Building Routines and Habits - Podcast

In this article, I share ideas about Step 4 of the Releasing Agility model. This is also episode 4 in the Releasing Agility mini series.

In this episode I share ideas on building routines and habits, that lead towards the bright painted picture.

Transcription

(May contain errors - as transcribed by a computer)

This is part of a mini series. It's the consulting model that I use when I'm working with clients to help them move smoothly and quickly towards their goals. We've covered already in the previous three episodes the first three steps of a 5 step model.

It isn't a prescriptive model. It's a model to get you thinking as a leader or manager about the various aspects that need to come together in order to move smoothly and quickly.

I call it releasing agility because what we're trying to do is identify the things that are stopping us from moving smoothly and quickly and remove them, work around them, get past them. As mentioned in all of the other episodes this is also applicable for our own personal lives. It's actually the model that I use for my own personal life, for my own goals, for my own vision of the future.

So let's jump into step number 4 which is routines and processes. Now this is where a lot of consultants, a lot of managers, a lot of leaders dabble and spend a lot of time on. This is the, you know, the processes that happen in organization, the routines, are we gonna do this agile model, this waterfall model, whatever, how do we get X done - etc. There's all sorts of different stuff in here. But the point is there's no point in dabbling around with this if we have the wrong people, overcoming the wrong obstacles, moving in the wrong direction.

And that's why the previous three steps in the model I always say belong to leaders and managers. It's about getting clarity and it's about getting alignment. We're going to paint a bright painted picture which is emotional, compelling, exciting. We're gonna ask a question. Well, if it is so compelling and exciting, why we're not already there yet?

What's stopping us? And then we're gonna put our hand on our heart and look around the team and say, this is the team to get it done or not. And we've covered that in the previous three.

So once we've got these three things in place or at least we're working on them, we can start to think about what routines and processes are gonna help us achieve those outcomes. And like I say, this is where a lot of people dabble and spend a lot of time.

But actually sometimes in a counterintuitive way, we make the organization slower and more cumbersome if we get this wrong.

Now, of course, I've mentioned the model is also suitable for our own lives. And again, get yourself on social media. It's full of people talking about how to build better habits, how to build better routines, you know. People seem obsessed with other people's routines to try and steal bits of it. It makes a lot of sense because if we have good routines and processes in place then we can almost kind of like let go of the painted picture to some extent and the goals.

Because if we follow the routines and processes and they're good and they're well thought through and they're well designed and they're sustainable, then we'll end up in a really really positive place in the future if all we did was stick with those routines and processes.

And actually, when we're trying to release agility in an organization particularly, we want to be looking at routines and processes because mostly it will be these things that are stopping us from moving smoothly and quickly.

In fact, we may well have identified many routines and processes or at least, you know, huge categories of work when we've done step 2 which is to identify our obstacles.

And so now we need to get to work building routines and processes.

Let's say for example one of the biggest problems in many organizations is that decision making often flies up the chain all the time to the point where you end up with steer-cos and governance boards and all kinds of different processes and routines to try and deal with the problem that people can't make decisions further down in the organization.

Instead of building red tape, what we want to be looking at is why don't people make decisions in the first place?

Is it sense of fear they'll get into trouble? You know, are they equipped to deal with those decisions?

Do some of these decisions rightly need to ripple up to leaders and managers because there's consequences, huge consequences on the other side of making that decision - that makes sense.

But what can we do to try and remove the need for everything to ripple up to a steerco or a governance board?

In one other company I was working in, they had a 14 stage customer support model. When a customer raised an issue, it went through 14 different stages before it came to a resolution. It was taking them about 3 or 4 weeks to deal with customer issues.

When we dug into this and looked at this routine and this process, we realized that it was built because managers had asked for a report.

They'd asked for a report every Wednesday giving them how many customer cases, were in each team.

So what the team did to avoid getting into trouble, to avoid being the person or the department that had the highest number of cases, was they built a process that was really complicated with all of these different stages.

But the thing that happened was 3 or 4 minutes before that report was generated, people were moving cases all across this process.

You know, If you're in the support team, you'd move it into the in-depth support team or the development team or, you know, all of these different queues, these different places that these cases could live. So that when the snapshot was taken, you weren't the one that got told off by management.

Now, the real insidious side effect of this was not only a huge amount of human potential in the organization was spent trying to move stuff around to avoid getting told off, but actually the customer suffered here because it was taking such a long time to get anything done.

