ThinkPlace - Organisation Transformation

You've found your 'why'... So now what?

Daniel Silkstone — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 00:37:12 +0000

You've found your 'why'... So now what?

Australia

For people, and increasingly for organisations, the search for higher purpose –for a sense of mission that drives us forward – has become increasingly important. Across business and government, leaders pursue purpose as if it is the answer to all ills.

Our why. Our mission. Our reason for getting out of bed each day.

Purpose has great PR, but alone it will never be enough. And, though it seems counter-intuitive, without a high-performance mindset and toolkit, overwhelming purpose can actually be a detriment to your organisation. More on that later.

MY HIGH-PERFORMANCE JOURNEY

What do I know about high-performance? I grew up surrounded by it. Both my parents are multi-Olympians, my father (3xGames) a swimming coach and my mother (5xGames) a manager. Often at our Sunday family dinners I would sit surrounded by coaches and athletes from around the world listening to ‘shop talk’.

I began my coaching ‘career’ at the age of 13, helping out wherever I could. At 22, I won a scholarship coaching position at the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) with the Swimming Team. Eighteen months later, I coached Jade Edminston to a World Record.

In 2007 I began coaching Alicia Coutts, a genuine diamond in the rough. Alicia’s father died of cancer on the day of her first swimming carnival, she was 7 years old. Nothing was ever handed to Alicia growing up, she had to work for everything.

I consider talent to be two things: work ethic and an ability to learn. Alicia is the most talented athlete I ever coached.

Video of AIS coach named best in Australia

A BIG SHIFT

In 2009 my coaching shifted. Alicia and I set an audacious goal, to achieve elite success not just for ten minutes but for ten years. That decision changed everything. We needed to start thinking long-term and holistically.

This meant:

Creating and sustaining momentum and
Having Alicia invest time in school, work, family and friends to nurture her support networks (you need them when things get tough).

By 2012, Alicia Coutts stood on top of the world as Olympic Champion. She had equalled the great Ian Thorpe and Shane Gould as the only Australians to win 5 medals at a single Olympic Games.

Alicia eventually retired a triple Olympian and a 28-time international medallist. I am immensely proud of our decade-long partnership. Together, we learned a lot about what it takes to chase and achieve a state of elite performance over a sustained period of time.

THE SECOND SHIFT

In October 2017 I shifted again, leaving swimming to join a different group of high-performers with a similarly audacious goal: to make the world a better place.

When I met with ThinkPlace leaders John Body and Nina Terrey I could immediately see they were facing the same types of challenges I had faced with Alicia in 2009.

Theirs was not a challenge of vision or motivation (they had that in spades) but of creating sustainable high-performance. We spoke about balancing intensity with recovery, creating cycles, flow and other lessons we could bring across from international sport to the world of a fast-growing global strategic design network. I now lead High Performance for the Global ThinkPlace Team.

We define high-performance as:

A team of highly skilled people with a clear sense of purpose at the leading edge of their field, resourced and supported to achieve high quality and continuously improving outcomes which are sustainable over time.

Video of High performance culture for your organisation

HOW THIS CAN HELP YOUR ORGANISATION

According to author Daniel Pink, there are three key elements which drive internal motivation: autonomy (desire to be self-directed), mastery (desire to develop skills and learn) and purpose (desire to do something meaningful).

As mentioned at the beginning of this post, there’s a growing movement for organisations to become more ‘purposeful’. This may be through increasing social and environmental responsibilities or aligning work to global movements of change (such as the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals).

And that’s fantastic. These are positive ideas that can be tremendously energising.

But there’s another side to it. The irony is that the higher your organisation’s purpose (say for example winning Olympic gold or changing the world), the higher the risk of burn out.

This is because people with a strong sense of purpose become extremely driven to go above and beyond what is expected of them. Time and again the evidence shows they will push themselves to ever increasing intensities for longer and longer periods of time.

THAT'S NOT SUSTAINED SUCCESS

The lesson from high-performance sport is ‘the greater the intensity, the greater the need for recovery’. This is exact reason the Australian Government invested millions of dollars to build the state-of-the-art Recovery Centre at the Australian Institute of Sport.

When everyone has talent, purpose, mission, and motivation other things can become your advantage (your edge). Things like patience, perspective, timing and recovery.

