Change – ‘We need to change’ is the rallying cry I hear so often when I move onto a new project. The list of opportunities to improve is endless, I always find, once I get into discussion with the stakeholders. A ‘brown paper’ exercise flushes out hundreds, if not thousands of improvement opportunities (UDO’s in lean speak) and soon it is clear that the sausage machine of improvement is jammed full, and therein lies the start of the help I need to provide. But that is just the start…….
If you stopped there, it would be easy to think that the problem is an excess of opportunity and the solution is about prioritisation, and/or resource/planning to get things done… but in my experience, the change challenge runs much deeper than that.
Britain lags in the world productivity scorecard.
Since 2008 we have been getting further and further behind countries such as Germany and France… but why?
Analysis by Andy Haldane, the Bank of England Chief Economist, suggests that it’s the long tail of smaller businesses, that are performing particularly badly, that are the ones that pull the average for the Nation down.
These are the SME’s on which our country relies.
Having scratched below the surface of that endless list of change opportunities so many times now, I find the next layer of that onion always to be that the person calling out the need for change, isn’t the one that needs to change, it’s always someone else….in fact, when it gets to them, that individual doesn’t just not need to change, they often actively resist it…sometimes aggressively, more often than not, passively.
The change journey is a very challenging one. They don’t teach it in schools, or colleges…..maybe sometimes in University. But since the dawn of time, when we crawled out of that primordial swamp, change has been necessary for us not to just survive, but to thrive….and if UK plc is to flourish and prosper once more, we need to support and encourage our SME’s to grab help where they can and move the country on to our next era of greatness, where we can celebrate high levels of employment, a green economy and opportunities for all.
A cohesive approach across government, the education sector and industry is always required. Using the skills and knowledge of people such as myself is critical… but what would your proposal be to enable the UK to beat the productivity trap, and become a global leader in productivity…?