Mission Critical?

One of the things I most enjoyed about my career in management consulting was the constant stream of insights I gained into areas of business and industry of which I had no prior knowledge. For most of my time, my consulting practice was focused on operational improvements but occasionally we discovered things that had a strategic impact.

One such assignment was carried out for a company whose business was the repair and maintenance of lifts - elevators to my transAtlantic friends. They were in receipt of a constant barrage of complaints about the speed and cost of their services although they were putting huge effort into both. One of the things we did as part of our practice was to hold what we called Painstorming Groups, where members of various parts of the stakeholder population were invited to share the problems they experienced. This led to a survey to prioritise them which then enabled us to recommend and lead a process for improvement.

The client's customers were from all parts of commerce and industry from factories, offices, hotels and hospitals, and we organised the painstorming groups to consist of members of similar sized organisations. The group that I most remember consisted of facilities managers from large sites, and two contributors stand out. The first was from a car assembly plant - he explained that the line was on the ground floor and the stores on the first. Each line had its own lift so that, if the lift broke down, the line had to be stopped. The second was from a large acute hospital. They had two theatre lifts serving six theatres; if a lift broke down, three theatres couldn't receive any patients which cost the hospital £1000 an hour for each theatre.

To cut a long story short, the project led us to realise that there were two kinds of customers - those who wanted their lifts repaired quickly and cheaply when they failed and those who couldn't tolerate a failure under any circumstances. Members of the second group were not price sensitive.

The client reorganised his business to deliver these two different services; service engineers were often based at the sites with low failure tolerance.

OK, this all seems pretty obvious now but at the time it was seen as a breakthrough.

You win some, you lose some

It's a while since I posted one of my management consulting anecdotes, so here goes:

Some years ago I undertook a project for the UK operating subsidiary of a global pharmaceutical firm. The project went well and I was ready to present my findings to the client. The presentation was arranged for their next Board meeting, which was to be held at a hotel named the Anugraha in Egham, not too far from Windsor.

I was timed to present at 9:30 am and started on time. I had just started talking to the third slide of my presentation when the fire alarms went off. We were in a ground floor conference room with French doors, so we left through the doors and trotted through a steady drizzle to the assembly point under the front entrance canopy. After about half an hour we were given the all clear and went back to our conference room. The Chairman said "I think we all lost track of what you said - best to start again", which I did. I had just started talking to the third slide of my presentation with the fire alarms went off again, and we repeated the earlier evacuation procedure, though this time in somewhat heavier rain.

Eventually we were given the all clear again, and returned to the conference room. However, this time the Chairman said, "I'm sorry, we have a lot to get through today so I will have to ask you to defer your presentation to the next Board Meeting." I groaned inwardly - I had psyched myself up for this day, and the delay also meant a month's delay in receiving our final payment. However, I had no option but to agree, so I did and returned to our office, not far away near Maidenhead.

A couple of weeks later the Chairman's PA called me. "I understand you have a spot at the next Board Meeting." I agreed. "Good," she said, "I have your tickets". "Tickets?" I queried. "Yes," she said. "Didn't he tell you it would be in Montreux?" I raised no objection.

On the day before the meeting I flew to Geneva and was picked up by a chauffeur in a stretch limo, who took me to my hotel. It was one street back from the shoreline but my room had a spectacular view of the lake and the food, as you can imagine, was top notch. I discovered that the Montreux Jazz Festival was in two weeks time, and Montreux was in a state of high excitement.

This time my presentation went according to plan, was received with gratitude, and we got paid.

You win some, you lose some.

The OPUS Method

In November 1991 I made the momentous decision to leave employment and become self employed. I had decided that I had a particular contribution to make but still had to work out how to make it. I joined a now-defunct network of self-employed "consultants" and discovered that most of them were just lonely "business advisers" looking for a home; it was not encouraging. The group was often targeted by people with a methodology who wanted to franchise or licence it. and I went to a presentation made by one such company in the group's headquarters in Battersea.

My train was delayed and I had to slip into the back of the meeting about ten minutes after it had started. The presentation was being made by two guys, a Swede and a Swiss. After twenty minutes, I had made a decision. I would find a way of getting involved. Now some background.

During my final years in ICL I had worked in a unit whose purpose was to research, develop and sell products and services to support boards and senior managers in national, international and multinational enterprises. My particular interest was in consulting services and my interviews with some of these people had revealed that one of the reasons it was difficult to sell consulting services to them was that they were unclear how much they would pay and what the deliverables would be. They had responded positively to the idea of consulting "products", so I set out to explore how this could be done. I developed three or four such products (see my blog on Robin Seward) but never really felt that I had cracked the problem.