HIGH PERFORMANCE NEEDS HIGH PERFORMERS

This way of thinking about organisational performance focuses attention on your team’s very best.

One of the ongoing challenges for coaches, teachers and executives is not to become hyper-focused on the worst performers: the squeaky wheels.

If all your focus and messaging is targeted at middle and lower performers, the top will eventually ‘switch off’ from leadership. When high-performers are driven to go the extra mile but their leader’s messaging is all about addressing poor performance, they become disconnected and resentment can build. This doesn’t mean poor performers or those who are struggling should be abandoned or written off. But nor should they dictate your strategy and monopolise your resources.

HOW TO SHIFT TO A HIGH PERFORMANCE CULTURE

1.Create a sustainable leadership team. Most leadership development focuses on cohesion, alignment or interpersonal skills. These are all important areas for development however one lens is missing, personal skills. We like to ask one powerful question of our leadership team: Will you be an effective leader for us in 10 years or will you burn out at the rate you are going now? Personal skill development is the first area we develop our leaders in at ThinkPlace, after all, what’s the point of development if you can’t retain who you have developed?

2. Build bulletproof performers.

As a coach I always aimed to develop people able to perform in high pressure environments without me there. In 2016 this is exactly what happened with Alicia. My first son, Jude, was born 2 months early and only weeks before the Rio Olympic Games. Needless to say, I was at home with him when Alicia competed in her third Olympics. Leaders should focus on building capability in their team, not providing all the answers or doing the work for them. Develop people with the end in mind. You may not be by their side when it matters most.

3.Vacate space and allow your culture to grow. When positive cultures begin developing, leaders must resist the urge to lead or drive everything. Allow others to take over ideas and initiative (even if it isn’t done exactly how you would do it). The ultimate compliment is watching a team embody the type of culture you want. Culture is not scalable if only driven by a few people.

At ThinkPlace, we work every day with individuals, teams, and organisations to help them research, design and implement genuine high-performance. To discuss your high-performance challenges, please get in touch.

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Future strategy for a public health NGO

Sashi Surendran — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 02:49:22 +0000

Work

Future strategy for a public health NGO

Service

Strategy & policy designOrganisation Transformation

People

Sector

Healthy Societies

Safe Water and AIDS project is a Kenyan registered NGO with programs and research operating for 11 years in Western Kenya.

SWAP has a sustainable distribution model of health and hygiene products which are sold from door to door by trained community health promoters from 11 Jamii centers in remote and underserved areas. The organisation also has a research department evaluating the health and economic impact of health interventions, technologies and products.

Operating an NGO in western Kenya with more than 100 staff can be challenging, in particular when working in the space of public health and fostering local social enterprises. SWAP has been doing so for more than 10 years but was encountering some difficulties.

THE CHALLENGE

SWAP was finding it increasingly difficult to attract good quality community health representatives, they have had to navigate adverse market conditions, and the organisation has experienced higher than usual fraud and corruption.

ThinkPlace worked with SWAP and Innovations In Healthcare (SEAD) to run a user-centric strategic design process aimed at addressing these challenges.

OUR RESPONSE

First, ThinkPlace brought together the entire organisation to discuss the current competitive landscape and the challenges they are experiencing on the ground.

This was a critical contribution to the overall strategy as it allowed the staff to genuinely contribute to the strategic direction of the organisation, while generating excitement and engagement in their collective future vision.

ThinkPlace then facilitated a more focused two-day session with the senior leadership team. The original objective of this two-day workshop was to refine the strategic plan, but it became clear that in the backdrop of recent events, the leadership team was now fractured.

ThinkPlace facilitated the team to design strategies to improve on this entrenched dynamic so that the organisation could respond to these adverse events from a stronger position.

THE IMPACT

By pivoting on the focus of the workshop, ThinkPlace helped the team become stronger, be better positioned to work through these issues and re-center around the their “why”: the reason they were working with SWAP in the first place.

We also co-designed a comprehensive strategy which outlined how the organisation should respond to the challenges it was facing, and also grow and strengthen in the next three years. The full strategic document can be found here.

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Innovation framework for an energy sector leader

Daniel Silkstone — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 01:39:12 +0000

Work

Innovation framework for an energy sector leader

Service

Innovation AmplifiedStrategy & policy designOrganisation Transformation

People

The electricity sector is going through accelerated change, driven by a relentless march of renewable energy entering the generation mix.

