Are you ready to innovate

In his article on innovation Jaime Beckett explores some of the key issues surrounding building a culture of innovation. Another aspect of innovation is that if your organisations culture doesn't allow failure then it is unlikely that innovation will occur. After all success and failure are both sides of the coin called innovation.

A story to make you smile!

I just had to share this story about Jeff the cabbie from drewsmarketingminute.com it just made me smile A customer service case study from Jeff the cabbie. Fantastic tale of real customer service.

The cost of forms?

This article from evolving excellence confirms what I have learned over many years of working in the public sector in the UK.

Forms are generally not designed for purpose and are used to keep the experts separate from the customer, this leads to an increase in costs as more often than not the forms are so complex or long that they are not filled in correctly and have either to be rewoked or sent back to the customer.

An even more worrying development is the ever increasing number of forms that can now be filled in online increasing costs even more, I will develop this thought in future posts.

I would love to gather examples where forms have been removed or redesigned saving both time and costs.

I love questions

Click Here for an excellent list of questions that may lead to improved Employee Engagemment, at least it will lead to better conversations!! From David Zinger at the Employee Engagement Network.

Would love to hear what you favioute question is, when working with Teams. Mine is

"So tell me what I can do to make you better"

Trial and Error

If at first you don't succeed then try try again.... That was a story my grandad used to tell me when I was a child so if you liked that story I think you will love this excellent TED video by Tim Hartford it is a must watch.

what practical methods exist to enable the teams to trust their new approach and not revert to old thinking?

I have worked with many teams over the years that process applications for housing benefit in the UK, in the main they have understood the key principles they need to follow in order to add maximum value to their customers, they find new and innovative ways to delight their customers and are in general happy with the new approach to the work.

One of the key issues that keeps cropping up again and again is whilst the is still an inherited backlog of work, i.e. Before capacity levels with demand, some teams find it very difficult to see past the backlog and the failure demand it causes they therefore find it easier to revert back to old habits in terms of trying to manage the work and the staff.

To address this problem I work with the teams and their leaders to focus on delivering value to customers and trusting that the backlog will reduce given time, whilst this has worked on many occasions, sometimes it is less successful. The question this poses is "what practical methods exist to enable the teams to trust their new approach and not revert to old thinking?"

Back in business

Hi all aim to restart blogging from this week. Looking forward to it?