#264 - Prioritisation, Decision Systems & Improvement with The Forum

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another episode of Get Out of Wrap. In today's episode you are going to come with me, with all of us, into the Team Leader community. We were very lucky that The Forum, presented by Phil Anderson and Chris Rainsforth, shared with the community a session on Decision Systems, making better decisions,

[00:00:29] prioritisation and improvement. And with their permission, they have been happy to share this with you all as well. So I hope you enjoy. Thanks. So first of all, massive thanks to Phil and Chris from The Forum for this session. I think it's a topic that is going to benefit so many people, myself included, hopefully.

[00:00:55] Intrigued by the title Decision Systems as well. But I'll hand over to you two now. And thanks very much for doing this. And George, Ian and Stuart, thanks very much for joining. And I'll let anyone else in that comes as well. Cheers, Martin. Thanks, Martin. Yeah. Good afternoon, everyone. For those watching live. Brilliant. Thank you for joining us. Those on demand as well.

[00:01:22] Always nice that you can take the time out to listen to us. Chris, I'll let you kickstart things before I'll come in at the reset, redefining pace. You'll chip in, will you? Right, yeah. Welcome along. So yeah. For those that don't know who we are, The Forum have been in existence now for over 25 years. And with a sole aim of kind of raising standards and customer operations. The idea being that as an industry, we want people to get better.

[00:01:48] We take a lot of pride from raising the standards of every individual that we talk to. Fundamentally, what that does is that wave and kind of momentum allows people to build their teams better, build their organisations better. And as an industry, then we become better. We are at heart a learning organisation. But we do a number of events and various sort of things throughout the year. But we support a lot of organisations. We've brought that logo cloud there, which is slightly out of date.

[00:02:17] But it's more to say that we work with a lot of organisations. And to understand really what's driving their challenges within their operation. And that enables us then as an organisation to make sure the content we create, the discussions that we curate, all those types of things are actually meaningful and relevant for the people that engage with us.

[00:02:38] And hopefully that then sparks new ideas, new best practice and new learning for the industry. So yeah, so Phil, I'll hand over you again as going on today's topic. And we'll join you in a minute. Thanks very much, Chris. Yeah, thanks again, everyone. So yeah, what we want to talk about today is primarily learning, as Chris has said, because if we don't protect the talent to learn, and we then don't do something with it, then we're not learning and we're not improving.

[00:03:02] What the forum is here to do and what makes a difference is not only us being completely independent, we're not here to inform, but we are here to improve standards. Hence why we are raising standards in customer operations. And some of the things I want to talk about today will be around from the failure loop that unfortunately too many others can relate to. I think because of that, that sometimes it holds us back there. Whereas actually when we can create that learning culture and improvement cycle, we can make some great steps to move forward every day.

[00:03:30] To do that, we need to be able to identify our priorities. And once we've done that, we then need to be able to redesign our decision systems. So one of the expressions that has been sort of rising up throughout the community over the last 12 months has been around how the role of analyst is more about architecture. So about decision architecture. And off the back of that, the operation, whether this be the resource planning team, the operation team leaders are more orchestrating all parts of this system.

[00:03:58] Again, we've used the expression about the brain, the heart, the nervous system, because we've got so much information and so much intelligence. We've got so many opportunities to improve. So what stops us from doing that? And one of the biggest reasons that stops us is we don't unlearn. We don't stop. And this is where our theme comes in from this year, which is about resetting before we start to redefine. Too many of us just keep going, keep adding. We get a new idea. We don't stop at Aldermott. We keep adding. We keep going.

[00:04:28] And we keep going again. Yep. If we do think of the classic IT, turn your computer off and start again, that's what we need to do with how we operate and our operating systems. Because we need to stop some of those background processes that we might have started a few weeks ago. There's just no need for it anymore. It's still running in the background. It's taking up our energy, our enthusiasm, draining our ideas, and it's stopping us from making progress.

[00:04:51] So by stopping and resetting and removing all the outdated thinking, it means we can start to think differently, make better decisions, and redefine what is not only what's possible, but what those new measures of success are. Again, a classic challenge we have as a business is that we do hold on to some of those old things, old ways of working.

[00:05:14] And this is what I wanted to show here with this sort of very basic sort of diagram that it shows how we often have great intentions. Okay. I don't like to use the expression, everyone turns up to do a good job because I've worked with people who definitely work like that. And most people do turn up with great intentions. They want to do something really, really well. But if they're not aligned, okay, at some point in time, that's going to create friction. And this is a way of displaying that. Whereas on day one, we can all have a great idea.

[00:05:43] So, yeah, we're going to move forward with this. But if every day we are just one degree out from an opposing opinion, by 30 days, we're going to be miles apart. And that's really important that we remember that. So, again, this is about how we protect time to be able to discuss, share knowledge and really agree on intended intentions. Not just here's the goal. Oh, I know what to do. Off we go. It's about how we set up the time for those regular check-ins to ensure that we're doing the right things.

[00:06:12] And this is really important to this community in particular, because too often the day will get in the way. This moment's incident. Something's happened. The playbook is let's jump on that and let's deal with that. In the worst examples, I'm sure all of us can relate to this. We love a good meeting to discuss a crisis. Do you know what? Because then we can see the difference we've made. So we think that is the measure of success.

