, well, that's what an elephant is, we can put all these bits together, but actually we are dealing with a snake and a smelly rope and a brick wall, etc. So our extrapolation of our part of the organization to try and see the whole can be very mistaken. So we used this model of starting with 4 worlds and going to 5 worlds, and I'll explain and connect why, to talk about these risks and the possibilities and how these different worlds play into organizational life. Because let's— so let me just go back briefly. What's happening here is a good metaphor, I think I'm claiming, for the different parts of organizational life. So people in customer services have one experience of the elephant, whether that's the tail end of the elephant, the sharp pointy end, the leathery rubbery end, doesn't matter. People in, you know, particular part of management have another experience of the elephant. And these are not just bits of a mechanism, they're not just bits of a mechanism that you can fit together and see how it all works. They are different sense-making worlds. Who has seen an experience where somebody who worked for a contractor and was bitterly complaining about the organization they were contracting to, you know, an outsourcer, say, applied for and got a job in that organization, and within 2 weeks, just like that, they were bitterly complaining about the outsourced provider, just in the same way, just in the reverse of what they did before, right? These are sense-making worlds that shape our whole understanding of the world and our life. and the organization and our role in it, right? And so in customer world, um, people come to us and tell us what they want, right? Um, customer world is where we just live our lives. Our, our goal is to achieve our purposes in life. Um, in service world— I usually work with service organizations, but this works, um, by analogy in any type of organization whatsoever— um, We try to— we deal in a very pragmatic way. We're trying to deal with lots and lots of complexity coming in, right? And so what do we call classically the divide between customer world and our organization, our service world? What's the name for that dividing line between these 2 spaces? Anybody want to just come on audio and say or type into the chat? Boundary. What do you call the bit at the front of the organization that contacts the real world? What the only place where any real value is generated, where we actually deal with our customers.

The cold face.

Well, sorry, what was James's one?

I said customer service.

Customer service. Yeah, the cold face. Very good. Anybody else? Well, yep.

It's. In a lot of places that I've been, it's been the customer support.

Customer support, fair enough. That's really interesting. Those are good words. And in kind of woo-woo organizational development, we might say the boundary of the organization. And a lot of people call it frontline, in my experience. But the coalface and the frontline are kind of metaphors of doing the dirty work. the frontline is dug in defending against the enemy, and very often in customer support it feels like we're defending against this onslaught of oncoming demand and requirements and so on. And one important point to say here is that that is the point of power, that is where customers actually tell us what they want, and very often our organisations are systematically deaf to that requirement. We're actually not able to actively take in and respond to what the customers want. Why? Because we have to fit things into our production or service categories. So customers come here and you get a customer, an A-shaped customer, a B and a C and a D-shaped customer. So those are their needs. I need A, I need B, I need C, I need D, right? What happens at that point of power is the information gets transduced, badly translated, gets converted from what the customer actually wants to meet a need in their life, A, B, C, D, into what fits into our categories. So customer A, well, that looks enough like our triangle service or product that will put you in the slot for receiving a triangle, because that kind of fits the, the, the A. You get the idea. Customers C and D, they look close enough to a circle that we're going to give you our circle service. B, we don't recognize that, we don't do that around here, we don't produce that. Very, very sorry on your bike. And our CRMs, our processes almost never capture that what people actually wanted was A, B, C, and D. All that gets pulled into service world and is therefore inspectable, if we're just looking at the work in service world, is one triangle and 2 circles. Does that make sense? And the customer B will go off to your competitor who will go, oh, there seems to be demand in the market for B, let's produce a B product. Or they'll really need something from you and they'll disguise themselves as a D and come in and get the circle product. And the consequence of not understanding and not actually matching the service to the customer need is that you get a lot of noise out there in the market, a lot of complaints and frustration, but you never know or hear about that. And inside your organization, you get those workarounds because trying to do a triangle service for somebody who actually wants an A-shaped requirement, or a circle for a D, or even worse, a B, means that you have to do that work to chip away the circle around the edges to make it look more like a D to meet the customer requirements. So the point of power there is, can we actually listen in the customer's own words to what they want? The example I use is the flat white. You used to not be able to get a flat white in any Starbucks in the UK. And then you would go in and you say, can I get a flat white? And they'd say, sorry, we don't do that. can give you a frothy cappuccino, right? And then one of the Aussie or Kiwi baristas in a Starbucks in Soho in London thought, hang on a second, I know what a flat white is, and it requires coffee and milk. And what do we have on hand? Coffee and milk. So we'll sell them a flat white, right? And now you can get a flat white in Wetherspoons. It's a product, but only because somebody was able to listen to the actual customer demand Not fit it into the categories in this this case on their EPOS system, but EPOS CRM is a way of simplifying, standardizing, and losing the detail of what happens in custom world. Right? What's the next world after service world? Anybody want to guess? I'm going to say for you it's management world. Okay. So in management world, we do rational things because if you're not rational and scientific as a manager, what are you? And that clashes with the pragmatism of service world where we're trying to get our job done. What's the invisible divide that breaks the flow of information between service world and management world? Does anybody want to hazard a guess? What information is service world sending to management world that is not reliable or trustworthy? James?

