Looking at small change pt.1
Purposeful listening
I like doing the sums on how small changes to a way of working when scaled up across many people or tasks can have a significant impact.
Yes, thanks for asking, I am very fun at dinner parties.
I’ve been doing a fair bit of thinking about this, and with the help of my colleague Ben, I have whittled this thinking into something resembling a blog post. Or that’s the plan anyway. You can tell me if it has worked.
It’s actually more than one post (failed at the first hurdle, never mind), so here’s part 1 of thinking about how small changes can have further-reaching consequences. This first one looks at how individual actions and ideas can save larger than expected amounts of time and stress or can shape decisions big and small.
I’ll start with a couple of examples of my back-of-fag-packet working out, though the simple changes which were made/suggested are from real life.
An example where someone has done a small bit of hard work so you don’t have to
One of our customers proactively did some work to standardise how their organisation will ask demographic questions. They wrote up guidance for when it is appropriate to ask them and got sign off on it, taking the thinking pain out of it for everyone else. They saved those questions centrally and shared the guidance so that these could be re-used quickly each time anyone needs them.
This small bit of effort saves colleagues about fifteen minutes every time they need to use demographic questions: the agonising is already done and signed off, and for every consultation or survey that the organisation runs, the question format can be re-used rather than being manually entered individually (where the likelihood for mistakes increases). If that organisation runs 150 consultations and surveys a year[1] this could save them up to 37.5 hours — or a full working week.
An example where someone closest to the problem knows best
An organisation has been using one of our products to gather suggestions from staff on how they can improve their operations. A suggestion from one of their call centre staff was to add extra information to letters going out to service users on how long the process might take, as the submitter noted that their call-centre received at least one call a day about it.
By calculating up:
- The number of offices the org has (approx 540)
- Hypothesising that half of these might get a call a day about this issue (270)
- Estimating the length of this call (approx 5 mins)
This small change could save 22.5 hours every day across that organisation. Or 237 full working days a year. And this doesn’t even take into account the stress levels for caller and receiver and any follow-up notes that have to be added to a system.
And even if by making this small change it only reduces the number of calls from half of all offices getting one a day to a third of all offices, then that’s still saving 90 unhappy service users the trouble of calling, and 7.5 hours saved every day for the organisation.
This kind of foundational thinking can take space and time, or it takes a different perspective: to be able to be lifted away from the day job for a short while. It’s not easy to set aside time which isn’t ‘doing’ time, or to show that there may be ongoing value in setting aside time to think. Broadening the horizon to ask the views of others, ideally those closest to an issue like in the example above, can bridge that gap.
Insight from others
One of the (many) reasons Delib makes things which help with the process of gathering people’s views on matters which affect them is the belief that there’s greater insight and legitimacy when opening up decisions to capture a wider range of evidence. These insights cannot be found by asking the same few heads every time.
The output of consultations is often not to radically pivot policy, but to usefully shape it so that it becomes more workable and actionable in the real world. Any suggestion may improve the process and have far reaching consequences for many people when scaled up across a specific group or an organisation, borough, city, county or nation.
Just one example (of many): In 2016, NHS England ran a consultation into improving mental health services for veterans, which led to the implementation of the NHS transition, intervention and liaison (TIL) veterans’ mental health service in Apr 2017. Design of this service was directly guided by the responses to the engagement work, most of those responses were from veterans themselves, but also from their support networks, third sector and healthcare professionals.
NB: In an ideal world, those who may be most affected by a policy change would be involved early in the process of policy-making. They’d be part of shaping the viable options collaboratively before they go out to consultation, rather than just being able to give their views on options which have already been decided upon, but that’s more and stuff and things for another time.[2]
OK, so?
Yes, why am I thinking about this now? Well, it’s the start of a new year and I need a reason to get up in the morning for the rest of the year, as I’m sure we all do. I need to know that my input makes a difference. I can get a bit lost in the day to day work and forget what I’m here for. By thinking about what good I can do with a small action and how that might actually scale up to a macro saving over time or frequency, I can feel pretty decent about doing the right thing. Doing those kinds of calculations helps me to see value.
I also need to feel there’s a purpose to my wider work, and by helping customers to bring citizens into the decisions which are happening every day (democracy itself has not stopped, contrary to what Twitter might say), keeping people informed, bridging that gap, helping with the listening and hearing process, it reminds me I’ve got a part to play in this which is bigger than the sum of my daily tasks.
It’s all good. Tell your friends.
[1] The number of 150 consultations/surveys a year is very roughly the average across all Citizen Space sites. This is not an exact science, just an example.
[2] This does happen of course, and it’s great, it just doesn’t happen as often as it could.