[00:06:39] We never go, there hasn't been a problem today because we made some brilliant decisions three months ago. And we're now seeing the downstream effects of that. Those invisible wins are what should be our motivation. Where unfortunately, too often the little things, the calls in the queue, the crisis that's just come in, takes up our time, makes us feel great. So we've got to stop that. And likewise, we've got to stop our great intentions moving off in different directions, which mean to the end of a month, we're miles apart.

[00:07:08] End of two months, even further apart. End of three months, even further apart, et cetera. So we need to stop that. And this is what we call the failure loop. Because when we get stuck in that cycle of, again, great intentions, but there's a problem. I need to speak to them. I need to have a team meeting. I need to take everyone off the call. This has happened now. Look at the calls in the queue. Why is this happening? We get stuck in this world of, well, at least we've cleared that backlog. Well, I can go home now. I can have a glass of wine. Everyone's a winner. Next day, let's repeat that again.

[00:07:35] You might feel a great sense of reward because you're dealing with challenges. You've sorted problems. But actually you're now part of that problem because you're in that cycle of making mistakes. We're not in the cycle of learning, of stopping, capturing information, really looking at root causes to understand why has this happened? Sometimes there might be a person that seems like a huge crisis, but we're about to put it into context of do we need to deal with that right now?

[00:08:04] Or is it something that we can deal with later? And Chris will talk about this later and we'll look at the difference between urgent and important. Because things can't be both. And that's really, really important to know. But again, if you're in that cycle where you're just looking at the latest report of yesterday's information, and before you've even digested yesterday's information, you're dealing with the problem of today. You're not learning as a business. If again, you're bringing in change and not really moving forward, you're not in a learning business.

[00:08:32] Whereas the learning cycle is about structuring our thinking, creating frameworks for forward thinking. Not to stifle what we do and to limit and to slow things down, but to ensure we all understand the why, the what and the how. Understand where we're going to. And most importantly, where are we now? Because the most important thing of any intention or plan is that it needs to adapt and be modified. Because we need to, but we need to be aligned with how that works.

[00:09:02] So this is why we talk about a learning cycle. And it doesn't, it's not as hard as you think. You have the two simple questions we always ask at the end of every, every learning module or every in-person event, every virtual event is what have you learned? And what will you do differently? And that mindset helps you to improve. It helps you to get better because first of all, it gives you that sort of data checkpoint or reality check of where are we now? What can I do differently tomorrow?

[00:09:30] And if we keep doing that every single day, we will all improve. Now, the best examples of this are where organizations don't work to arbitrary targets and averages, but they get everyone to just be that little bit better every day. Because if you think about that incremental gain this time next year, everyone will be better. And that alignment is there behind your strategic objectives, your short-term goal, your project initiatives.

[00:09:54] You will see some huge changes, but that's a massive mindset change to go away from a, everyone needs to hit this particular target sort of number. If everyone gets to this average, we'll all be bang average, won't we? That'll be great. It gets you away from all of that. So I say, this is one of why we're talking about stopping those old metrics and really thinking about how we can redefine where we are going. Chris, I've given you a little intro, so I'll let you do the priority there. I was enjoying that. Probably not. No, no, no.

[00:10:24] Cheers. Yeah, to Phil's point, if we're going to get into a new mindset of learning and doing stuff, sometimes we've got to create the time to be able to do that. You know, and especially as team leaders, I think what we can typically become is the busiest people in the world. Um, because we want to take everything on. We take on everybody's problems. We try to solve everybody's problems.

[00:10:47] And the fundamentally we kind of leave little time for our own development and little time to actually understand where we can break some of those failure loops or understand how we can learn individually and move forward. I'm the world's greatest procrastinator. Like there was a world cup for procrastination. Right. I would be world champion every four years. Right. I just would. Right. I like nothing more than sitting and mulling over what I've got to do and then chastising myself for just not doing the things that I needed to do. Right.

[00:11:15] I can be, I can be a bugger for it. So over the years, I've had to develop ways of thinking and ways of kind of counteracting that procrastination to create time, not just to make sure the work gets done that needs doing, but protecting time for me to, to do what I need to do in terms of my own development. Um, because we work in an issue that moves very quickly and we set the force of the land.

[00:11:39] If we're going to be kind of helping people raise standards, we need to understand what standards we need to be raising and we need to understand how the industry's moving. So we've got to protect time. So we use this model. There's two models I'm going to show you now that we use as part of our learning academy for our assisted learning pathway students. And we talk to them and they say to me, I've never got any time to do anything. And then I'll go, you have to lie. I have got time. You're just choosing not, not to kind of utilize it in the best possible way. The first one is Eisenhower's urgent and important principles.

[00:12:08] That's a quote from Eisenhower there. He's always got two kinds of problems. The urgent and the important. And the urgent are not important and the important are never urgent, right? It's a bit of a misnomer, but from that, there's a development of a tool that helps us to problematize. Um, Sarah would have seen this before. She's done assisted learning pathways and such, right? But fundamentally what it looks like is this. We simply put these things into four categories. We have got the things that are important and they are urgent.

