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Home > All site sections > HR blogs and comment > HR blogs > Specialists' blog

Change the system, not the staff

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Peter Honey

15 Dec 2010 | 16:05

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Articles more than one month old can be viewed only by CIPD members or PM Subscribers.

Suppose you are the head of a project team in a large organisation. Your team has been working on plans for a huge project – and I mean huge, think aircraft carrier-sized – and you are all totally committed, utterly convinced it is the right thing to do. Unfortunately, in order to proceed you have to have the project signed off by the finance department. They have a reputation for being a mean lot but, once they have ticked their boxes, you know from past experience that a project like yours rarely gets scrapped once it’s started. What would you do to play the system and ensure your project gets the go ahead? That’s right, you’d underestimate the likely costs to maximise the chances of your project being approved - a totally predictable and sensible thing to do in the circumstances.

Then suppose that by the end of the first year of your project, you have money in the budget that, for various reasons, you haven’t spent yet. You know that not spending the money will weaken your case for an increase in next year’s budget round. What would you do? You’d spend the money of course. In the circumstances, budget-dumping is a totally predictable, sensible thing to do.

People in organisations – especially large ones where the money doesn’t seem ‘real’ – learn how to play the system. I once interviewed the CEO of a large international organisation and asked him what he’d change about the behaviour of his managers if only he knew how. He thought about this for a long time and eventually said: “I wish my managers would spend the company’s money as if it was their own.”

The MoD is under fire (sorry!) for being dysfunctional and wasting billions of taxpayer’s money, ie, not ‘real’ money. A report by Deloitte estimates that the MoD could save up to 20 per cent of its running costs by streamlining its processes. An anonymous source said: “It is not that there aren’t capable people, it is just that the processes of running this organisation stymie you at every step. However good you are, you are brought to a halt by the system.”

That’s the trouble with silly systems; they contaminate the behaviour of people who in other circumstances would behave quite differently. It all reminds me of the teachings of the late Dr W. Edwards Deming, the quality guru. He was adamant that inadequate processes, not inadequate people, were the key to understanding and solving performance problems.

Processes and systems, not the people caught up in them, are the real villains. Change the process to change the behaviour.

Comments

1. At 22:12 on 20 Dec 2010, Andy wrote:

Peter, at long last someone has opened the "Pandora's Box" of systems thinking and I offer my heartiest congratulations! I and others have been swimming for years against the tide of conventional behaviourist HR thinking about the nature of leadership, management, performance and human nature, to no avail.

The weight of evidence from decades of work undertaken by the likes of Deming, Scholtes, Juran, McGregor, Ackoff, Senge, Herzberg, Ohno (of Toyota fame), Kohn, Pink and Seddon (of Vanguard) and many others seems to have had little sway within the hallowed halls of the CIPD and the greater HR profession, and you have exposed these to re-appraisal, should people take the courage to look at these again or for the first time!

I would entreat you to continue writing these blogs on this topic, there is much yet to expose for HR to explore. We must get people to fundamentally change the way they think before progress can be made to transform work. As Deming proved, when you look at the performance of the organisation, over 95% is due to the system (the design of the work) and less than 5% is due to the people. Why does HR continue to focus all its attention to the people rather than the work? Time for change Peter, lead the charge and we're right with you!
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