Consumers are enthusiastically embracing new energy technologies. They have more choice than ever before about where to buy electricity and even how to generate and store it.

Within this context major players in the sector are required to show a highly-developed sense of strategic planning and to display the organisational agility to change their business models and practices in such a way as to meet customers where they want to be met.

TasNetworks was grappling with many of these issues before they retained ThinkPlace to carry out this work.

THE CHALLENGE

To stay relevant in the market, and deliver revenue to its shareholders, TasNetworks needs to innovate. In late 2018, the company engaged ThinkPlace to develop an Innovation Framework. The framework is intended to help TasNetworks “execute ideas to achieve value for TasNetworks and our customers”. 

OUR RESPONSE

The project team used ThinkPlace’s Design System to co-design a pathway for innovation.

Stage 1: Establishing intent to understand TasNetworks aims for the project and setting the scope and deliverables.
Stage 2: Exploring to understand the experience and expectations of Innovation from the perspective of team members, customers and partners to ensure the framework builds value for customers and addresses any cultural blockers. This stage started with a one-day co-design training session for team members, to help them create the right mindset for the design. The course covered the philosophy and fundamental techniques of design thinking such as how to involve consumers from the start, how to prototype and test ideas iteratively.
Stage 3: Planning what the innovation framework might look like for TasNetworks. The team explored a number of frameworks from other organisations, then created the core principles that innovation would need to follow, and mapped the journey from a team member’s perspective. This created the groundwork for a pathway, which was iterated a few times. The team then generated many possible areas for innovation, clustered them and landed on four Innovation Frame. Some of these were close to ‘core activities’ that TasNetworks already does, others were more adjacent to core business. Following this, the team made an assessment of TasNetwork’s innovation maturity, mapped to ThinkPlace’s Innovation Maturity Model
Stage 4: Planning to activate the framework and ensure it stays relevant to the organisation. Apart from receiving endorsement from senior management, a number of communication activities, capability building and other tasks are required to put the framework in action. A test stage was proposed to test and refine the framework.

HOW WE DID IT

The pathway identifies 5 stages to innovate

Identify: The first stage to identify a problem and gain a better understanding of opportunities and challenges
Ideate: The second to Ideate possible solutions to the problem
Incubate: Then to Iterate ideas in a rapid succession of agile sprints, until most hypotheses have been validated and a project with a defined scope emerges
Running a project: To run the project following Tasnetworks’ formal project management practices
Implement: To implement the solution across the network and organisation

Video of ThinkPlace is helping innovate the energy sector

It also provided some focus to innovation efforts through four innovation frames:

Frame 1: Accelerating game-changing business improvements
Frame 2: Creating energy solutions with our customers and communities
Frame 3: Harnessing data to enable better outcomes for customers
Frame 4: Reimagining resources around us for new products and services

THE IMPACT

The framework was presented to the client in May 2019 and received enthusiastic support from executives.

ThinkPlace was subsequently engaged to support TasNetworks to test the Identify stage on a real business problem. The work done in this project will create significant impact for TasNetworks' ability to innovate for a challenging energy future and therefore contribute to the overall shift towartds more sustainable, renewable, secure and reliable energy in Australia's future.

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Wednesday, 25 September 2019

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Rethinking safety in New Zealand workplaces

Daniel Silkstone — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 06:27:06 +0000

Work

Rethinking safety in New Zealand workplaces

Service

Strategy & policy designResearch & insightsOrganisation Transformation

People

Sector

Healthy Societies

The Accredited Employers Programme is the premium injury prevention and management programme for NZ’s highest performing workplaces, responsible for continuously and sustainably improving everyone’s health, safety and wellbeing.

A number of features of the programme were not functioning as intended and this was having a negative impact on health, safety and wellbeing for employees of some of New Zealand’s largest employers.

THE PROBLEM

Instead of being a programme consisting of the best health and safety performers, the AEP was being used as a cost saving programme.

Some of these businesses are just not investing in H & S or trying to prevent injuries and it is causing people serious injuries and sometimes death. (client)

ACC needed a compelling redesign which positions the worker at the centre of the programme and provides ACC with assurance that members are high performers in the health, safety and wellbeing space.

