Financial Times
"Curiosity Killed the Cat - Satisfaction Brought it Back"
Increased Performance through a Learning Partnership
A Turn Of Events
We asked the client, Human Resources Director, Audrey Stewart, for her impression of the programme. Her reply was so comprehensive that we have decided to let her tell the story. Along the way we include some of our thinking and our approach, but Audrey's words are her own.
First we asked Audrey "What was the outcome of the events - what was different after the programme?"
"The building recaptured the buzz it had in the early days. The business as a whole became slicker - ideas were quickly cascaded - people were keen to ask questions, to probe, to be curious - so projects were completed more quickly. Bad ideas were dropped faster and overall there was a marked change in pace.
There was suddenly a hunger to try things differently. There was a demand for senior managers to communicate more frequently and in different ways. It became impossible to find an empty meeting table - people were constantly joining people from other teams to discuss shared projects, people from opposite sides of the business worked together. Problems were overcome. Friendships sprung up with the unlikeliest of people.
In appraisals managers felt better equipped to handle the traumas of managing people, employees were more confident about talking - the learning needs identified by employees and managers were more specific and sensible.
The events are still talked about today"
The Beginning
At FT.com it is a fast moving culture. Buying and selling different companies, changing premises, reorganising constantly - the pace is, and has been, relentless.
As part of dealing with an increasingly competitive environment and to meet its aggressive targets FT.com identified that its people needed to learn more quickly, effectively and actively.
The company also wanted to acquire the government's Investors In People status. It saw the award as a foundation, part of any intervention that increased speed of learning. As Audrey Stewart explains:
"I knew we needed something that would get the whole organisation open to the idea of learning, passing on knowledge, supporting each other, demanding to be better, to seek ways to improve everything we did, to question things and challenge. Something that opened everyone's eyes to the possibility of being great - of being a really slick organisation.
I had a vague notion of what I wanted, but I couldn't articulate it.
I met with two suppliers. I talked about the project and my thoughts - and tried to draw a picture of what I wanted. When I read the proposals submitted, it was clear that neither consultancy could see my picture. The ideas didn't even come close to satisfying my vision.
Maynard Leigh were already working with another part of the organisation when they were recommended to me so I arranged a meeting. About 30 seconds into my description of what I hoped to achieve, the Maynard Leigh consultant said he thought he got it - and described what he thought he had understood from my brief - it was exactly what I had pictured - it was as if he had seen the picture inside my head and translated into words far more effectively than I could."
So what made the difference?
Our Consultancy Approach
Maynard Leigh always aims to work in close partnership with the client. Whether we are helping with a major change initiative or a specific development area, we find it more effective to generate proposals jointly with those who must make the change stick.
Our approach to major change is that it starts with individuals. Ultimately it is individuals who make change possible. So, much of our change work inevitably begins with developing PEOPLE, POTENTIAL and PERFORMANCE.
For this project we adopted a five stage process:
Stage 1: Objective
Stage 2: Diagnostics
Stage 3: Discussion in Partnership
Stage 4: Intervention Design
Stage 5: Implementation
Stage 1: Objective
First, we worked with Audrey Stewart to clarify the objective, to help articulate the vision. What would be a successful outcome, what was the compelling reason for change?
It became clear that the vision was to create a company that is
Continuously learning and transforming itself to take advantage of new opportunities
Able to increase its revenue by creating more value for its customers
Capable of responding to a dynamic environment characterised by speed and constant change
Using the huge resources locked up in its people's knowledge, experience and creativity.
Stage 2: Diagnostics
Secondly, through individual and group meetings we sought to:
Understand more fully the environment as it stands.
Identify the obstacles to creating the vision expressed above.
Identify the enablers of a learning culture and those elements that impede learning and development.
Help increase buy-in to the programme as a whole.
Stage 3: Discussion in Partnership
Our findings prompted further creative discussion with FT. They helped identify four particular areas or pressure points on which to focus attention. These would be likely to generate an impetus toward the desired change and hopefully to dramatically improve performance. The pressure points were the ability to:
Change
Most major change efforts falter through a failure to enrol those affected. We committed to helping the client's people manage and take responsibility for change.
Create
We committed to unlocking the creative processes within FT.com that unleash innovation, adaptability and agility.
Compete
Any outcomes from the project would need to affect the market offering from FT.com. One of the major drivers behind the change was therefore to retain and enhance a competitive edge.
Cohere
The programme needed to generate a shared experience and vocabulary. This would help maintain organisational coherence in the face of rapid change.
The diagnostics and the partnership discussions led to the subsequent design of the programme interventions. As Audrey describes:
"The brief came back quickly - and went much further than I had hoped. Not only did it exactly capture what I wanted, it articulated the thinking that would underpin the programme. And it described a programme loaded with creativity, fun, passion and lots of learning - perfect for our fairly young and highly creative people."
Stage 4: Intervention Design
It makes sense at this point to explain our thinking on learning organisations.
The Need For Learning
"The only truly educated person is the one who has learned how to learn".
