Is Large Scale Change Impossible?

Gail Severini, one of my new cyber friends that I made on LinkedIn had the following to say...

"So how do you create change when there is this insidious contradiction to change? How do you get people to focus on the needs of the whole system, when they only get rewarded for the outcomes of their sub-system?"

I didn't want to give you the impression that I thought it impossible to drive large scale change.  The point is if you don't understand how people are being measured you will fail.  And changing those measures is sometimes very hard. 

Let me give you a brief case where I was succesful...

The client was Blue Cross. 

We were hired to improve their productivity and quality of work life.  The area of focus initially was the customer service group which was under incredible pressure. 

They had hired a large of number of people, but call waiting time was still unacceptable.  The manager had become so overwhelmed by the stress that she had taken sick leave. 

The management team wanted to reduce the average call time significantly, but the data showed time getting longer. 

So what was the problem? 

After doing a review of the work processes I met with the management team and told them that reducing the call time would be easy. 

I proceeded to demonstrate how this could be done by sitting at a phone table.  I picked up the phone and conducted the following dialogue....

'Thank-you for calling Blue Cross.  I am sorry you have this problem with your claim, but this is the best we can do.  Good-bye."

The management team looked at the consultant with disbelief and were about to throw me out, when I made it clear that I was being facetious to make a point. 

The actual problem was not in the customer service group, but in the claims administration group. 

The two groups reported to two different managers.   The new manager of the admin group had put in very tight time frames for the administering of a claim and had thus been able to reduce staff.

Unfortunately the only way the administrators felt they could meet the standards was by taking short cuts which resulted in a significant increase in errors.  This wasn't a problem because the Customer Service Group would handle the errors. 

As you can see the measurement system was rewarding the shoddy work done in the claims area.  

Without going into all the details, the way we fixed the problem was by creating a learning organization that analyzed and categorized claim administration problems and then tracked them back to the administrator that handled the claim.  

We then built training programs and IT programs to improve the quality. 

The customer service group became  the hub of creating this leaning organization.   Product quality went up, overall cost went down, and the real speed in process handling also went down.  But most important quality of work life improved.

This kind of positive solution seemed impossible to achieve with another of our clients and it took years to finally drive the desired change.  The problem was we couldn't change how the marketing people were rewarded.