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Speaker A I want to talk a little bit about the background in the context. It hasn't been used extensively in the public sector, that's government or the not for profit sector, but it has been used in a variety of countries in a variety ways. And the people who have been involved in those experiences would say it takes courage, it takes persistence, it takes patience. I want to give you some sense of how broad the application has been in these sectors, in countries and in levels of government. These are not experiences that I know very much about. These are simply experiences that I've learned about since I've been here. Actually, in the US. We had a presentation yesterday about the military in the UK. There's a hospital in London which was made into a profit center, and they used Requisite organization to make it a profit center. It is now being used, I'm told, in the UK around high flyer performance in the government. In Ireland, it was used in the public health field. In Canada, it's been used at the federal government level. I've got some experiences I'll tell you about in my little piece, but also the city of Toronto, where we are today, before there was regional amalgamation. So the city got bigger. They tried to use Requisite organization to make the city, the smaller city, work better. It got overtaken by amalgamation, but it nevertheless was there. It's also been used in Canadian defense procurement, borrowing, I think a bit on the experiences in the US. It's been used in South Africa, it's been used in Australia with the Australian Post Office, it's been used in the Singapore military, it's been used in New Zealand government, and I'm sure you would know more about that and what's gone on. And it's been used in Argentina with the tax authority and with a private company. So in terms of the variety of countries, quite a number of them, in terms of the kinds of applications, I mean, it's funny, I hadn't thought about it until I came to this conference. For me, it was more around my world, and my world is very much around an organization. But the levels of work part was used to sort out levels of work from volunteers at a Los Angeles hospital and to deal with the conflict that arose between the staff and the volunteers around, stepping on each other's toes, apparently with a great deal of success. I simply had never thought about it that way. It was used in terms of levels of capability in the mental health authority in Wales. How do you improve the lot of the mentally retarded in that area? And it led to the development of, I think, five levels of mental retardation. So nobody had ever thought about levels of capability being susceptible to that kind of treatment. And that in turn, led to a fairly elaborate booklet that basically says what do you need to know if you're a parent, if you're an expert, if you're a caregiver to try and understand the level of retardation with which you're dealing in the people you're dealing with or the kids you're dealing with. And what would be the appropriate way to deal with them? And what would be the appropriate way to try and get them to feel satisfied? Get them to feel better about themselves? And so a very important piece of work, but quite kind of unrelated in a sense to what we normally think of. It's been used in churches. I'm told the Church of Scotland. I'm told the Church of England. It's been used in community work in Aboriginal communities in Australia, in WIPA, which is on the York peninsula, the northeastern part of Australia. Now, Ken Craddock, who's here, and you can probably buttonhole if you need to, has put together a bibliography of all of the examples, all of the experiences from academics, from private sector, public sector, not for profit sector. There's 500 or so entries in this bibliography and it's on your website, on the global organization website. So if you want to know more about them, I can't tell you very much about what they actually consisted of. They're not my experiences, but they show the richness of what's gone on. So if you want to pursue something a bit more, there are many of the people who are here today who have some knowledge of some of these things. Absolutely. Requisite organization in other sectors, that's what we're here to do. Why is it difficult? Well, as I said, it's been successfully used, but there are some important differences. Slide two, what am I going to talk about? It has been successfully used. I'll mention the examples that I personally have been involved in, but there are some important differences, I think, between the private sector and the other sectors. I think the concepts are adaptable. I think some of the challenges are exactly the same, may have different names, but they're the same. And I've learned a few things I guess we always learn. We learn more from what doesn't work the way we thought than what does. But I have a lot of learnings that I've gotten, and they may prove quite useful. So successful. In the federal government in Canada, I talked yesterday a bit about GST administration. In the department that I was in charge of, there was a huge expansion. The government decided that we were to implement a certain tax administration. There's a 30% increase in the overall size of the organization, almost 100% for the part of the organization that had to worry about this. And requisite organization theory helped to decide how to structure the organization, how many regional offices we needed, how many district offices we needed. Because we were frankly growing in an 18 month period enormously. And I hadn't thought about it. In fact, I didn't know about requisite organization. But that's when I first stumbled across it and it turned out to be very useful. Another example that I don't know I wasn't involved in personally, but I know the person who was the person who was the deputy Minister permanent Secretary of Citizenship and Immigration when she arrived in that department, she