Operational Excellence versus Design Thinking. Compare And Contrast.

The Regional Education Board Operational Excellence Sense Radar hears a rumour that the budget for next year is going to be cut again.

The Management, as ever, moves swiftly and launches an investigation. Being a ‘budget’ problem, the investigation is handed directly to the Accounts team, with an ‘urgent’ priority code. The team jump to action and ‘run the numbers’. True to form, they do this very quickly. The message back to the top is, ‘we’re in trouble’.

Management asks for options.

The Accounts team run some more numbers, draws up an elegant cost-per-pupil distribution curve for all the schools in the region and come back with three options. The way they’ve been taught. Two of the options are visibly ridiculous – also the way they’ve been taught – and the other one involves closing the two worst schools on the distribution curve. They present their findings to Management. Management asks about the two worst schools. It turns out – no surprise – that they are the two smallest schools in the region. This is good news. Closures always mean protest, but closing the two smallest schools means the smallest amount of protest. The Management team declare themselves happy with the analysis and, being dynamic thrusting types, they announce the decision to their masters. A week later, the story goes public.

Two weeks after that the first lawsuit arrives. From one of the parents at one of the two soon-to be-closed schools. ‘How can it possibly be’, the suit charges, ‘that the school with the highest academic record in the region is going to be closed?’ Management look at the letter and do the only sensible thing. They pick up the phone, dial the Lawyers and tell them, ‘we have a problem for you to come and fix’.

So much for Operational Excellence thinking.

It’s a story based on a real situation. At this point in time it is ongoing. The lawyers are hard at work sending each other letters. On one level, we don’t as yet know what the outcome will be. On another, several things are already crystal clear:

–   The outcome will be win-lose. Either the Education Board will win, or the parents will win.

–   The teachers and pupils at the school will be caught in the middle, unwitting victims of a battle over their futures.

–   The lawyers on both sides of the argument have no incentive to make a swift resolution. The longer the fight goes on, and the more acrimonious it becomes, the more money they will make.

On too many levels, it is a depressing story. Perhaps the most depressing part is how quickly the Operational Excellence-driven legal downward-spiral took hold.

Here’s how things might’ve played out if the Operational Excellence blinkers had been removed from Management’s eyes:

As part of their ongoing search for contradiction-solving opportunities, a member of the management team looks at the latest cost-per-pupil distribution curve prepared by the Accounts Department, and realises this would make a pretty good contradiction to try and solve at the next Management design-day. She draws the contradiction up in a way that will bring some structure to the discussion:

At the next design-day, the team spend a few minutes looking at the picture and someone shouts out, ‘this would be a great one for us to get all the parents, teachers and officials together to see what win-win solutions we can come up with.

Two weeks later, forty people turn up to a Saturday morning ideation session. They quickly agree on where they all ideally want to get to. Then spend an hour writing down all the reasons that might prevent the ideal from being achieved. That list then got turned into a perception map, which revealed what the key barriers were. Now capable of seeing where they were trying to get to and what was stopping them, they spent the last hour of the session working in small teams to generate solution ideas. They filled a wall with Post-It notes, clustered them, and then gave everyone three stickers so they could vote on their favourite ideas. Some people voted on things that could be done quickly, some on things they volunteered to take away and work on for the next semester.

Back in the office the following week, the Management team was still buzzed at the excitement and passion of the parents and teachers from the Saturday session. They heard a rumour that the education budget cuts next year were going to be bigger than ever, and smiled. Taking 75% out of the Legal budget suddenly seemed like a no-brainer.