[00:12:34] We have got the things that are important and not urgent, the not important and the urgent, and the not important and not urgent. So it's four clear tasks that are task groupings that come into what we do. Right? So when we look at this, these ones at the top of the thing, they obviously are most important stuff. They are important. They are urgent. What we started to think about it, all that list of things that you've got to do.

[00:12:57] If you start to think about where they sit within that kind of scale of important and urgent, how can we then utilize our time in a way that makes these things happen? So we kind of easily just transfer that into a simple matrix. This is the level of importance, the left and the level of urgency going on the bottom. I just map my tasks based on that. Right? This is how they are based on those four categorization.

[00:13:25] And if we grid that off, it gives us a clear kind of definition of where these sit. Right? And then I can start to think about what other things I can actually spend my time doing. So if you look at the top, top right, the important and urgent, they're your top priority lesson. They're the things that you do. They're the stuff. They've got clear deadlines. They have significant consequences if they're not done. You know, so these are the things that we need to make sure whatever else we've got to do, we're getting them done. Right?

[00:13:53] They are our most important things to do in any given day, in any given timeframe that we're planning for. The next group then is the things that might be important, but they're not really urgent. So we can schedule to do them at a later date. Right? So this thing where we get people tapping us on the shoulder and we go, can you adjust? Right? And 99% of the time we just go, aye, I will. Right? Without actually questioning. If when it needs to be done by, we just go, aye, I'll do that. That's fine. Then all of a sudden you've wasted an hour doing something.

[00:14:22] You go back to the guy and I've done that for you. He goes, all right, then I don't need it till next Tuesday. And you go, I wasted an hour of my time doing that. I could have, I could have, I'm Friday. Why didn't I have to do it now? So thinking about the things that we're getting to, asking the right questions around the tasks that we're being asked to do, allows us to go, yeah, they're important. Right? Need to do them, but they're not urgent. So these are things I might not have a set deadline for, or it's a deadline that's kind of down the track a little bit. Right? So we can shed sort of do them later. Problem you've got with scheduling tasks.

[00:14:49] Sometimes if you don't get them done, they will potentially move into that top right bracket at some point because you've kind of procrastinating on them for that long hands up to me that actually then they do become important and urgent later down the line. So schedule them. If you schedule them, make sure you're bloody doing them. Otherwise you're kind of going to kind of push them up to scale. The next things, you know, as team leaders, this is a skill that we need to develop more and more and more is what are the things that we can delegate? Right?

[00:15:15] These might be urgent things that need doing, but they don't necessarily need your capability, skill level, whatever to do them. Somebody else could do them as part of their development problem. They're learning development. They're learning new skills. They're kind of engaging with different stakeholders, whatever those things might be. But think of those tasks that don't necessarily need you to do them, but they still need doing in an urgent manner. Right? And you kind of go, right, what can I delegate those out?

[00:15:45] They may be not putting things at risk in terms of important projects. They don't get it quite right. It's not the end of the world, you know, but it's a learning and development opportunity for your team or the people around you. And then at risk of being controversial, the ones that are doing nothing, they're not important, they're not urgent. Why are we bloody doing it to start off with and why are we wasting our time? Right? So think about those things. Right? So that's the kind of thing that you need to start thinking about. We can get bogged down in doing stuff for doing stuff's sake.

[00:16:13] And that takes up a lot of time when actually we might not necessarily need to be doing it the start off with. So we always urge you, have a think about how you're taking these tasks on and how then you're utilizing your time to make sure you're getting the most out of the time that you've got. Now, once we understand kind of what we're doing, what are the things that I need to invest my time in? What am I doing? The other thing that we utilize during our kind of pathways with our learning students, this idea of the 1-3-5 rule.

[00:16:42] So if we can assume, right, in any given day that we could accomplish nine items, right, in a day, a big thing, three medium things and five small things, right, to kind of map out our kind of day. We can start to prioritize things a different way. So Martin, you talk about frogging, don't you, right? On a day-to-day basis, you go on, you got to call eight o'clock in the morning, I think in the morning you go, this is my big thing that I need to make sure I get done today. Right?

[00:17:10] And that's the first thing you focus on at the start of the day. And that's a great way to do it. But in that same way, there's different ways you can display that. So I go, right, okay. What is that one thing you need to get done to? If everything else goes to, I'm going to swear, because I know it's going to get distributed. If everything else goes to poo, right? In the day, what is the one thing that I need to make sure I complete before the end of the day? Right? Because things do come along that we're not expecting. So what is the one thing we need to get done? And that needs to be priority. That's the one thing.

[00:17:40] That's the thing we should be doing. We then go, okay, what are the three smaller medium-ish things I need doing? They might be on that important, but not urgently. So they haven't got a deadline, you know? So you might go, right, I'll do those three things to kind of move them along. And then there might be some little bits that you just need to do. Reply to an email. You might do a little bit of admin, whatever it is. You know, those little kind of niggly tasks. Just sit around that you can kind of study your time in between meetings if you need to.

[00:18:07] If you've got 20 minutes and go, and I can't concentrate on the medium thing now, but I could get those emails applied just so I'll do that. Right? It's about utilizing your time over the course of a day. And you can, you know, there's a sheet like this you could write on a Word document in your notepad. You know, if you want to be really fancy, you can do something like this where you kind of have a slide and you create that. You do that. Some people even build spreadsheets because people like that type of stuff, right? Where they kind of track throughout the week what they've done, what they're doing, how they're utilizing their time. Different ways to do it.

