Ever wondered why some organisations seem to naturally perform better than others? More importantly, why do some, seemingly successful business improvement projects unravel shortly after the consultants have left?

Just as water finds its own level, organisational behaviour follows a path of least resistance.  The science of wiring is, therefore, all about understanding the influences and linkages that cause an organisation to behave the way it does.

Behaviour can either be positive – and enhance high performance – or it can be negative and can drag performance down. What you want to do is make ‘high performance’ the path of least behavioural resistance.

All organisations are wired.  The question is – is your organisation wired for success or for failure?  If an organisation doesn’t consider why it’s performing badly to start with, business improvement efforts can easily become futile. 

For the past 10 years, Partners in Performance International (PIP) have been in the business of helping companies around the world address the wiring “gaps” that work against good performance.

What we’ve seen over the years is that it’s easy for organisations to become fixated on symptoms such as “I’m always tied up in useless meetings” rather than the underlying root causes for instance “no-one takes any minutes and no clear decisions ever get made at our meetings…so we tend to have lots of them”.

Similarly, few organisations have a framework for assessing wiring in its entirety.  It’s important to think holistically as organisations and their wiring are complex and the elements interlink.

To help clients understand the bigger picture and how wiring influences performance, PIP has developed a framework that considers six main elements:

• Operating Strategy – at the lowest level, do we know what to do, how to correctly operate that machine, and are we communicating the relevant input KPI’s to the only people who can really control them…operators 
• Operating Disciplines – assuming we do know what to do, do we have the discipline to consistently adhere to procedure – or are some shifts behaving (and performing) very differently from each other?  What are our shift handovers like? Do we even have them?
• Alignment & Incentives – are accountabilities clear throughout our organisation or we more atuned to ‘pointing the finger’? Do our operators know how to influence bonus payouts via their own actions? 
• Sustaining Disciplines – do we have the discipline to ‘close the loop’ and check if agreed actions have been completed as promised – or is it “OK around here” to agree to do something but then quietly forget about it?
• Continuous Improvement – do we, as an organisation, have the skills and tools we need in order to deliver ongoing business improvement?
• Visible Leadership – last but by no means least…are we leading the organisation to succeed? Do we, as managers, “walk the talk” or is it more a case of “do as I say, not as I do”?  Do we even talk to our operators or do they get most of their information from the ‘rumour mill’? 

It’s not unusual for companies to assume that the only way to achieve enhanced performance is to spend millions.  However, if capital spending simply masks an underlying behavioural – or wiring – problem, it’s unlikely that big-ticket project is going to fully deliver its expected results.  It’s better to recognise the behavioural root causes of poor performance up-front. Companies that take the time to plug their wiring gaps inevitably wind up being the ones that succeed – naturally.

Notes to editor:

Practical application of wiring using a real-life PIP client example ONE:

Recently, a subsidiary of a well-known global resources company found that its senior management were constantly reacting to unplanned operational events instead of managing pro-actively.  Worse, management felt they were being tied up in endless, under-productive meetings that clogged their diaries and kept them from the actual “doing” of management.  At the same time, middle and lower level managers felt under-utilised and disempowered as members of the leadership team. The performance of this subsidiary was good – but not as good as its parent company expected of it.  Rumours always seemed to be rife that a sale was on the cards.

The organisation asked PIP to help it improve its operational performance – which we did.  However, we – and our client – recognised that several wiring gaps needed to be addressed if the hard-won performance improvement was to be sustained. The answer was a comprehensive program to address the fundamental wiring gaps that were holding performance back.

1. First, we helped the client streamline the KPIs they were using at lower levels – with an emphasis on input KPI’s (e.g. number of conveyor belt stoppages) rather than high-level, output KPI’s (e.g. output tonnes off the conveyor belt.)  With a clearer sense of precisely what to manage on a shift by shift basis, supervisors and operators became more able to deal with unforeseen occurrences and less reliant on decision-making from above  
2. Next , we helped the organisation set up a regular review process around these new KPI’s that included a two-way flow of information. Reviews became an interactive process rather than something one management layer “did to” the next. Issues in need of resolution, and the selection of priorities, became as much a part of the process as checking the variances on KPI’s and matching these against planned remedial actions. Managers wound up with a concise, effective review process that took less than one hour per review each week
3. Finally, we helped senior management initiate a meeting effectiveness program which saw a radical reduction in both the number of meetings held, the duration of each meeting, and the number of participants required.  We coached executives how to regain control of their diaries as well as how to make their meetings more powerful and more effective

As a result senior management become more able to focus on real business improvement priorities rather than putting out the operational ‘fires’, while middle-management felt more empowered and able to deal with day-to-day operational problem-solving.  

In less than nine months, the subsidiary was routinely setting new production records and rumours about its possible sale had stopped altogether.

 
Practical application of wiring using a real-life example TWO:

Using an example that highlights the importance of taking a holistic approach, I’m reminded of an organisation (not a PIP client) that implemented mission-directed work teams (MDWT’s) – without a robust review process to cascade results up to, and priorities down from, senior management. Effectively cut off in a leadership sense, the MDWT meetings lacked focus and headed off in different tangents.  Some shifts decided that equipment breakdowns were the only things that mattered – convenient, since they could then ‘point the finger’ at Maintenance when their own performance was poor.

Other shifts took a more realistic perspective.  However, without a common direction, all the team meetings started to lose their effectiveness and their momentum.  They became seen as a waste of time by participants and, eventually, MDWT’s died altogether.