Large Organisations Can Become Agile
Organisations struggle to make decisions: moving slowly and disconnecting from customers - but it doesn’t have to be like this
This article originally appeared in Passenger Transport
We’re living through a crisis in governance. Our challenges aren’t caused by a lack of technology or innovation. They’re not caused by a lack of great people. They’re not even (primarily) caused by a lack of money. They’re caused by the fact that we are no longer able to make decisions.
Everywhere you look, organisations are becoming more bureaucratic and less agile. In both the public and private sector, firms (and the systems in which they are embedded) are struggling to make decisions, moving more slowly and gradually disconnecting from customers. The people working at the frontline are getting frustrated while the execs are overloaded.
During my time as Director of Strategy & Innovation at Transport for London, I became fascinated by this problem. How come when you put great people into a corporate, it can feel like they become less than the sum of their parts?
I spoke with multiple transport organisations, globally. I visited Swiss Railways in Bern and Ruter in Norway to learn from the highest-performing in our industry, amongst many others But I particularly spent time with organisations like Amazon and Google.
We dismiss the tech giants because we see them simply doing software. Hold on! Amazon manages assets worth half a trillion (yes, trillion!) dollars, employs 1.5 million people and operates 100,000 vehicles. Amazon is the biggest transport operation on earth. Their world is our world: drivers, depots, assets, timetables, delivery, delivery, delivery.
Yet they have managed to retain agility and pace in their decision-making. How has this happened?
Well, the answer is that they (like the other startups that have become the biggest corporates on earth) have thought deeply about how to create an agile bureaucracy.
We should learn from them.
I set up a workshop for TfL directors to learn first-hand from Amazon to how they’ve achieved this. My fellow directors absolutely loved it. The appetite for change is enormous. On another occasion, I remember a depot manager literally begging me to change the culture so that he could try new ways of doing things.
Luckily, a toolkit exists.
It’s not new
What was so interesting, from my perspective, was that the toolkit that Amazon have developed with such formality and care results in a remarkably similar working environment to one I’m very familiar with.
I spent seven years as Commercial Director of Chiltern Railways. During that seven years, as a team, we doubled revenue from £100m to £200m, built the first new rail link to London from any major British city, introduced the first rail ticketing app, launched the barcode ticketing that’s now universal, became the first rail franchise to put WiFi on trains, refurbished and reintroduced mkIII coaches, were the first train company onto Twitter, opened another new line with another new station, rebuilt our Birmingham terminus and upgraded our route.
It was a busy seven years but, here’s the weird thing, it was less effortful than getting smaller things done in a corporate environment.
Adrian Shooter, founder of Chiltern Railways, had, in effect, invented the Amazon model before Amazon. Except that he hadn’t invented it. Adrian actually modelled the culture and operating processes on SouthWest Airlines in Texas back in the early 1990s.
It turns out these approaches have existed for a long time.
So if we know how to create agility and pace in an organisation, and it’s been proved to work in transport (i.e. Chiltern Railways) and it’s been proved to work at any scale (i.e. Amazon), then why aren’t we doing it?
Part of the reason is that we’re all too busy. And – boy – we are. But that’s another version of the paradox that saving time often requires spending time. An organisation in which the work is better distributed and decisions are faster will free up time.
Part of the reason is that it’s too easy to explain away why it’s possible elsewhere. Chiltern Railways is a self-contained franchise, Amazon is a startup, Ruter is Norwegian, etc. “These things work there but they won’t work here”.
Another reason – bluntly - is because it requires doing things differently, and most of us find that difficult.
Most of us either hail from a corporate background so are used to corporate ways or hail from a startup background - and stay in startups. It is only if, as I have, you have alternated entrepreneurial organisations and corporates right through your career that you realise the extent to which entrepreneurial organisations are getting faster not only because of technology but because of process.
That’s why I’ve created my new business, Freewheeling. At the moment, I’m mainly doing ad-hoc transport and mobility consulting but I’m building it into a business offering what I’m calling Organisational Productivity Coaching. (I’m not settled on the name. By the time this goes to print, I may be calling it Business Agility Mentoring. Or something entirely different. The name is less important than the concept).
The idea is to provide organisations with both the methods and the mentoring to make it happen. Teaching the methods is crucial because we (humans!) already know how to achieve pace and agility, so let’s not reinvent the wheel. But just teaching methods is no good: this stuff is difficult. It’s more like fitting a kitchen than flatpack furniture: methods will need refinement and careful planning to install. Some methods won’t fit. Some won’t look good. Some will gleam. So the idea is to share methods openly with a leadership team and have an honest, constructive conversation about what could (and would not) work here.
