Moving beyond MBAs and Six-Sigma to Excellent Outcomes

Faced with relentless pressures, many leaders look to bring solutions into their enterprise from outside.  Don’t get me wrong, fresh ideas and new inputs from outside are an important part of innovation.  But high performing companies rarely rely on external resources to make changes to the core parts of their business.

The reason is simple.

• • There are grave risks in redesigning without deep understanding of the whole enterprise as a system [people, capability, facilities, environment, stakeholder relationships].
• • Every change project reveals new understanding of that system.  The people working on the change learn valuable things, but if they are not part of the enterprise, these insights are lost when they move on.  Knowledge is not retained, so capability is not improved.

Excellent leaders value the knowledge and capability of their staff, creating by their example a culture of continuous organisational learning.  This is not about tools and methods.  The things you learn in an MBA or Six-Sigma course are important, but unless leaders have wisdom from living and applying the Principles, they will not be facilitating the right conversations to uncover the barriers to real, sustained improvement.  Understanding what is important to the smooth and efficient functioning of an enterprise comes from the experience of applying the Principles through three sorts of conversations:

• • Conversations with oneself – self-talk – building emotional fitness, and rigorously challenging our assumptions and values
• • Conversations between the people around us to develop relationships, share information and build understanding
• • ‘Conversations’ with the system itself to seek out the important information, analyse and interpret it, and see the reality.

Colin has worked with more than 200 diverse organisations, each trying to find a way to meet challenging targets with limited resources.  By crystallising the wisdom of many, Colin provides a practical pathway to change the conversation and start the perpetual cycle of sustainable improvement.  Each organisation is unique so needs vary, but the initial time investment to develop your leadership team can be as little 4 – 6 half days over 6 months.  Most learning actually comes from the practical application of new understanding, so there is little need for time away from business responsibilities.  Typical support includes regular 1:1 conversations with each member of your team to coach and guide, building practical understanding of how the Principles apply in practice.