The subject of this presentation was The OPUS Method. It was a genuine methodology - the architecture remained constant, as did the interfaces between the four stages in the process - but there was scope for innovation and the exercise of consultant or client preference in each stage. It did not pretend to be strategic - it was all about identifying and putting into effect operational improvements, and its target audiences were stakeholder groups, commonly customers and employees, less commonly the wider society, intermediaries and investors.

I engaged with the owners at once and consulted for the initial UK licencees. Then, in 2003, I became the sole UK licencee and continued to use the process as my sole source of income until I decided to retire in 2015. This blog is work in progress; I intend to write about some of the more interesting assignments where they drew particularly interesting or surprising conclusions. Some of these may justify blog posts of their own and I may append others to this piece.

This is not the place for a detailed discussion of the process - I have written about this elsewhere, as have others. If you read this and would like more information, do get in touch.

My influences: Hazel Austin (my mother)

My mother was born Hazel Jessie Pearl Binding in Ystradmynach in 1917, Monmouthshire. Her parents were Lucy Totterdell, whose father was a master baker in Taunton, and Francis Leonard Binding, from a seafaring family in Watchet, both in Somerset. They had moved to South Wales in search of work - my grandfather worked as a miner - but returned to live in Watchet in around 1925/6.

My mother was awarded a place at the newly built Minehead Grammar School which she attended until she returned to the primary school in Watchet to learn the skills of a teacher. Photographs taken of her in her school uniform suggest that she was very proud to be there and she always talked about the School with great affection. Her favourite teacher was Mr Traherne (which she always pronounced "Tray-Herne") and, when I gained my place at Bristol Grammar School my mother was delighted and took me to Minehead to show me off to Mr Traherne. 

On leaving the primary school in Watchet she moved to the primary school in Westbury-Sub-Mendip where she made friends with Myrtle Northam, a farmer's daughter, and they remained friends until my mother died. When my mother was still teaching in the village Myrtle gave birth but declined to marry her daughter's father. Despite her position my mother's friendship was unswayed which, I suspect, must have given rise to some adverse comments in the village. My mother's steadfast support for her friend is one of the things of which I am most proud.

When my younger brother Martin also moved to Bristol Grammar School my mother decided to fulfil a long held ambition to train as a domestic science teacher. She attended college in Bristol and started teaching, part time, when she qualified.

My mother loved writing - when I was at school she would spend Sunday afternoons writing letters to her friends and family - these were always substantial and I suspect would have required "large letter" stamps under the current pricing structure. She had recipes published in the Bristol Evening Post, a number of articles published in "The Lady" and contributed a piece to an anthology of memoirs edited by the Marquess of Bath of the time. No doubt there were other things of which I was unaware.

My influences: Mary Elizabeth ("Bunty") Tracy

I grew up in Knowle, in south Bristol. My parents were both from Somerset, my mother from Watchet, in the west and my father from Sandford, near Winscombe, in the north; my brother Martin is five years my junior. Initially we didn't have a car but then my father bought one and we began to go on day trips to visit my parents' friends and relatives. We often used to stay with my maternal grandmother in Watchet but the day trips were to a variety of other people.

One of the families to which we made regular visits were the Tracys, in Winscombe. James ("Uncle Jim" to me) was my father's uncle on his mother's side; he had been one of Somerset's first motor mechanics and had run his business from a large shed at the side of the house. He was a great racconteur, and I remember him talking about the titled people for whom he had worked, though his stories are lost in the mist of time. His wife had died before I was born but his two daughters, Bunty and Peggy lived with and looked after him. He died when I was still quite young, as did Peggy, who had had a senior role in local government in Somerset.

Bunty lived for a good few years after and it was clear that both my parents held her in considerable esteem. Visits to her were always a joy. In particular, she used to treat children, including me, as fully paid up members of the human race, and was interested in our hobbies, our opinions and our experiences. As I grew older and went to Bristol Grammar School I was not surprised to discover that she was a head of department at the grammar school in Weston-Super-Mare. She would show us things and explain things and I always felt fulfilled by our relationship. I have always tried to emulate her in my dealings with children, my own and other peoples'.

Later, she became a Licenced Lay Reader in the Church of England and, as I had become involved with Church organisation at a Deanery and Diocesan level, we had even more to talk about. When she eventually died she left me a few specific bequests: a Communion chalice was no surprise but there were several other items I couldn't explain; I can only imagine they were things in which I had expressed interest as a child. At about the time of her death but for reasons unconnected with it I came to the conclusion that I was agnostic but I've been able to find a home for the chalice with a minister who uses it and understands its significance to me.