I was going to say statistics in the sense that amounts of sales get accumulated up so you don't see all the detail. Nuances in it still.

Very good, very good. Absolutely. Chris, were you going to say something there?

Yeah, I was going to say it's KPIs, isn't it?

Yes, both of those, all of that. I, you know, let's call it performance information, right? So from ABCD being the demand in custom world to 1 triangle and 3 circles being what we are able to comprehend in service world, management world gets a report: 3 successful units of service have been delivered. Um, and I'm exaggerating all of this, but, you know, James put his finger on the point about statistical incompetence is rife in our organisations. You know, anybody who's managing by an average, by a percentage, and by year-on-year comparisons— statistical nonsense and wrong. Anything that's got, you know, 80% first point of contact resolution, that's a recipe for disaster and mediocrity at worst— at best, I mean. You know, any average, you know, if I've got one foot in a bucket of boiling oil and another in a bucket of cold ice, then statistically on average I should be comfortable, but I'm not. So then after management world, there is board world, and board world is further separated in its sense-making and its understanding from management world, I guess, by board reports. You know, you could put this in various different ways. Now, this is a simplification. It's a model. It's just a way of getting across the point that, guess what, all of these worlds are different parts of the elephant, right? So each of these worlds is a different sensemaking experience where, in order to survive and thrive, you have to work in different ways. You have to adapt and chip those rough edges off the circle in service world, but you don't report that in your process analysis because, of course, it's not what you're supposed to be doing. That's where we get into, you know, work is done and work is reported and all those kind of things. And in management world, you only want to hear good news because good news drives your bonus. Therefore, you create the incentive for service world to only tell you good news. So that's why board world gets all these reports, services being successfully delivered, and can't square that with the costs, the overruns, the workarounds, the management getting dragged into process kind of work, and the dissatisfied customers. Because the language is getting converted from world to world. So this is just description of what I was just saying, and we do different things in the different worlds. If we're to succeed, we have to link these worlds together. So that's the basic concept. We've got these different sense-making worlds that can be considered as different parts of the elephant, and they are not just different perspectives on a machine. They are different sense-making worlds. Where people are really understanding their job, their role, how things fit together in very different and sometimes contradictory ways. That gets us to the core model that I'm discussing today, which is built up from, you know, from all of this stuff that we've just been talking about, which is really— which we call 5 worlds. So the point is here that we have citizen, or because I do a lot of work in public services, you'll sometimes see it says citizen rather than customer. So citizen world is where we live our lives, and sometimes we have a need that causes a demand on service world or production world. So you could see this as your market. The point about this model is this can be applied at any level to any system where there is a provider on the right-hand side and a customer. Okay, so this can be provided to, you know, you can look at, you know, internal HR, where the customer world of internal HR is, say, the management of the organization. and the service world is HR, right? Wherever you've got a customer and a provider, um, you've got that split of different worlds where we make sense. You know, you, you, you go to work and you put on a, a different hat and a different brain, a different mindset than when you are living out there in the, in the world. Then there's management world, which has to try and make sense of service world, make it coherent, make it work as a whole organization. We as consultants are usually in the service one way or another of management world, aren't we? And we're trying to make their irrational world rational and kind of make sense. And in the process, my point is that we are at risk of misinterpreting the parable of the elephant and actually acting as though we could put all the bits of the elephant together and it would simply make sense. We have to understand their different sense-making worlds. So management world is trying to get coherence. Is trying to make service world fit together and not fall over itself and not break and balance the resources across all the different bits of service world. This could be many, many, many service units. And then leadership world is trying to set the overall goals, the purpose, shape the culture of the organisation, and create the possibilities of the organisation. And the world of learning and change, hopefully we're visiting regularly. That