[00:18:36] The key thing is, understand what your priorities are at the top end. So what's the important? What's the urgent? What are the things that really need my time and investment? Then how can I divide my time properly throughout the course of the day of the week that enables me to achieve that? Once you've done that, that creates the pockets of time where you can invest in yourself. And you can go, you know what? I just get these things done. And I've got some time there. You know, you can prioritize your own learning within your one, three, five, you know, and people do that. They go, actually, you know what?

[00:19:05] What is a real kind of important thing for me is I give myself a couple of hours a week, or I give myself an hour a day or half an hour a day when I'm reading an article or I'm learning a new concept or I'm watching a webinar or I'm doing something right.

[00:20:21] Interaction changes the conversation. So instead of them coming to you with their demands of, I want this now, why aren't you giving it to me? They can start to understand that. Actually, I'm more likely to be told to plan that thing later because it's not urgent. It's not critical. I can plan that meeting in. I just need to speak to them at some point this week. If they're doing that, that now means that freeing your time up as well on top of that. And yeah, Martin, I'll bring you in at this point. I've just got, this has been great.

[00:20:48] I've just got a question around what advice you would give. Let's say a team leader is looking through all of their list of things to do and they're applying it into the Eisenhower matrix and then maybe moving it to this. What advice would you give in terms of challenging upwards around whether things are urgent or not?

[00:21:16] Because they might have been given tasks to do from a senior manager or their line manager and naturally assume that that goes into urgent, but it might not be urgent. And how, what's the advice around how do you kind of, you want to do that matrix properly, but there might be outside influences affecting you? Yeah, definitely. The starting point is documenting it and writing it down.

[00:21:45] And I said earlier, you don't create a plan to stick to it. You play, you create the plan to adapt from it by, by writing it down to think forward. But then also looking back on that, you can track the differences. So the day one, let's say you've, let's say week one, you start with this by tracking it. You'll start to understand how often do those things happen as a starting point, because sometimes perception is we always get sold to do these things.

[00:22:12] When the reality might be it's happened twice in three weeks because you've now been tracking it. So straight away, you're more calculated with that pushback to someone else. There's a strong chance that top down are constantly or saying a lot of things, shall we say, that actually your version of what is urgent or what is important is wrong. Because it's not uncommon for organizations to not be crystal clear on what their strategy is, what their organizational objectives are and how current in-flight projects are influencing those.

[00:22:42] And so therefore the issue might not be people coming top down and giving you new, new priorities. It might be that there's a flow of information that's not passing around. So therefore you now need to go and ask or be involved in another, in another meeting. So the transparency of it is really important, but as a starting point, yeah, just be open with it, that things are going to change, track the changes and use that as a way of thinking forward. So again, what you might find is that, do you know what, you might have a priority, but you might only want to put two things in your number three section here, because you know,

[00:23:12] that another number three is going to come in each week. And then likewise, that'd be number five, leave two available. So again, you're leaving yourself open for opportunities. You're not fixing it. You're already starting to create all of the playbook of rules or guidelines or principles that can help structure your day to stop it being so reactive and to prevent the important things not being done. A little bit.

[00:23:36] And there's an extension in the full module we do on this around kind of dealing with some of that ad hoc requests that come into your thing, which is going, okay. So once you've got that kind of Eisenhower kind of matrix and you've looked to what you're doing, the kind of next level below that is what's the probability of action being taken on the back of the work that I'm doing. So to Phil's point there, they might be asking you because they just keep asking it. So we start to talk to people, we'll ask the questions back. So when does it need doing by?

[00:24:05] You know, what's the consequence of it not happening by that deadline? So, you know, it could be, you know, for example, someone could say, well, we're going to get done by Friday and they go, and you go, why do you need to do my Friday? And they go, well, I go on holiday Friday. And you go, okay. So when you're back from holiday, well, I get back from holiday in two weeks. So actually you need it for when you get back from holiday, because you're not presenting that information back. So you get back up holiday. So you put a deadline on May of three days when actually it could be two weeks. But it's asking those questions of going, you know, why we're doing that?

[00:24:33] You know, who else could do it if it's not me? You know, it's all those kind of open questions that allow us to kind of get to where does that sit within my list of priorities as an individual by just challenging back and asking those questions. So what we, what we are very guilty of and I'm the same and my, and you're probably the same is just saying yes. But someone asks us to do something, you know, and we go, yeah, I'll do that. That's fine. But actually questioning back just gives us a sense of clarity to go, when do I need to invest my time in it?

[00:25:01] Is it right now or is it tomorrow or is it next week? And then I can plan more effectively time and tasks. I love this. I especially love the idea of tracking those types of requests. So you get an act, not only are you going to get an accurate picture, but it's probably going to change your own perception of how often it happens. Very much so. It's too easy for, nothing worse than anyone who universalizes with things like everyone or this always happens.

[00:25:30] And when you actually track it down, you realize it doesn't happen often at all. You know, like with certain, certain individuals, oh, they're always late on that day. You look and they're not. Yeah. It gets disruptive when it is. Just track the damn thing. Yeah. Deception is very, very inaccurate half the time. But this then all feeds in really. So these are the practical things towards other frameworks, which are very much around that continuous improvement.