discovered that she was expected to give really very good policy advice on immigration policy and citizenship policy to her minister. But she had no direct report who could give her any advice. And her predecessor, who happened to be what I would have called a policy wonk, didn't mind. He liked to give it himself. He loved this stuff. When he left and she arrived, her interest was much more in management. I mean, she was by no means an unintelligent person. It just wasn't her interest, her interest with people, that kind of thing. And so I suggested that she use requisite organization theory to get a look at was there in fact a missing level of work? And if there was, which she suspected, how did she defend it to these people who had just gone through the trauma of four years of adjustment to not having somebody do that job? And it worked really well. The evidence supported her intuition, but it was objective scientific evidence. It wasn't know. Here comes another wave, another person. The third example is the PSC, the Public Service Commission, where I was in charge. And it's an organization that has part of the HR management levers of the government. And I wanted to bring around some change to the Public Service Commission, and I thought requisite organization might be a good way to do it. And I had been appointed to a ten year term, which I thought was fairly sensible. The people couldn't avoid what I was trying to do by outweighing me, which is what you can do in government if you think your boss is not going to be around long. It didn't work. We can talk in questions about why it didn't work, but it didn't work. We also used requisite organization under my suggestion for Central Talent Pool Management, not high flyer identification, but to accelerate high flying potential people through the executive ranks. Because like most other public services, when we looked at the demographics, we had a big bulge of people who were in there around 50 coming up to 50. We had a great kind of nobody, and we knew that those people were going to be taking retirement, and we needed to bring the next generation or the next generation plus one up with as much experience in the five years we had left. So we introduced what's called accelerated Ex Development Program Aextp, and the other one is what's called pre qualified pool. It was a pool of vice presidents, executive vice presidents from whom people who needed them, leaders who needed them go to the pool and take anybody out instead and just choose somebody who had a kind of pre qualified stamp on their head, if you like. And so we used the method to manage the pool. It worked, I think. Excellently. Well, it did not survive that's another interesting conversation about why so sustainability was an issue, but it certainly was effective. There are some important differences in the public sector particularly and the not for profit sector for three reasons and I'll talk about the first one and the last one. Three reasons I think the foundations of the public sector are in motion. I'll tell you what I think that means in a minute, but if I'm right, then trying to you either have to reframe everything or you have to take little chunks because if you try to do anything else, you're dead. It won't work. Second, I won't spend any time talking about this, but it's true, I think the vocabulary in the context matters. So if you're trying to persuade as a consultant to persuade people in the public sector or the not for profit sector to use requisite organization, you have to be able to talk the language a bit, you have to be able to understand and market a bit differently. And I think thirdly and I will talk a bit about this I think you have to understand the sector givens like there's some things that are just different. If you don't understand that and take it into account before you start, then I think the advice doesn't really register very well. What do I mean by the foundations being in motion? Well, and this is all from the perspective of any particular country. So I'm not kind of sitting on the globe looking at it or a piece of the globe. I'm sitting in any country at all and looking at the world and saying, well, there's globalization, there's deep diversity in most countries. There's citizens who want to be in the loop, citizens who are not prepared just kind of sit back and just let others decide for them. All of that means that the steering of the society of the country is moving from government, which is big G, if you like, to small g, which is governance. And that has some things that go with it. With new public management, which swept governments, certainly Western democracies, there was a notion that the private sector knows better than the public sector, and so we had to bring more of their methods into improve our efficiency and effectiveness. There's a drift which you see in some countries to some extent, from rights to needs. Partly it's fiscal, partly governments can't afford to provide everything to everybody. Partly it doesn't work. And there's a drift from kind of treating everybody the same to subsidiarity, which is really a word that says you do what you have the best ability to do as a level of government or as a sector and a shift from centralization to decentralization. This been called things like frag migration or power leaking down and power leaking up I think that's all true, and I think that makes so much of the foundation in motion that it causes problems. So that was my first message about change. My third message is about incorporating the sector. Givens the theory has to be different, why does it have to be different? Well, if I give you an example for a country like Canada, for the federal government, we've factored accountability at the bureaucratic top. Now, I've had conversations with Ron Cappell about this, and he keeps saying to me, but, Ruth, that's not perfection. That's not how it should work. And I keep saying, well, no, but that's how it does work. And it's