Combining Lean Process with Behavioural Principles to Achieve Large Scale Change

McKinsey Quarterly recently featured an interview with Joroen van Breda Vriesman, Chief Executive of the Dutch Insurance company Eureko on how they achieved a large scale change programme, initially within a 2,200 person division and then across the entire 20,000 person organisation.

The observations of two of the critical components resonated strongly, as they reflect closely the work that FranklinCovey does in helping clients to deliver effective change

1.  "You must have a vision that explains to people why they are working according to lean principles - that it's not only about meeting a budget, that it's actually about creating a better company. With a vision - one that employees trust - you can make incredibly big changes in a short time. Without this vision, if you push lean just as something top management wants, it will probably not be around for more than a couple of years"

2.   "The prerequisite for succeeding with this vision is that people trust us. (By this) we mean that people in our company need to trust themselves, players within teams have to trust each other and teams also need mutual trust. This is very important for lean, because if teams don't trust each other, they will end up duplicating work. It also goes without saying that our customers also need to trust us. So we have performance indicators that measure how sales teams trust each other and how our customers trust us overall, as well as our separate brands. It's also important to learn how we can improve that trust. Finally, we have begun to measure how health care providers trust our company."

FranklinCovey's long established work in helping Leaders to set a direction for their business and communicate their strategy in terms than enable engagement and execution means we have strong experience to offer when it comes to establishing a compelling vision. Likewise, the work we have done in our Speed of Trust practice means we can also provide very tangible measures of Trust at an Individual, Team, Organisational, Customer and Market level. As (if not more) importantly, we can then provide the support to develop a culture of trust through the daily behaviours of an organisations people towards colleagues and clients.