My Top 20 ways organisations can get things done faster 1/4

It’s nearly time to make your New Year’s Resolutions. Here are Your first five doses of inspiration!

1/20 EMPOWERED TEAMS

When I was at Chiltern Railways, we were the first rail franchise to introduce barcode tickets.

Other companies in the Arriva group were not far behind.

They did it using different contracts with different suppliers. That's stupid, isn't it.

No.

Because, as businesses, we were all empowered to make our own decisions.

Which meant we duplicated some contracts.

As a team of Commercial Directors, we later realised this was suboptimal, got together and fixed it.

Had we not been empowered to JFDI, we'd almost certainly have ended up with a single group solution that was penny-wise, pound-foolish... years later.

(the photo below of me launching the first mobile ticketing service with Ben Whitaker from Masabi, back in the days when I was 32 years old and wore a tie. Neither true today...)

2/20 A CRISP PAPER AND A MESSY MEETING

Meeting Bingo. Ever been a meeting that would get a full house?...

* The chair opening the meeting by saying "we've a lot to get through, so let's stick to time"

* Each item consisting of a slide deck of bullet points that - because they're bullet points - it's not totally obvious what point they're making

* Insufficient time for clarification and discussion

* Each item closing with the person being given some positive words that aren't a decision e.g. "Great work. Please continue with this and come back when appropriate"

If you have, you're not alone.

It's how most meetings work. It's weird: meetings are one of the biggest single cost for most businesses.

Let's imagine a firm with a head office of 500 people, each costing an average of £75k. If each spend 33% of their time in meetings, meetings cost that organisation £12 million.

How many other seven figure costs will not be subject to any kind of reivew of their effectiveness?

This is something Amazon do differently, and well.

Jeff Bezos is said to want "a crisp paper and a messy meeting": meaning a detailed, thorough, comprehensive paper written in full sentences which is read and absorbed in detail at the start of the meeting by every participant.

Then a thorough discussion which takes as long as it takes to get to a point where everyone has said everything they can think of, and a decision is made.

That's the exact opposite of our current approach - but it's in our gift to change it.

3/20 INNOVATION TEAM

In some ways, innovation teams are a sign of failure.

A truly innovative organisation doesn't need innovation teams - the whole business is the innovation team.

But that's idealistic.

Large, mature corporates often don't work like that.

So it's good to have a team focused on the future, connected with startupland, championing experimentation and fast learning.

A good innovation team should be embedded in the business.

There's a danger if they're too independent that they drift off into a parallel universe.

But they must also have a distinct culture.

If the team both serves and exasperates the core business, it's probably doing its job quite well.

(The photo at the top of this page shows the innovation team at Transport for London, which I was lucky enough to lead).

4/20 ONE WAY DOOR / TWO WAY DOOR

In some ways, this is the most important of the lot.

Because if you master this one, all the others become easier.

This is an Amazon concept, so I'll quote their words:

"A one-way door decision is one that has significant and often irrevocable consequences—it requires a lot of capital expenditure, planning, resources, and thus requires deep and careful analysis. A two-way door decision, on the other hand, is one that has limited and reversible consequences. When you step back and look at the decisions you make, you may find that most of them are two-way door decisions. When we see a two-way door decision, and have enough evidence and reason to believe it could provide a benefit for customers, we simply walk through it. You want to encourage your leaders and employees to act with only about 70% of the data they wish they had—waiting for 90% or more means you are likely moving too slow. And with the ability to easily reverse two-way door decisions, you lower the cost of failure and are able to learn valuable lessons that you can apply in your next innovation."

The key point here is to label each decision.

Is this a one way or a two way door? Becuase if it's easily reversible, we can just "walk straight through", confident in the knowledge we can always come back.

A great example of a one-way door is abandoning a 50 year editorial policy of endorsing a Presidential candidate when there’s only one week to go before an absolutely critical election.

If you know what I’m referring to, you’ll know that Jeff Bezos does not always practice what he preaches…

5/20 TIME BOX DECISIONS

What connects the service plan for London 2012, a trespasser on the line at Canons Park, whether to accept a time-limited VC funding offer and specifying the new DLR contract, to be awarded when the old one expired?

They are all times I've been in the room for a decision that had a clear deadline that simply couldn't be extended.

Some of them (London 2012) had time horizons of years, sometimes (the trespasser) required a service controller to make a decision in seconds.

But the decision had to be made and could not be postponed.

As a result, the decision WAS made.

And in every case, the decision made was a good one.

In general, postponing a decision doesn't make the quality of the decision better.

But so many decisions that can be postponed are postponed.

The solution needs nothing but willpower. Set a realistic date in advance. Once a date is set for a decision, pretend it's like one of the decisions above: utterly immovable.

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