[00:25:56] Because to pick on your point, Martin, it's very easy with good intentions, the role of whether it be an advisor, a team leader, even the head of that support area. To actually not quite focus on exactly what matters most, focusing what matters most to them. And actually, when you think about your business and your strategy, the operation model, the changes that are going on, what are those key opportunities that we need to work on to align those priorities? That really helps us to focus on what matters most.

[00:26:26] And those conversations probably don't happen enough. And they don't happen enough because we're stuck doing the do. And when we're doing that, we know less about what's really happening at that, at that broader level. So we do need to take the time to read those updates, attend those meetings. If we don't feel like we're getting enough of that information from above, that's what we need to push back to them. Not to say, you don't tell me anything. It'd be great to know a bit more about this so we can align our priorities on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.

[00:26:54] Not just working towards, for instance, a service level figure or another sort of quality metric. Though those are important, they're not critical or urgent. You know, we just need to, they're all sort of indicators of what's going on. But by focusing on what matters most, we can be aligned with our priorities. That then in turn feeds into that measure tracking and analyze and truly understanding performance. So again, that's not just following up the metrics.

[00:27:21] That's really understanding the more qualitative side of things of how are things actually happening out there? How are we achieving those particular measures and metrics? And likewise, with decision systems, how many decisions are being changed too quickly? Because if no one's tracking it, no one will know how bad or how good those things are. And then out of that, that does lead then to empowering, empowering people to make decisions. Because again, we pay people to make decisions.

[00:27:49] We don't pay people to control them and restrict them and just get to do a job. Because if things don't go right, that means the people who are controlling it are at fault. So we've got to make sure people feel empowered. Because when they're owning their own learning, that means they're coming up with great new ideas. That doesn't mean say we can do all those ideas, but it means you're starting to capture this sort of vibrancy of enthusiasm and energy.

[00:28:11] That really can start to improve things much better moving forward, which is the last part of this cycle, which is that driving action and improvement.

[00:28:52] Yeah, it's one of them. And Phil went through there. The career thing for me is that we only learn. We learn from doing. That's pretty much. But we've got to understand why we're doing the stuff that we're doing as an organisation. So, you know, when we understand what the strategy and the purpose is, when we understand that, we can go right from there. Where are the key things that I as an individual, so that could be you as team leaders, could be operations. It doesn't matter which role you play within that. Right?

[00:29:17] The idea being that everyone should understand what the purpose is and what we're trying to achieve, because then as an individual, team, whatever, you can go, where are my key priorities? Where are the things that I can actually do to influence our purpose, you know, and influence our output and stuff like that. So the more we understand that, the more we can start to kind of have those conversations. And what that stops at is what Phil said at the beginning, because we're really aligned at the beginning on our priorities.

[00:29:46] It stops kind of spread away from kind of being, you know, it keeps us kind of narrow straight away. We're aligned up. We know what we're doing. We know what we're working on and we're doing that. And then the ability then we've got so much data and information and tooling now to understand performance. It's criminal if we don't do it. You know, I think we should be able to truly understand at every level how we're performing against the priorities that we've set ourselves.

[00:30:11] And then giving people the time, the space, the opportunity to do what they need to do to better themselves, to make decisions, to whatever those things are. It just helps drivers and the more inclined to do it if they're relying from the start. So when everyone's focused on the things that matter more, what that allows people to do is actually build a rhythm that works for them. We're not dictating what that rhythm should be. We're kind of letting them create a rhythm that allows them to move forward.

[00:30:39] And then the thing that I always talk to you about this is, at the very end of this cycle, it's really important to me, especially in the world today, the industry today, because the very last bit of this is going, once we understand what we are doing, when we understand how we are performing, once people are taking ownership of stuff, once we've got the right knowledge in place, once we've got the right support in place, we're doing these things. The last thing in the cycle is like, okay, so now that we've done all that, which things can we simplify? Which things can we automate?

[00:31:08] And what processes and system are we seeing far too often that the system is driving the change. And actually the thinking we do before that should be then what drives what systems we deploy, whether that's automation, whether it's AI, whatever it is, doesn't matter. But that should always come at the end of a period of thinking, not at the start. It shouldn't be thing that triggers the thinking, it should be the thing that goes, this is where we need help and support.

[00:31:33] This is where we can improve things by bringing in some technology, by updating a process, by automating some things. The end of that learning cycle or improvement cycle, where that they should become clear, not at the start of it. I'll move on, Phil, conscious. That sounds. Yeah. And so that's one, another framework that's really useful to measure and to track.

[00:31:57] This is another hugely useful one, which is around really understanding your organizational objectives as it suggests there. And this is sort of something that came out of what started out as a triangle really, or how's that structure our classic key performance indicators. And when you challenge yourself on that, you soon realize just because we've got some data doesn't mean to say we need to be measuring it, managing it and reporting it on a daily basis.

[00:32:21] And we definitely don't need to call everything a key performance indicator because by its very nature, they can't all be key. So this helps to structure that thinking. So again, challenge the organization. Well, actually, what are the vision, the values and the brands? What are the key objectives that we need to achieve this year, two years, three years, five years, maybe even 10 years? Depends on the, on the type of industry, the type of organization that you are and the maturity maybe that you are.