So when we look at things like that, what we're looking for is ways to remove that red tape, that bureaucracy, that nonsense that's affecting the customer. And we managed to streamline this process down to most cases taking anywhere between 1 or 2 days to be resolved in their entirety And a process that only had 4 different stages left in it.

We got rid of the management report because it made no sense whatsoever. A weekly snapshot that wasn't even accurate makes no sense at all to even use it. And what we found was that customer satisfaction went up. Customer cases actually went down bizarrely. People felt more happiness in their role.

They were no longer having to play to the management reporting system and instead were able to do the right thing for the customer. That's a great example of releasing agility where we looked at what the problems were. We spoke to the team, highly qualified team, good team. All they were trying to do was just cover their backs and not get told off. And then we optimized the routine and the process to make sure it worked from the customer's perspective.

And you will find many many routines and processes in an organization that could be fine tuned optimized or even removed to allow work to flow, to allow us to get smoother and quicker at achieving our business goals.

Another example and one you might wanna go and look at in your own organization is the recruitment process. So when I first started leading and managing a team, our recruitment process was rubbish. It not only didn't give us high quality candidates through the pipeline for us to interview, but it was such a long period of time. We're talking anywhere between 1 - 3 months for an application.

By which point, the good candidates had gone somewhere else, somewhere where they had a better process than we do.

So we looked at this and we studied it and we worked out what was wrong and then we put in place actions and and tactics to overcome those problems and fine tune that routine and process, we managed to get it down from first contact with a candidate to either an offer or rejection in 2 weeks. You can read about the tactics and process here.

Now part of that process is out of our control waiting for, you know, the candidate themselves to book time off and come and see us, etcetera. But the average was about 2 weeks, and that was brilliant, fabulous. And the quality of candidates went up through a whole series of different initiatives to try and improve that process.

And all points here, we're trying to build routines and processes that take away the everyday thinking so we don't have to ponder how do we get something done and there be 15 different ways to do it.

We fine tune it down to 1 or 2 ways of doing something that works, and then we have the discipline to follow that so that we know that we don't have to think about what the recruitment process is.

It's this process and it works. We can trust it. We can divert our energy attention onto something more important that needs focus and attention.

And that's really what we wanna try and do in our own lives as well.

We want to build habits and routines that don't require us to think about what we've got to do. You know, how do I get to the gym today and do this? We can build a habit. We can build a routine that allows us to always have our gym kit ready the night before, always go to the gym at the same time, you know, follow a routine and a process in the gym, get it done, move on.

And we know that if we keep doing that every day, in a year's time, we're gonna be a much better person, a stronger person, a healthier person hopefully.

And that is what we're trying to do at work. We're trying to build habits, routines, and processes that help us achieve our painted picture, our goals, our strategy with the people that we have, so that we don't have to think about how to do stuff. That we don't have 8 different ways of doing something and each one leads to a different result at the end of it. That makes no sense.

So we need to spend time on these processes. But like I say, there's no point building routines and processes and habits if we have the wrong people, overcoming the wrong problems, and doing the wrong work leading in the wrong direction.

So that's why those first three steps of the thinking model are so important. And they belong to leaders and managers.

And then they can galvanize and motivate the team with a clear direction that when we're faced with these problems in our day to day work, these routines that don't work, this red tape, the bureaucracy, the pointless meetings, the pointless processes. We can look at them and go, this isn't helping. It's not helping us achieve this bright future.

And if you're doing a really good job of management, then your team probably won't even come and ask you if they can improve it. This is really a golden place to get to, where the team themselves are actually making the business better without everything having to come up to leaders and managers. It's a wonderful place.

But, of course, that comes with some challenges and you're going to need data and evidence, and ways to make sure that everybody knows how to solve problems, and whether they're making the world better.

So step 1, do we have a painted picture? Do we know where we're going? What's the direction that we're actually trying to get smoother and quicker towards? Do we have some goals that outline that that are measurable and time bound that we can say we've achieved and then create some more as we move towards that painted picture?

If we understand our current reality and we built a plan to overcome it and we've got the painted picture, we've got a strategy.

Do we have the right team to get it done? And if not, what are we doing about it?

And then do we have the right routines and the right processes in place to take away a lot of the brain energy that people expel just trying to get their job done and work?

In the next episode, we'll close this little mini series out and we'll talk about learning and improving. And again, these topics are huge and vast and this is not a prescriptive model.

It's a model to get you thinking about stuff.