OUR RESPONSE

ThinkPlace had worked with ACC in the discovery phase of the AEP redesign work, which meant we already were aware of some of the existing issues as well as the impact they were having. We leaned heavily on our previous expertise and knowledge so we didn’t ‘start from scratch’. Instead we leveraged the fact we already had a number of experts on the current AEP and the state it was in.

We implemented a sprint approach where we compartmentalised features of the programme and spent two weeks on one area, diving deeper into the problems, the impacts and what a better design would be from a worker, employer, ACC and Government point of view.

Most of the business hadn’t ever worked on something this big and in such a short amount of time, it was a great experience and enlightening. (client)

HOW WE DID IT

Key stakeholders within ACC, including senior leaders, subject matter experts and operations staff actively participated in the co-design process over a 14-week period. The team relied on user typologies (developed from qualitative and quantitative research) to ensure the voice of workers and employers was considered at all times.

The team used current behavioural insight approaches and modern regulatory approaches to ensure the newly proposed Target Operating Model was best practice for this type of programme and future proofed.

To ensure appropriate governance and senior leader buy-in, there were weekly demo sessions to walkthrough the redesigning features and to get their input into the design. This avoided any surprises once the sprint cycle was finished and ensured buy-in throughout the entire project. We were proposing wholesale changes to the operations side of AEP within ACC. These weren’t minor tweaks but transformational discussions so getting senior leaders across this thinking early helped to set the direction and gave the project team permissions they needed.

THE IMPACT

The team developed a cohesive story and rationale for the proposed TOM design. The TOM was used to socialise the case for change with the ACC executive team and the Minister for ACC.

ThinkPlace has since been contracted again by ACC to refine the design further. This work is ongoing and the refined design is due to be completed by October 2019.

Hearing that we won the contract for the next round of design work for AEP made the team feel proud. All the hard work and devotion ThinkPlace had was obviously noticed and valued too. (project manager)

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Friday, 20 September 2019

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A new focus on service delivery for Australians

Daniel Silkstone — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 03:55:58 +0000

Australia

A new focus on service delivery for Australians

Topics

human services, service design

When Prime Minister Scott Morrison began laying out the priorities for his first full term in office there were some questions raised.

Where was the vaulting ambition? Where the inspirational nation building?

It’s there if you know where to look.

Because within the priorities laid out by the Prime Minister – hiding in plain sight – is an initiative that is ambitious, important and utterly integral to the lives of all Australians and how those lives are touched by government.

Service delivery.

Stay with me. Don’t drift off to sleep. It may not be a grand new piece of infrastructure; a huge piece of social engineering.

But it couldn’t be more important.

In the days following his re-election, in remarks to both the party room and to senior public servants, the PM touched on three priorities:

The economy

The Indo Pacific region – national and regional security

Service delivery

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Sunday, 30 June 2019

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Want a more customer-centric business? Try origami

Sashi Surendran — Mon, 29 Apr 2019 01:25:48 +0000

Australia

Want a more customer-centric business? Try origami

Topics

Business design

Remember being a kid, grabbing a piece of paper and folding and turning until you looked at (what you sincerely hoped) was an approximation of a crane or aeroplane?

There’s something about the tactile nature of creating a model in three dimensions that our human brains really enjoy. It makes us engage differently with a problem, giving a spatial dimension to the way we conceive the relationships between people and things.

And those traits can be harnessed when we are working with clients to understand the relationships, needs and interconnections that typify the kind of complex systems we design in at ThinkPlace.

We sat down with ThinkPlace Australia Principal and energy sector specialist Danny De Schutter to talk about how he recently used the technique of business origami to help a large electricity network service provider better understand its customers and begin to engage with them more meaningfully…

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Saturday, 4 May 2019

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5 Essential qualities for a leader of the Digital Age...

Sashi Surendran — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 01:36:50 +0000

New Zealand

5 Essential qualities for a leader of the Digital Age...

Topics

Business design

If you’re a leader in the public or private sector you know by now that a massive digital transformation is underway.

In the near future the ways that governments interact with their citizens will change dramatically. The tools already available, including technologies like artificial intelligence, data mining and blockchain mean that organisations and leaders will increasingly have to make strategic decisions about where they are headed and how they will get there.

And these decisions will be made in the midst of both unprecedented uncertainty and tantalising possibility.