not a criticism of Ron. It's just that you have to understand that when I was told I was accountable for implementing the GST, I also knew I couldn't hire. I couldn't hire. I could not choose where to put. I could not choose the location of my facility. The people who gave me legal advice didn't work for learned. I learned partly at the Harvard Business School and partly I was reminded when I came here, if you work in government, it's like swimming in mud. And after a while, you forget that there are people who don't have to swim in mud. They actually swim in clear water. And it's not that I can't swim in mud. It's just that you learn to swim effectively in mud. And so if you're going to take a kind of how does requisite organization theory apply? How does it apply in a muddy stream, not in clear water? It's really, really important. The concepts are really adaptable. Some of the challenges are similar. I found it very useful as a way of thinking, a kind of conceptual model. I found it useful for the overall performance of my organization or for specific problems. I found a lot of opposition from in house experts, the not invented here syndrome. So, you know, we didn't think it up. And I had in one of my jobs, I had people who were supposed to be experts in HR. They were actually, and I'm not. And they would say, well, we don't use this. Well, frankly, Scarlett, I don't care if you use it or not. It seems to make sense to me. Well, no. And they would give me 45 pounds of material about why this wasn't sensible. So I did have some opposition, and I also had some colleagues and subordinates who were opposed, and they were opposed primarily, I think, because they were afraid. What were my learnings? I have a couple of slides of learnings. It's useful as a frame, even if you don't do it visibly. And the bank of Montreal presentation, I thought, was superb, and it was very visible. I didn't always use it visibly because I couldn't or I wasn't there long enough. I learned not to forget the soft side. I learned that you can have the most brilliant kind of rational way of doing things. But if you don't worry how people feel and you don't know what it's like to walk in their shoes, you can't get very far. I learned that human capability goes hand in hand with level of work. There are people who look at one or the other. For me as a manager, getting the level of work was right. But I had to be thinking all the time about the capability of the people, including myself. I learned more about what my capability made me look like and act like in my organization. And that turned out to be very useful. It takes patience, it takes persistence. It really does pay to be stubborn and it takes determination. You have to get a little bit of support, at least tacit support, from your boss, assuming you have one. But I also learned some years ago I discovered an article, I can't remember the title of it from the Harvard Business Review, which was really about the people that are opposed to you are going to be opposed to you regardless. The people who support you are going to support you because they think it's a good idea. The trick is to go up the uncommitted middle. I have never forgotten that because it turns out to be very good advice. You don't worry about your supporters, you try not to turn your back on the people who are going to stab it. But you design your strategy around the uncommitted middle, which is kind of a neat idea. And lastly, a few more learnings. It's harder to find the missing levels of work than to find the compression. In my experience it looks like the performance problem of subordinate, but it isn't. Now the trick is to distinguish between when is it a missing level of work and when is it genuine performance problem with subordinate. But the really easy thing to do is to say, well, it's his fault or her fault and not ask the question wait a minute, wait a minute. Maybe what I'm expecting in terms of level of work isn't what this person thinks they're supposed to be doing. They may in fact be very capable to do their job. It's just that in between there's a level of work that I'm unwilling to do or unable to do, and that needs to get done. And so I found a lot of that. The mismatch at the top of an organization, it has a huge ripple effect. If it's too high, then you can rip the top off the organization. If it's too low, then the level of work will sink, as somebody said yesterday. The other thing is that if you're in a job where you're responsible for an organizational unit or an organization for more than a few years, four or five, you have to watch for whether people's capability has improved because theirs can shift or yours can shift. And all of a sudden you're having problems you never had before, and you don't understand, because you know the person, why you're having them, and they may be around that. They may be around capability. The last piece of advice is thin slicing. Now, there's a book out that talks about thin slicing and thick slicing. Thin slicing is the kind of intuitive leap you make, the judgment that you make without all the evidence. And people do it all the time. Sometimes they do it well, and sometimes they do it poorly. But what I learned was after I'd been through the requisite organization, which I could have applied by people who knew what they were doing to hire people with the right capability, I figured out that if I knew what level of work I wanted done, I could sit in on an interview for a direct report. To hire a direct report. I could pose an open ended question. If I listened carefully, I could deduce whether the person had the capability. Now, I'm sure people like Ron or Ken or others would probably have a haemorrhage at the idea, but it actually worked. I used it, and I hired I mean, I discriminated quite effectively between been people who were very good but couldn't work at that level and people who could. And the consequence was, in fact, excellent. So that's my little story about what I've done.