The management religion of PROCESS re-engineering has led to the rationale of splitting “front office” from "back office" functions with the outsourcing and off-shoring of "non core" functions.

Yet the overall quality of customer experience and employee satisfaction for many the services treated in this way have become worse - and overall costs have actually increased!

We need a new management paradigm that enahnces the best of process but promotes a new, simple idea of "service in the moment" - or PRESENCE.

Problem

The Obsession with Process

The management religion of PROCESS re-engineering has led to the rationale of splitting “front office” from "back office" functions and outsourcing and off-shoring.

Whilst this has allowed the movement of labour to apparently lower-cost countries, the overall quality of many services has actually reduced over the past ten years and costs have not gone down, but increased.

Many large telecoms companies demonstrate this - and it is no coincidence that Scott Adams (the originator of the famous caroon Dilbert) worked for a large US telecoms company for a while.

We might laugh at the humour of it, but processes have become the currency of management measurement and success - as well as the ridicule of those condemned to work the processes themselves. Senior managers and executives in many of these types of companies keep their jobs by adding more and more protective processes - adding time and hassle to the customer rather than fix their problems first time.

Some specific recent case studies have been documented at: http://lornemitchell.com/blog/?p=645

To be clear, Process still has its place. But we need to find a stronger, more powerful super-ordinate organising idea which we believe is missing from the more traditional Process-centric management thinking. Question is - what is it?

Understanding Caetextic Behaviour

The obsession of Process being one of the main organising ideas in modern management thinking has been well analysed by Joe Griffin and ivan Tyrrell - the two originators of the term "caetextia". They define Caetextia or 'context blindness', as "a chronic disorder manifesting in the inability to adjust behaviours or perception to deal appropriately with interacting variables".

Many mental health problems (including autistic and Asperger's behaviour) can be framed by this single organising idea of context blindness.

More information can be found at their excellent website: http://www.caetextia.com/

Organisational Caetextia

Just as a bee is both an individual creature - but so also part of a colony of bees which itself is an organism - the same is true for humans and organisations. Just as humans can exhibit caetextia, organisations can exhibit what has bee termed "organisational caetextia".

The authors further define two types of dysfunctional caetextic behaviour - left-brained caetextia and right-brained caetextia - which can be further extended to organisations. More information on this idea can be found at: http://lornemitchell.com/blog/?p=38

We therefore believe that the essential problem we are trying to address is one of two types of context blindness that affect organisations:

Process Caetextia - where people follow a process religiously without the tools or the ambition to solve the problem in the now, and

Information Caetextia - found at the top of organisations - where leaders or departments actually believe the world that their softwar systems and measurement systems are telling them - rather than getting out on the floor and seeing the reality for themselves.

These two types of organisational caetextia have created the mental health problems that we currently having to deal with both individually and as organisations.

Solution

Rebuild management's philosophical foundations

We need a new management paradigm that promotes service "in the moment" where the correct information, people and processes are brought together to address specific business problems and respond to customers, suppliers and internal employees "in the moment", not finding excuses to hand-off to another process! After all, Presence is the foundation of all religions. It is time to bring the essence of the world's greatest religions into the world of business so that we can solve our current challenges more quickly and more effectively than we are at the moment.

Transcend traditional trade-offs

This approach can be described simply by promoting "Presence over Process". We believe that it transforms the way that companies are designed and organised. Front Office joins Back Office. Work is relocated to be close to the need - not off-shored to add cost.

The traditional trade-offs of costs v. process need to be replaced by this new paradigm - however uncomfortable that is for the supply-side of the "service-by-process" industry. Process aggregation and the removal of financial accountability from the point of presence is one of the main reasons why the financial crisis has happened. The whole design of large companies is being challenged by this new way of thinking.

Focus the work of management on a higher purpose

We, at Objective Designers, have developed a simple matrix for service improvement that brings sharp focus on processes are not working and helps to streamline organisations to become more present in finding flow.

Practical Impact

The Impact of Presence over Process

Those involved with the work of promoting Presence over Process become more present themselves and raise their levels of consciousness as well as the consicousness and balance of their organisations. Results are dramatic and improve customer experience, employee satisfaction and shareholder value by not focusing on measuring them!

