{"id":307,"date":"2020-06-01T09:47:44","date_gmt":"2020-06-01T09:47:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/?p=307"},"modified":"2024-09-08T17:18:23","modified_gmt":"2024-09-08T17:18:23","slug":"every-covid-cloud-has-a-silver-lining","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/every-covid-cloud-has-a-silver-lining\/","title":{"rendered":"Every Covid Cloud Has A Silver Lining?"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

What strange, uncertain and frankly terrifying times we are all living in. The world feels like it\u2019s completely falling apart. In amidst a sea of uncertainty, injustice and heartbreak all I feel I can do is attempt to look at the positives.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

As a full-time working mum, pre Covid 19, my life was frantic, \u201cGet ready, get ready, quick! Got your bag? Tuesday – Sports kit \u2026 Wednesday – Ballet shoes, traffic, drop-off at school, traffic, traffic, work, which building? Main. Meeting. Actions. Which building? Aberconway. Meeting. Actions. What\u2019s the time? Have you picked her up? Great.\u201d Repeat until death.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

There\u2019s repetition now too of course\u2026 \u201cDon\u2019t touch that! Wipe that down! Wash your hands! Boris said what?!\u2019 but there is a stillness which I\u2019m enjoying. There\u2019s as much work to do as ever but I\u2019m not missing the rush between places, ping-ponging my way around Cardiff daily, feeling frazzled and always behind. There are new feelings of course, an ache for my family, for fun with my friends, for longing for the time when I could pick up a letter that popped through my front door without fear of contracting a deadly virus.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

So the juxtaposition of extremes is disconcerting – the quietness and calmness of living within a severely reduced geography but one that is coupled with mental anguish, longing and fear the likes of which I\u2019ve never experienced.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

It wouldn\u2019t be me if I didn\u2019t think at this point, does lean have anything to say about this (here we go I hear my readers cry!) because hey, this is a lean blog after all\u2026 but alas, I can\u2019t easily draw parallels between the existential angst and global turmoil that we are all facing and the \u2018Components of Successful Organisations\u2019 at the moment. Sorry!\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

What I can think about perhaps are the different types of work that I find myself post lockdown vs. pre.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

One of the most important ideas that underpins lean is the work of Maasaki Imai in his book Gemba Kaizen where he outlines the amount of time different people should spend on different activities in work in order to create a learning organisation, dedicated to positive improvement.\u00a0\u00a0Peter Hines interpreted Imai\u2019s classic \u201cKaizen Flag\u201d (Kaizen meaning \u201cchange for the better\u201d and flag, because well, the image looks like a flag) for modern day life as follows:<\/p>\r\n

\"\"<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

It\u2019s an important image for lean because it clearly expresses that everybody, whatever their level within the organisation, needs to dedicate time to improvement activity or \u2018kaizen\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0It also shows us that the majority of a senior person\u2019s time should be spent in the \u2018strategy’ zone, setting the direction of the organisation and leading the systems required to make work happen. Critically, as you move through the different levels within the organisation everybody is also involved in \u2018strategy\u2019. This is key because the operatives are usually the people creating the most direct value in the organisation and are often the closest to customers and are best therefore to both enable<\/em><\/strong> strategy and to help to shape<\/em><\/strong> strategy.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Another important element is that senior members of staff are not so detached from the day job. They stay in contact with the core business of the company, interact with staff at all levels and use this to inform their strategy work.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

This situation is rare however and most organisations find themselves with kaizen flags more akin to the below:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\"\"<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The realities of many senior members of staff\u2019s lives is that they are just responding to crisis after crisis, problem after problem. Strategy is a nice to have, once a year reflection, post rationalization process.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Improvement is a responsibility assigned to a few middle managers (usually on top of another job that they have), where they endeavour to help those that work for them \u2018be better\u2019 and covertly attempt to influence those more senior to \u2018be better\u2019 too.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Insufficient focus on strategy and improvement activity leads to the huge amount of ‘fire fighting’ or ‘failure demand’ that organisations have to deal with.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

So what does the Covid 19 Kaizen Flag look like?\u00a0\u00a0Maybe I\u2019m having a rare moment of optimism (VERY RARE FYI) but perhaps now we have more time? Maybe the world paused for a moment and whilst it\u2019s not true that fires don\u2019t still need to be fought, this situation\u00a0has<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0caused many, but perhaps now that we\u2019ve all stopped rushing about (well most of us \u2013 all praise to the key workers!) what\u2019s more important work wise has been pulled sharply into view?\u00a0\u00a0For example, Universities ARE making big strategic decisions about how to pivot their offer and are rapidly moving into a space of improvement, gearing up lecturers to deliver teaching differently, to embrace new tools to protect our value proposition.\u00a0We are embracing new ways of working at a phenomenal pace. Fire fighting is still happening of course, but are we thinking more about strategy, improvement and change than we have for a long time? Not the perfect picture, but perhaps more close to ideal?<\/p>\r\n

\"\"<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Is this similar to your experience or not? Let me know but from my perspective, if right now doesn\u2019t provide the opportunity to regroup and refocus, to change and improve, I don\u2019t know what will.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What strange, uncertain and frankly terrifying times we are all living in. The world feels like it\u2019s completely falling apart. In amidst a sea of uncertainty, injustice and heartbreak all […]","protected":false},"author":151,"featured_media":1014,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,5,6],"tags":[],"custom_author":[44],"class_list":["post-307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-innovation","category-lean","category-service-improvement","custom_author-sarah-lethbridge"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/554\/2020\/06\/Cloud.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/151"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":619,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions\/619"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307"},{"taxonomy":"custom_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/custom_author?post=307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}