This tactics guide is designed to get you thinking ‘customer’.
There’s always plenty of talk about being ‘customer centric’ or ‘putting the customer at the heart of what we do’ but in reality a command and control ideology ‘pulls’ management back into silo, activity, unit cost thinking… and the good words are just more corporate wallpaper.
This guide will get the focus back with some useful exercises and activities you can undertake and engage others in.
From the Vanguard archives and recorded on 02 December 2019, watch John Seddon debate the future of public services at the Institute of Government with David Walker, former Managing Director of the Audit Commission and Kathy Evans, Chief Executive of Children England. John argues it is time we made managers who deliver public services responsible, rather than compliant; an essential prerequisite for innovation.
For a while now, everybody has been talking about the importance of understanding the ‘customer journey’. Vanguard’s Toby Rubbra outlines the alternative to journey mapping; building a system picture. System pictures enable you or those you are working with, to make the largely invisible perspectives and assumptions that shape the design and management of work, visible. Informed choices can then be made to act on the real levers for change; the levers that enable the system to fundamentally do better things.
John Seddon, Vanguard’s Managing Director, describes Buurtzorg, an organisation design for social care that originated in The Netherlands and was developed by Jos de Blok.
John outlines how Buurtzorg design and manage work, using a logic that is diametrically opposed to traditional command and control thinking. The system gives recipients of care what they need. It delivers better service at lower cost, reducing admissions and hospital stays.
Here is another guide from our ‘tactics’ series for you to dip into. There are lots of questions for you and your teams to get your teeth into.
Listen to Chapter 1 of John Seddon’s latest book ‘Beyond Command and Control’ to find out what the biggest problem is with command and control management.
