Paradigm Switch Consulting Ltd

Prisoners of the system or prisoners of our own thinking?

Performance improvement

Towards a lean service organisation

By adopting a new and fresh perspective PSC will help you to understand the distinctions and what it means to change from a traditional almost unconscious mode of thinking to systems thinking. The result will be improved performance, improved quality, reduced costs and improved morale.

We understand that service is delivered by the system (all the elements of an organization including policies, procedures, IT, etc) – not just the people in the front line, in fact the people in the front line paradoxically often have very little control over how they respond to customer demand leading to costly mistakes, unhappy and frustrated customers, waste and inefficiency. And yet management’s focus tends to be on the people rather than the system which forces them to behave in ways they often don’t want to. It is a waste of management time and resource.

“If management were to spend as much time to improve processes as they do in ranking, rating, rewarding and punishment for people (teams, departments, divisions) at the top and at the bottom, the results would be stupendous improvement of our economic position.”  W. E. Deming

We will challenge you to answer these and other questions:

• How does your system respond to demand?
• What are the major transactions between the organisation and its customers?
• What types of demand are there?
• What volume for each type? (do you measure this?)
• Is it demand you want (value demand) or demand you don’t want (failure demand)? Failure demand is created by ‘us’ not doing something right – so far as customers are concerned.
• What is important to your customers? How do you measure if you are achieving it?

The greatest leverage you can have on a service system is to alter the characteristics of demand. The single greatest lever is the eradication of failure demand.

We start from the premise that all work is a process. Although most organisations are designed with functional hierarchies, the work that gets done goes across boundaries. Work is a process that goes through functions.

To improve, management thinking needs to change. As Einstein said: “You cannot solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it. You must learn to see the world anew.”

Contact us to discuss how we can help your organisation take the steps towards lean service provision. Email info@paradigmswitch.com and one of our consultants will contact you very shortly.