[00:32:45] Because out of then you will have particular strategies for your customer, your colleague, the commercial and the compliance where you can set your true success measures, which are typically your key performance indicators. Those indicators will be driven by a set of performance indicators. So both performance measures and input measures. And these are often the interval, daily and weekly things, data points that we see that we end up call saying they're KPIs and they're bloody not.

[00:33:15] Okay. So let's stop doing that. Let's promise to do that. Okay. These are just indicators to help us draw out understanding. And going back to one of the things I said right at the beginning about moving away from averages, which we should have been doing. We've been writing about this for 20 years is understanding the outliers, understanding the sort of different sort of categories. That are within there and driving everyone towards improvements, whatever that may be.

[00:33:41] Because those small incremental changes towards improvement and intentional targets will get an overall better performance for us. If we keep hiding behind averages, we will keep going backwards. We'll be keep hiding the truth. And most, most important, we'll be hiding learning because we won't be really understanding what happened. We'll just be taking a huge sigh of relief because we've solved another disaster today and we've hit an arbitrary target.

[00:34:08] Those will not actually ever be the organizational objectives unless you are working for a business that deals in crisis management. Okay. That might be what your targets are, but even then you'd be wanting to improve them and doing them more cost effectively, which will have a new measure on it. Okay. So that's why these are really important to look at. Your organizational objectives shouldn't change that often. They should be set because you have a budget that can afford to deliver those objectives. That helps you drive learning. And likewise, your key performance indicators shouldn't change that much.

[00:34:35] However, they should adapt to new initiatives and projects that are introduced into your business. Okay. You still have a baseline and a benchmark to be able to compare where your new measures are against that to be able to understand return on investment and difference and impacts of change, but they shouldn't be changing too often. Your performance measures may because as I said, you want everyone to incrementally improve on a daily basis, which in turn drives an overall improvement.

[00:35:02] So strategy pyramid is a great way of helping to draw yourself out of the weeds of the day and think forward about the future. What's most important. This then all works with things like the planning cycle that we've got here. It's very easy to think my job isn't planning, but the intention to do or not do something is a plan. So unless you'd never do anything and just sit there, even that would be a plan once if you didn't actually intend to do anything. So either way, you need to use this cycle is what I'm saying.

[00:35:30] Your business will have an operating model. So really understand what the operating model is and then how much you can afford to deliver that. Because again, sometimes the way the budget has been set might be based on average for the year. Therefore, you will have known difficult months or known easier months. That doesn't mean to say you work hard of some months and you take your foot off in the other means you adapt how you work in those months so that you can deliver those objectives at the end of the year. So utilizing that.

[00:36:00] In turn, you've got the operationalizing of the plan. And these are the long term decisions. These are the decisions that lead to the invisible wins. So you can get better recruit, better training, better projects that are landing at different times. You will stop the problems arising on the day or you'll have a better chance of doing so. And by bringing them and making more transparency around that, it means you can start to create better rule books, which means your contingency planning is better, which improves your readiness, which ultimately improves your effectiveness.

[00:36:26] All of this, this cycle is driven by the sort of powerhouse down that left-hand side. And again, the more we are, have an understanding of the data that we have, the better because we understand where that data comes from. We understand how to compare this year's data versus last year's data, especially if there's a new system in place and it may not be like for like. You wanted to understand the difference and are we improving better? And that's it. This in turn can lead into how we analyze and use our modeling.

[00:36:52] Now, depending on your role, you may not need to be an analyst or an architect, but you want to know the people who are doing that sort of way are driving forward great what if and if then scenarios of what's going to happen next. Because that in turn helps us to make those better decisions. All of these things are around knowledge share and improving of decisions. Because when we get that right in our business, we become more open to ideas, we become open to failures, capture more learning, and we drive, drive greater improvement.

[00:37:22] Which I think takes us back to the improvement cycle, Chris, I'll let you wind, wind things up. Yeah. So it does take us back because all those things go back to how do we drive forward improvement? And I say in your role, no matter what role you have, you can influence improvement, whether it's your own individual influence or your team's improvement. It doesn't matter. Because if we all take ownership of improvement, what that allows us to do to fill the point.

[00:37:49] Really, really at the start of this session was around just think how much better we'll be in 12 months' time. If we all take a little bit of ownership, if we all do a little bit of something different, we all think about what we can do to raise standards. To improve our performance, to, you know, change the way we approach certain things. It just makes us a little bit better every day. So that was it from me. Phil?

[00:38:15] Yeah, no, I think that's been a good opportunity to be able to talk these things through. What I'd say is do bits by bit. Don't try and take all of this on straight away. If there was one thing to take from this, this is about structuring your thinking. If that is the Eisenhower matrix, start to use that. Keep up with it. Build the habit. Look for improvements, then add to it. If it's the 1-3-5 principle, again, start it. Build your confidence with how it works, how it works for you. You may even adapt it.

[00:38:45] They say 1-3-5 is a principle. You might decide to do 1-2 and 7, for instance. Doesn't matter. Just make sure it works for you when it's adapted based on that theory. Again, start to use and introduce these other frameworks. And again, they might need to be adapted for the culture of your business and how it works. But the more we track these things, the better we can improve and the better we can learn. Be patient with yourself. Doing anything new is always tricky. You've got to unlearn.