is, what are we learning from what citizens actually want, not what we get converted to in Service World, and what are we learning about our competitors, about the landscape, about what's coming over the world to us in the future. And of course, that typically gets fed into Leadership World, and Leadership World tasks Management World with the transformation program to prepare for the future and compete better against our competitors. But Management World are also dealing with all of that complexity, all of those workarounds, because Service World is trying to cope with the here and now. So management world has to balance then, now, and the future. So this is the more detailed version of the 5 Worlds approach, and where we talk about some of the elements of thinking that we go into in each of the worlds. We're actually helping people to fulfill their purposes in life. So even if it's a business-to-business, we're trying to help the other business achieve some purpose. You know, as a consultant, I'm helping them to achieve their transformation. We only hear about that after their purpose gets blocked and they have some need and they come to us and they may want a manufactured component or they may want a transformation program, that gets turned into demand. That demand gets turned into our service categories in Service World. So we often start from demand analysis. Do we— can we really think about what the customer wants in their own terms as our triggers for activity rather than what we at some stage in the past put into our CRM? We look at 7 ways to save and improve. That's a model which I'll leave in the slides for you to have a quick look at, but I won't get to today. Service design, 3 levels of fix, which is a powerful way of looking at processes. Can you— if there's a customer problem, can you fix the problem, fix the process that caused the problem, and fix the system in the process so that that process can never cause the problem again? You haven't just fixed the process itself, you've put in an extra loop to look at why did it cause this problem and how can we anticipate and prevent in the future. We look at co-design of services with the customer. Management world is integration of the whole system organisation design. Leadership world is shared understanding of what our purposes and measures are, and both of them are responsible for shaping the culture of the organisation and giving the clarity of boundaries, the boundaries within which you act and have discretion. And hopefully again, we're looking at the reflective practice, training, planning for the future, adapting and improving our processes and our organisation, etc., on a very regular basis. So these 5 worlds can be applied to any size of organisation or system where you always look at what's going on in the customer world, what's going on in the provider world, what's going on in management and leadership world, what's going on in improvement and change world, and how are each of these worlds making sense in very different ways What's their experience of the different bits of the elephant, and how can we bring those together, understanding that when information crosses these boundaries, it becomes something different and can't completely be relied on. So I'll stop there for questions, just to say we have the Red Quadrant Toolshed, which is a way of looking at— we meet twice a month in paid groups, small groups, where we build up all of our transformation methods, approaches, theories, perspectives, tools, and we give those to people and apply them in their context, in their organisation. So I'll send around a bit of a blurb about that if Craig's okay with that, and if anybody's interested, feel free to come back to me. But that was it. That was a bit of a canter through, and I know we're short of time. How was that, Craig?

Brilliant, thank you very much, Benjamin. That was really useful. So Benjamin and I had a bit of a discussion a couple of weeks ago about the topic to cover in the session, and essentially he gave me a menu of things, which of these do you think could be of interest? And I picked this 5 Worlds because I know this is a conversation that's often come up in previous drop-in sessions when we've been looking at different types of processes that we're capturing in the organisations that we work in. And this theme of actually different people within an organisation and outside the organisation, in this case citizens or customers, have this different view. One of the conversations I think we had, it was actually probably back in April, was around customer experience and customer journey mapping and the sort of complexities of when you sit with a group of people to map a process and someone says, well, are we doing this from the perspective of the customer or from the perspective of somebody within the organisation? And that can be a very tough question to answer for those of us who are process through and through, when we've often been only used to focusing on the service world. So I thought this was a really valuable model in terms of helping us start to think about and also communicate with our colleagues about the difference between those Those different worlds that we have to deal with.