First Steps

Six Steps to Improved Presence

1. Choose a single service (or product)

2. Divide the service into four or five components - for instance: Product Development, Marketing and Sales, Service and Billing/Reporting. Determine the most senior people responsible for these components within the organisation.

3. Interview four recent customers who can describe the pros and cons of using this service by the five component areas.

4. Map the attributes against an Objective Designers Blueprint and share the results of the interviews amongst the owners of the respective components.

5. Redesign the three worst-performing components so that they react to customers in a more conscious, less process-driven way.

6. Repeat Steps 1-5.

Credits

The many prophets, gurus and founders of religions for the ever-recurring ideas of the importance of becoming more conscious by dropping past prejudice and future anxieties to become more present and "in the moment".

Eckehard Tolle for his brilliant insights in "The Power of Now" and other books and lectures.

Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell first coined the term "caetextia" in 2007. It is from these and other powerful organising ideas within the Human Givens approach.

Professor John Seddon and the Vanguard Method for the key similarities and differences between Product and Service design - as well as the great case studies on Systems Thinking that his organisation and clients have developed to reduce waste and improve service flow against demand.

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September 30, 2011 at 12:39pm

Alexandra Bennett

I think you are correct in determining that the process is the problem. But removing the process and moving towards a "fire fighting" organization will also not solve the problem. If the problem lies with the process then fix the process. I think the saying "don't toss out the baby with the bathwater" may apply here.

September 30, 2011 at 2:08pm

Lorne Mitchell

Thank you for your comment, Alexandra.

I am not saying get rid of process at all: Process has a very important place in helping people get flow. I am definitely not saying we should toss it out - and agree that if the problem is with the process, we should fix it.

However, what I am saying is that the near-religious obsession with Process has not served us well - and we need a super-ordinate organising idea. I am suggesting that this should be Presence - because it allows more focussed attention on what matters in the Present.

Does that make sense?

Lorne

October 4, 2011 at 11:25am

Angela Shaw

Hi Lorne

Would you say that an example of 'presence' in a service situation is when excellent contact/call centres focus all customer service representatives on achieving 'first call resolution', making sure that the customer only needs to phone once to complete their enquiry?

Contact centres that do it well provide their employees with the training, product knowledge and support to service customer enquiries in the first phone call. They also integrate process improvement with this activity to continually improvement and add value to their collective 'knowledge banks' and training programmes so that all employees grow their knowledge.

October 4, 2011 at 11:53am

Lorne Mitchell

Hi Angela,

I would definitely say that companies that execute well on providing "first call resolution" - or "One and Done" as one vendor terms it is a good example of PRESENCE. To provide this type of service, it requires excellent coordination of people, process and information to ensure that the response is timely, accurate and satisfies the customer's question first time.

However, I have also found that measures like this can become counter-productive. Some contact centre managers are quite ingenious in making the statistics look good for their. Unless the measurement system asks the customer up-front whether or not it is the first call on this issue - and have a robust feedback mechanism, measures like this can be massaged.

I am also finding that clients (and their respective customers) are using WebChat a lot more. There are far fewer language barriers and many internet-based sales and service organisations are finding the experience to be superior to conventional voice call centres. This is likely to be a growing segment - and creates even more presence if documents can be shared straight away over email.

Beyond that, it is important to study the demand of different types of question coming into the business - so that companies can also have enough information or knowledge to improve the quality of products, services and interactions IN THE PRESENT. So an even more mature organisation will track this and allow the product or service line to implement improvements on the hoof. The feedback mechanism needs to be intelligent enough to alow for this continuous improvement - which is why chat is so useful - because it is much easier to search than a whole lot of voice recordings.

So Presence is about managing the experience across multiple channels of contact first time, every time in a professional way - but with an eye to constantly improving the life of your customers AND your own company. In my experience, small groups of up to 150 people (typically Small-to-Medium sized businesses) are much better at doing this than larger groups - where the focus on a single purpose is not watered-down by the politics of much larger organisations.

Thanks for the comment - very useful.