[00:39:12] And remember, you've got to stop something first to give yourself the time to be able to really embed this learning and sustain that momentum of learning. Mr Teasdale. Well, this has been great. Before I ask another question, I don't want to keep hogging these. Has anyone, George and Sarah Stewart, anyone got a question for the chaps?

[00:39:40] I think they're sick of me asking them questions, to be honest. So I'm going to take a back seat on this one. I'm glad I'm sat down. And I've sat all over. I have got one. So if you guys are thinking of one, you're going to get a bit more time now. So, yeah, Phil, Chris, this has genuinely been brilliant.

[00:40:08] I've written like two and a half pages of notes here just for me. But I wondered what you would say to someone. I was talking to a member of the community the other day, and she shared that she's really keen on her own personal development and improvement and trying to bring some order to the chaos that exists around her, but bring the order for her own team.

[00:40:39] And am I right in thinking that what you've just gone through? Yes, you mentioned there at the end, Phil, that you have to amend for your company culture. But this is something you could work on yourself, regardless of what's going on around you. I mean, that's still quite difficult to make a commitment and to kind of swim against the tide if the tide is all kind of, well, we just firefight all day.

[00:41:07] But this can be used individually. Yeah, is the question, I guess. Yeah, absolutely. I think, again, another principle that we keep adding in these things is, and whether this is an 80-20, 80% of the time do your job, 20% of the time improve your job. The other one is the 70-20-10, 70% do your job, 20% improve, 10% talk to other people. This is the key thing.

[00:41:29] Sometimes when you feel like you're the only one thinking of something, it's because you're not spending enough time just sharing what your challenges are and listening to other people's challenges. It's maybe at your same level or even a level above. That doesn't mean, say, you use your one-to-ones or coffee breaks to moan. It's about thinking forward. What can we do to improve? They say too often, a great way of connecting with people is talking about problems and having a moan. It's a very British way, isn't it? Let's relate to one another about that.

[00:41:59] Whereas actually just by talking to people about, I wonder what we could do differently tomorrow. I wonder what would happen if we did this. Just helps others to understand what you're talking about and what you're thinking about. But the more you understand others and listen to them, that can only in turn give you more knowledge, which in turn helps you make better decisions. But I think any starting point needs to be that structuring because I say a big part of this is perception and perception can very quickly become our reality.

[00:42:25] If we think we're in a world of chaos all the time and things are always changing. Well, let's track that and let's really understand if that is the case. But if that is the case, you can more easily, if you've got it quantified, speak to someone to say these targets keep changing on a daily basis. It's really confusing for my team and it's driving this behavior. All of a sudden, someone can bring to life what is a problem as opposed to, it's a real mess. We're just constantly firefighting each day. Again, these are all expressions that it's too easy for people to use, isn't it?

[00:42:55] I mean, at the start of this, how are you? Oh, I'm busy. You know, because people don't want to go, well, I'm really quiet at them. Oh, do you know, I don't think I've done a day's work in a fortnight. No one wants to start with that. Well, of course we've got stuff on, but you know, we want to sort of change that perception of saying actually, yeah, it's been really interesting this week. I've been working on these elements and this isn't working. Because again, too often we don't want to talk about what isn't working. And I think again, being open around that can just help the learning to actually take place.

[00:43:24] But again, coming back to those two questions, just think at the end of every day, what have you learned today? So what am I going to do differently tomorrow? Let's not be ingrained in this habit or cycle of just doing the same thing every day, thinking I've survived in a day of success or I've cleared my email inbox, that's success. It just isn't. It really isn't. The success is we've moved forward on our understanding of where we're trying to go as a business. We're getting nearer to some of those measures that are our true measures of success.

[00:43:53] And actually we've all improved and we've all learned something to do. I love it. I think, you know, just to follow up on that, you know, wherever it is where you're watching this, there's no one size fits all to any of this, right? Which is where we kind of fall down a little bit. Everyone will learn differently and everyone will have times in their day or their week or whatever that weren't better for them. And, you know, Martin, you've started doing that early morning frogging thing, right?

[00:44:22] That won't be for everybody. It just won't be. It works for you, but it won't work for everybody. You know, the 1-3-5 rule will work for somebody, it won't work for everybody. We like to structure things in a slightly different way. Some people don't want structure or they want a loose structure rather than define structure. There's loads of different models, loads of different ways of thinking out there, but actually going away and learning about those is a way of getting yourself kind of into a mindset that allows you to push forward.

[00:44:49] Once you get, you know, we talk about learning in a way that says it has to be habitual. You know, we can dip in and out if we want, but actually just doing something that makes you think differently, makes you react differently. You know, there's a big reason why we put, you know, the creative within our accreditation program as you move through the levels. One of the biggest things that we put in there is around people's ability to share, you know, and that helps kind of move your level up through your accreditation. It's not just about reading the article.

[00:45:18] It's not just about watching a module. It's not just about attending a conference. It's about what have you learned? What are you doing different? How are you sharing that with your team, with your colleagues, with the wider community, with the industry? Those types of things are really important for us because if we don't learn from each other, we don't get any better. You know what I mean? I could be the greatest at everything. Right? I could be. It's a stretch. But I could be the greatest at everything.