People who have influenced me

I am conscious of the fact that a number of people have said or done things throughout my life which have influenced me profoundly. Most if not all of them have no idea how profound their influence was, and I have never thanked any of them. Sadly, some of them are already dead, so my thanks will come too late. However, I want to set the record right and share with my readers the insights I was given. I originally intended to post these anecdotes in more or less chronological order but my memory is not as well organised as I had imagined.

I shall be pleased to have feedback from anyone and, if any of my readers knows the whereabouts of anyone I feature, please let me know.

Douglas Adams and Consulting Practice

To the extent that they are trained to be consultants, and in their consulting practice, management consultants usually start an assignment by talking to the project sponsor and/or senior management and then forming a hypothesis about the problems they have been engaged to solve. It is therefore inevitable that, during the rest of the project, they tend to accept data that supports their hypothesis and discard data that challenges it. It is also inevitable that, during this process, they become more and more committed to their hypothesis and increasingly reluctant to challenge it. There may be professional consultants to whom this criticism does not apply, but they are in the minority.

The justification for this arrogance - and it has to be described as arrogance - is that they have been schooled in the belief that their training and previous experience mark them out as superior beings able to make this kind of judgement. However, let us consider an alternative view.

If, whilst I am interviewing a member of client staff, or a customer, or a supplier, or anyone else, and I ask them a question, I may often get an answer that doesn't really seem to be an answer to the question I asked. So what is happening? There are three possibilities:

a)   I am not asking the question clearly enough, or in a form that the interviewee can understand, so I am getting the answer I deserve.

b)   I am quite clear about the question but, for some reason, the interviewee doesn't understand, or doesn't have the experience to enable him to answer the question.

c)    I am quite clear about the question, and the interviewee's answer is also clear, but I don't understand his answer.

The typical consultant will probably recognise condition a) and re-phrase his question. He will be justified in discarding answers that satisfy condition b) - if he realises that is what has happened. But he will discard answers that fulfil condition c) and, in so doing, discard information that may challenge his hypothesis or even lead to a new hypothesis.

Which is where Douglas Adams comes in. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was first broadcast on Radio 4 in 1978/9 and, some years later, was made into a television serial. And as fans, and many other listeners and viewers will recognise, the plot includes several sudden and unpredictable changes in what constitutes reality.

In January 1992, Douglas Adams appeared with Melvin Bragg on the South Bank Show in what can only be described as a happening, in which many of the characters from the Hitch Hiker's Guide drifted in and out and had an impact on the interview. At one point, Melvin Bragg said (l paraphrase), "Throughout the series, you are clearly fascinated by alternative realities and/or alternative universes - what was the origin of this fascination?" Douglas explained that, at the age of 10, his father had taken him to London Zoo and was explaining about the animals as they looked at them. When they got to the rhinoceros, his father explained that the rhino's most acute sense was smell, and not sight or hearing as for humans. Douglas began to wonder what the world must be like if one perceived it through the shifting, eddying, sometimes enduring and sometime ephemeral smells - and realised that it must be a very different world to the one inhabited by humans.

Eventually this led him (l paraphrase again) to the realisation that every sentient being has a different but equally valid set of perceptions of the universe. Which raises philosophical questions about what we mean by reality and even whether there is such a thing as reality. If you want to find out more about this, read Bertrand Russell - I can't help you!

However, even staying out of the philosophical deep water, it is quite clear that no management consultant, however experienced or clever, has the right to assume that his perception of reality is THE reality.

Shrinkage

 At the time when I was working for ICL in East Anglia the primary focus of my support role was to explore with my customers opportunities for introducing stock control and production control systems. One of my customers, a small manufacturing company, was seriously interested and we were successful in helping them install and operate a stock control system, with a concomitant requirement for additional computer equipment.

All went well, except that there was a small but persistent difference between the stock levels forecast by the system and those revealed by a stock check, and I was much exercised by the task of tracking it down.

One Friday afternoon I was chatting with the computer manager about plans for the weekend. I explained that I was fitting out a cupboard in my new home so that we could use it as a wardrobe. The problem was, I explained, that I couldn’t find a piece of metal tube long enough to serve as a hanging rail. “I can probably help,” he said, “come with me.” We walked across to the stock shed, which was surrounded by a high fence with a locked gate. He produced a key and opened the gate; we went into the shed and found the length of tube I needed and locked the gate. “How do you come to have a key to the stock shed?” I asked. “Oh, all managers have them, and we can go and take anything we need.” “How do you record this on the stock control system?” I asked. They didn’t, of course. Problem solved.