Carl Rodgers
In business today the speed of information gives particular power to those with knowledge. Almost the only way to maintain competitive advantage is therefore to accelerate the learning and development of an organisation's people, it's response to innovation, knowledge sharing and ability to adapt.
Maynard Leigh interprets this requirement to mean that organisations need people who are constantly growing the company through developing themselves and those around them. We sum it up as 'Grow your people and you grow your company'.
The Need For Teaching
It is not enough for people to learn how they learn. To become a true learning organisation people also have to learn how to teach others.
"We believe that the most effective Learning Organisation is one that is also a Teaching Organisation," explains Stuart Mackenzie, a senior Maynard Leigh consultant. "People need to coach those around them formally and informally. This creates a learning partnership and is the most powerful way to create a company fit for the future."
For FT.com we designed two learning events: Curiosity Killed the Cat and Fish.
Curiosity Killed the Cat
This was a theatrical intervention, fast moving and multi-layered. The event aimed to:
Stimulate a proactive attitude toward knowledge sharing
Ignite curiosity as a learning tool
Create a shared value about the importance of learning
The workshop experience used 360 degree stimulation and was highly interactive involving multi-media, and accelerated learning.
Fish
To embed and maintain an effective learning culture requires an environment that constantly and consciously supports both learning and teaching. Amongst other things this demands an internal resource of competent coaches.
Fish followed on from Curiosity, and was a coaching course based on the idea:
"Give a starving person a fish and you feed them for a day teach them to fish and you feed them for life"
This two-day learning event set out to inspire people to become effective coaches and to provide them with the necessary know-how and practice. Fish revisited the principles of learning established earlier in Curiosity. It offered the tools needed for coaching, both in formal and informal situations, and examined how one supports and challenges others to learn and develop.
As with all Maynard Leigh Associates' courses, it was designed as a totally interactive learning experience. As Deena Gornick, the consultant responsible for delivery of the programmes explains:
"People learn by doing, so we wanted to create many opportunities in which to practise coaching skills. Learning should also be fun, so the experience was designed to be enjoyable as well as instructive. Most of all, it was intended to be of practical use; thus we continually related the learning back to real-live issues in FT, and wanted to ensure that the skills could be directly applied to the business."
Stage 5: Implementation
"I can never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they learn"
Albert Einstein
In the FT culture explains Audrey Stewart:
"...we do not force anyone to do a course. It was important that we make any event attractive to the people. Maynard Leigh actively helped us promote the programme - for example, helping devise a slow burning ad campaign on email. Using lots of interesting and thought provoking quotes released slowly and with no more explanation than the name of the course - everyone was intrigued and really keen to go on the programme."
People vary in how they learn, and while there is no formula there are some key ingredients. Maynard Leigh specialises in creating the best environment for individuals to maximise their learning. In particular we:
Use ideas from the theatre combined with business know-how, creating an exciting, fast moving learning environment
Get people up and doing, rather than being talked at
Create a learning environment in which people experiment and grow
Encourage people to take risks, seeing our workshops as learning laboratories
Recognise that people have different learning styles
Expect all learning on Maynard Leigh workshops to be closely linked with the business environment
Audrey's impressions:
"The programme itself was great. The layout, the huge amounts of props everywhere, and the initial ice breakers set the scene for a day loaded with experiences. It was fast, the activities were varied, techniques and models were delivered in interesting ways. It was impossible not to participate.
There was a buzz at the office as one group completed the programme, while other people hadn't yet attended. People were anxious for their manager or colleagues to attend so they could discuss what they had learned on the programme and agree how to do things differently."
The Result
The company was awarded its Investors In People award, the first member of the FT Group to win at the first try. The report from IIP spoke glowingly about the effect of the Maynard Leigh course on the culture and as Audrey Stewart reveals:
"This is some feedback from just one of our managers, six months after she and her team participated in the programme
As a result people were (and still are) far more creative in the ways that they approach their work.
There were some excellent tools and techniques that we have used many times since, which have helped us to approach problems and challenges in a more complete sense.
Communications have improved ever since.
Excellent for team working.
The ethos of it's OK to make mistakes, as long as you learn from them' was a valuable concept that many people took away
An important outcome from the programme has been the creation of a strong culture of learning, including learning from mistakes and understanding, valuing and using diversity in teams"
Audrey further concludes that:
"this experience and Maynard Leigh intervention has raised morale, changed the culture of meetings, built personal relationships and made learning fun. Coaching and co-coaching has also become strong, including modelling from senior managers.
When we submitted our application for IIP accreditation, we invited each team to produce evidence of how we met each of the IIP standards. The submissions were amazing - they were highly creative, they all talked about how the team communicated and learned and how that learning directly related to the business goals. If we had asked for that months before, the submissions would have been entirely different.
In the IIP interviews, Curiosity and Fish came up time and time again - people saw it as a start point, a catalyst, a foundation - the point that they learned to listen, to learn, to communicate, to share - it was the springboard."
Because of its success in the UK, FT invited Maynard Leigh to export it to New York. Curiosity and its sequel Fish have both now run successfully in the USA.