So what kind of leaders will prosper in this environment? And what kind of skills will they need to have?

ThinkPlace New Zealand recently ran a deep dive conversation around leading in the digital age. At our Wellington Design Studio we hosted several government leaders active in this space and UK-based consultancy Adapt2Digital, who shared their experiences about elevating leadership in the UK and Australian public sectors.

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Wednesday, 24 April 2019

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Technology is transforming our most ancient computers

Sashi Surendran — Wed, 03 Apr 2019 02:52:35 +0000

Australia

Technology is transforming our most ancient computers

Topics

transformative innovation

Our attention is fixed on what’s happening in the world of digital innovation. But while the latest Facebook scandal or the challenges of digital transformation hog headlines, some of the most profound advances in technology, are not happening on our phones or our PCs.

They’re happening in the most ancient computer we know of – our brains.

I recently spent a week at Oxford University, studying Neuroethics under Professor Julian Savulescu – a remarkable Australian who holds the university’s Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics. It turns out that the frontiers of neuroscience are a rollercoaster ride of medical opportunities and ethical dilemmas. Questions that came up included:

At what point do you stop being you if your brain is intervened with to the point where it changes your personality and sense of self?
What is the capacity for someone in a coma to make decisions about their own care, if they can answer yes/no questions using an MRI machine despite being in an a vegetative state?
Should neurostimulation be considered to be like doping and be banned from elite sports?
Would it be ok to stimulate or inhibit love as a therapeutic response to relationship breakdowns or domestic violence?

These questions may seem either deeply philosophical or even like science fiction, but in fact they are live dilemmas where the neurotechnology described is either on the cusp of being real-world, or is actively being used in clinical or even consumer settings.

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Monday, 8 April 2019

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The six things you need to build an ethical organisation

Daniel Silkstone — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:15:44 +0000

Australia

The six things you need to build an ethical organisation

Topics

disruptive technology

Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.

John Berger

Rightly or wrongly, the business of right and wrong has become a booming industry.

Across the world we are seeing huge interest in companies and organisations codifying their approach to ethics; appointing Chief Ethics Officers, signing up to ethical charters and outsourcing ethical frameworks to a growing band of specialist providers.

Yet if we take even a cursory glance at the daily news headlines it’s clear we are also seeing a golden age of unethical behaviour.

So what’s going on?

If this seems something of a contradiction it need not be. We may be talking and thinking more about organisational ethics, it’s true. But can we say we are doing so effectively?

As a company that exists for profit and purpose, ThinkPlace has long had strong ethical frameworks and practices in place, led by a Chief Ethicist (that’s me).

And as a provider of transformational education and related services we are also at the forefront of building effective ethical capability across government agencies, NGOs and companies.

Along the way we have learned some important lessons that explain why so many companies – obsessed as they may appear with risk management and compliance -- still manage to misstep when it comes to ethics.

Why banks with lengthy (and expensive) ethics policies have acted against the interest of customers and paid the public relations price. Why social media mega-platforms vow to protect the privacy of nervous users and then repeatedly let them down.

Here are our top lessons for building an ethical organisation.

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Monday, 15 April 2019

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So you want to be an entrepreneur?

Sashi Surendran — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 01:55:15 +0000

New Zealand

So you want to be an entrepreneur?

Topics

Business design, gamification, small business

You’ve honed your pitch. Seen every episode of Shark Tank. Read every word of Steve Jobs’ biography.

What do you do next?

If you’re a young person in New Zealand’s capital there’s finally an answer to that question.

A team of final-year students from Wellington’s Victoria University Business School has won the ThinkPlace Prize for Best Entrepreneurship System Map for their new game ‘Start Up’.

What’s that?

Start Up takes a gamification approach to mapping the entrepreneurship ecosystem in Wellington – a city with a strong track record in fostering innovation and entrepreneurship.

Presenting the award to the team behind the game, ThinkPlace New Zealand Co-founding Partner Jim Scully said the students were continuing a proud tradition.

“When you think about it, some of New Zealand’s biggest international success stories were founded here in Wellington,” he said.

“Whether it’s (special effects studio) WETA, (auction website) TradeMe, Xero or Icebreaker they all have emerged out of the streets and cafés around this city.”

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Friday, 8 March 2019

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