That’s why it isn’t management consulting. The traditional ‘plan by powerpoint’ approach doesn’t work for this: it’s is about approaching the different methods with curiosity. “Will that work here?”. “Will something like it work here?”. “Does that inspire a different idea for something I can do here?”. My role is to lead these conversations but not force the answers.
If – together - we get it right, we end up with faster and better decisions, junior colleagues empowered and delivering and execs with much-needed time freed in their diaries for strategic thinking.
Why now
This is a critical moment. After years of stasis, change is coming. Great British Railways is being created, train operations is being nationalised, combined authorities are getting muscular, new bus franchises are being rolled out. New public sector bodies will be contracting new delivery organisations. More new cultures are going to be created in the next five years than the last twenty. Let’s make sure they’re the right ones.
We’ve had so many reviews of this industry, but they’ve all focused on organisational structure. Ultimately, reporting lines and ownership matters. But culture, processes, behaviours, decision-making matter too. Some of the most innovative transport organisations on earth sit in the public sector (Ruter in Oslo, SBB in Switzerland). Some stultifying bureaucracies exist in the private sector. The crisis of governance affects everyone. With so many balls being thrown in the air, now’s the time to ensure they land in a better place.
It’s not just us
If you recognise some of these characteristics, don’t worry, it’s not just you. In fact, it’s not just transport. It’s not even just the UK.
The last year’s seen a flurry of books on this topic. The Geek Way describes Silicon Valley firms to highlight how different they are from the bureaucratic norm, Failed State highlights how centralisation and disempowerment has crippled the UK public sector, How Big Things Get Done describes how our standard models for major projects routinely result in delays and overspends, Mission-Driven Bureaucrats is a clarion-cry to empower public sector managers, The Friction Project describes how (largely American private sector) bureaucracies unintentionally make their workers’ lives miserable.
All these book came out in the last 12 months and I’ve read all of them. They tell the same story through different lenses: large organisations struggling to deliver outcomes. But the good news is that they all offer solutions. While the books are all different and the authors use different words, the solutions are consistent, and all similar to my own experiences and learnings.
I’m not promising this stuff is easy. I know it’s not. I’m not promising it’ll solve everything. It won’t. But we’re not going to solve our crisis of governance without it.
How can I help you?
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Take Action!
Entrepreneurial organisations are biased to action.
Here are five things you could do in your organisation today:
One way door / Two way door – Amazon categorise every decision as either a one-way door (once you’re through, there’s no coming back) or a two-way door (can be reversed). Governance should be much, much tighter for one-way doors than two-way doors. Without this categorisation, it’s easy for organisations to give every decision the same level of governance. Most currently do.
Fast escalations – entrepreneurial organisations push decisions to the lowest-possible level and make sure that the person closest to the customer feels accountable for the decision. But sometimes there’s conflict and it’s impossible for the person at that level to get the business to own the decision. In this situation, fast escalation to the top is crucial. Could your company have a weekly “escalations meeting”, in which anything that is acting as a blocker anywhere in the organisation can be escalated to the top for immediate, binding decision?
Eliminating bureaucracy – bureaucracy accumulates naturally like limescale in a kettle. It won’t be removed without scrubbing. Does your exec team schedule a regular bureaucracy cull, with the goal of actively killing processes every quarter? Could it?
“Crisp paper and a messy meeting” – I love this quote from Jeff Bezos on what makes a good meeting. It is, bluntly, the opposite of most corporate meetings. Most corporate meetings start with a PowerPoint that most people haven’t read and is in bullet points which makes it capable of multiple interpretations. Then the priority of the meeting is ‘keeping to time’, which means that the paper isn’t subject to rigorous discussion. The result is that the meeting ends without anyone quite clear what, if anything, has been decided. How about we reverse it? If a paper is worth taking up peoples’ time for, it should be thorough, detailed, specific and in proper, unambiguous sentences. Then it should be read and debated in detail – and the meeting only closes when everyone is confident that it’s been thoroughly discussed and everyone understands what has been agreed.
Disagree and commit – this is one of the Amazon leadership principles but I first heard it at Chiltern Railways. It’s a leadership norm that means that everyone should get their say, but there must always be someone responsible for making a decision and everyone must accept that once the decision is made, even if you disagree (which you should do vocally!), you then commit to the decision. It’s perfectly possible to make it a norm in your workplace: you just need to say it, mean it and stick to it.
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