[00:45:45] Right? But if I just sit there in my house and don't share that with others, display it with others, role model for others, what's the point in being the best at everything? You know, what's the point in knowing everything? There's no point to any of these things if we're not sharing that and helping other people get better amongst themselves. So it's a really important thing for us is that ability to share. You kind of tell me you're the best at everything every other day.

[00:46:13] I mean, I'm not far off. I'm the best at being confident, mine. That is for true. Well, guys, thanks a lot. And Sarah wrote in the chat, forum fangirl. I'm definitely a forum fan boy. It doesn't have the same ring, Martin, mate. It doesn't. It doesn't. I'll think of something better.

[00:46:39] But I'm sure you guys are watching this live and those of you that watch the recording can see why we are such fans. And I'm pleased to say that we're developing our relationship between the community and the forum even further. And live now in the community is a link to a virtual learning academy. And Chris, if you could share that and just talk through what we have cooked up.

[00:47:09] To find magic. So hidden within the team leader community, well, there'll be a link that slide there. It's in the navigation panel on the left hand side. Yeah. So that'll open up this. Now, you know, it's the first iteration. Why did you scroll so quickly past that? I mean, that's the greatest face of all time.

[00:47:45] It's amazing. We looked at content that we've got available within our learning academy and said, what do we think the team leader community will benefit from in terms of helping their roles, understanding the broader industry and things like that. And so we put those on. No one else has accessed this particular page. It is anywhere that comes through the team leader community. And you can go on there. You can have a look at it. Speak to your line. If there is any learning that you want to do, this is your route in. And it's all just into a LMS system.

[00:48:15] It's very much self-paced. But again, if you've got that habit to learn, you want to learn more about different things. There's things like the fundamentals of a contact center, which might be good for new team members coming in. There's stuff around engagement and stakeholder management and how we do that. Some stuff around strategy and understanding through that strategic intent. What are we doing? Why are we doing things? There's some really good content in there. And I will, you know, I mean, I'm bound to say that. I'm not going to say it's rubbish. I'm a book. There is some really good content in there.

[00:48:44] But do take some time and look around. It's a thing that interests you. Speak to Martin. You can book directly through the website. It's all open for you guys to go in and do that. Brilliant. I'll pay plug. I would definitely, I've sort of alluded to it in the chat, but I would really recommend this learning pathways. I did the strategic leadership one last year, which was quite out of my comfort zone as I'm not a people leader. I'm sure everyone will tell you, but honestly, it makes you think differently.

[00:49:13] It makes you question things that you weren't sure about. And also it puts you in touch with other like minded people in the community. So I would say it's not just a sit down learning session. If you want that, it's not for you. But if you want to really make a difference and I promise they're not paying me to say this. You know, it is really, really good. I've learned a lot from it. Some of it's a bit uncomfortable. I actually ran Chris at one point and went, I can't do this. It's too uncomfortable. So, you know, it's not easy, but learning's not meant to be easy.

[00:49:42] What did I tell you, Sarah? What did I tell you? Yeah, I'll move it. No, I'm joking. The point it becomes uncomfortable and that is the point you're learning. That's when you're learning. Yeah. And then you embraced it and off you went. I did. Yeah. So again, I've done two. I've done a planning one and the leadership one. If you don't know much about planning, really, really good sessions as well. But the leadership one was completely out of my comfort zone and I learned a lot about myself through that. So I do recommend it.

[00:50:09] You know, and hopefully, even from this session today, for those that haven't, you know, met Solari before in any way, shape or form, we try to learn. Try to learn in easy. That's one of our statements. We met learning in easy, but you've got to take the ownership of your learning, right? But what we're trying to do is not make it really kind of clinical or all that. We try to have a bit of fun with it. We try and make sure you're bringing people in, you get to meet people, talk to people. You know, that's what we try to do. We try to make it as kind of engaged as possible.

[00:50:38] So it resonates what you try to do. You know, we're not just, you know, we're not that type of people. You know, we're just not. We, you know, we have got time served in this industry. And we know difference between what's really boring and what's a little bit more engaging. We're in that little bit more engaging bracket. One hundred percent.

[00:51:04] I'm really pleased about this and I'm really looking forward to what more we can do together. But for today's session, thanks very much. And Ian, Sarah, George and Stu, thanks very much for joining live. And for everyone else that's watching it on the recording, if you want to find out more and if you want to get more involved with the forum outside of the Virtual Learning Academy and just find out more about them, please just let me know.

[00:51:32] I'm happy to facilitate that as well. But Chris is in the community occasionally when he's... Well, I'm not procrastinating. But I'm feeling great. Yeah, I'm busy being the best at everything. I've got time just to be in the community. Well, thank you all very much. Have a lovely rest of your Friday and a great weekend. Well, big cheers, Matt. Thanks so much, everyone. Thank you. Thank you.

[00:52:00] Great stuff there from Phil and Chris at the forum. Massive thanks to them. If you are interested in the team leader community, please just email me at martin at getoutofrap.com and please do go and check the forum if you are a contact centre that cares about the development and progression of your people. Thanks very much for listening and take care.