{"id":732,"date":"2023-01-05T21:26:39","date_gmt":"2023-01-05T21:26:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/?p=732"},"modified":"2024-09-08T20:04:57","modified_gmt":"2024-09-08T20:04:57","slug":"organisational-tempo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/organisational-tempo\/","title":{"rendered":"Organisational Tempo"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Christmas and New Year period is the best holiday in the academic calendar because Cardiff University literally shuts. (I\u2019m sure that there will be some<\/em> people who have to keep working, IT, Estates etc. so sorry guys.. ) but for me and most of my academic and professional service colleagues at least, \u00a0it\u2019s the closest that the institution ever gets to WE\u2019RE CLOSED SEE YOU LATER!\u00a0 Summer breaks are either punctuated with recruitment activities for the Executive MBA or summer Exec. Ed. Programmes so they just never seem as restful, despite the lighter nights and better weather.<\/p>\n

Christmas is the opportunity to TURN OFF WORK.<\/p>\n

I revel in my Christmas Out of Office (OoO \u2013 love that abbreviation) message as the normal OoO is usually \u201cif it\u2019s about x then contact this person, if it\u2019s about y contact z\u201d.\u00a0 The Christmas OoO is basically \u201cwe\u2019re shut, you\u2019ll have to wait until we open again SORRY :D\u201d. So yes, whilst there are definitely some stressful aspects of the Christmas period, for the most part, I slow right down.<\/p>\n

I am starting to speed myself up again in readiness for the big return to work. I have a couple of major things to complete in the first few weeks of January as well, so I really have to make sure that I\u2019ve reached top speed sharpish. One of the things that I need to do is complete a portfolio of evidence to show that I am successful in teaching and mentoring others in their teaching to attempt to secure my \u2018Senior Fellowship\u2019 of the Cardiff University Education Development scheme. \u00a0\u00a0A big part of this qualification is demonstrating that you are consistently reflective with a view to improve your practice.\u00a0 Now readers, I hope you should know by now that lean IS BUILT ON reflective practice. The Plan Do Check\/Study Act cycle<\/a> is THE underlying philosophy of lean and critically, you can detect it\u2019s present in nearly all of the lean tools. I pride myself on building lean into my personal practice, plus I\u2019m great at reading articles I come across and TED talks and podcasts, really trying to be open to new ideas.\u00a0 I do feel that I\u2019m successful at incorporating exciting new things that I learn into my teaching.<\/p>\n

But this qualification needs evidence<\/strong> <\/em>of personal growth and development and apparently \u201cI\u2019m really good at this honest!\u201d won\u2019t quite cut it.<\/p>\n

This is irritating in the extreme.<\/p>\n

Luckily, I have recently picked up on the fact that I might have dedicated the last 10 years to helping other people pursue continuing professional development but that during that time I have kind of neglected my own \u2026. so I have engaged in three activities (including the Senior Fellowship programme itself) to make sure that I consider my career and how to continue to progress it.\u00a0 I have been really fortunate to be able to participate in a programme of Executive Coaching, which has been really enlightening, and I have also joined the British Academy of Management \u201cDirectors of Engagement\u201d Development Programme. \u00a0I\u2019m learning loads whilst also collecting lots of evidence of reflective activity for my portfolio.<\/p>\n

In the first session, Prof. Babek Yazdani the Executive Dean of Nottingham Business School<\/a> gave a really interesting session which discussed their approach to engagement and he introduced a concept to me which I found really interesting\u2026 that of the \u2018tempo of an organisation\u2019 i.e. the speed at which people are able to get things done and make change happen.\u00a0 He discussed how he has seen the tempo of his organisation increase and how this had been advantageous in terms of how he been able to achieve his strategy.\u00a0 I\u2019ve discussed how some organisations are much faster than others at deciding things<\/a> and implementing new ideas<\/a> often in my blogs, but I love being able to give it a name.. \u201corganizational tempo\u201d is elegant and describes the phenomenon really well.<\/p>\n

Barry Evans, another lean guru at Cardiff Business School, described what I can now call the \u2018organisational tempo\u2019 of Tesco in an early research project of the Lean Enterprise Research Centre in the 1990s.\u00a0 The story goes that there were a group of competitor retailers who were all taking part in a Business School research project looking at how they could reduce the number of \u2018touches\u2019 within a replenishment \u2018value stream\u2019 or process. For those of you who are old enough to remember old school supermarkets, you\u2019ll remember how ‘shelfy’ they were.\u00a0 Individual bottles of coke were placed on shelves individually, constituting a massive amount of time and energy within the supply value stream.\u00a0 The research project worked out how many times a bottle of coke was individually touched by a human through the production, distribution and selling processes. It was A LOT. Together, the research group looked at reducing the number of touches and came up with an innovation \u201cmerchandisable units\u201d i.e. working with the bottle supplier to get them to deliver their products directly in a delivery mechanism, with wheels, which requires fewer points of human contact … the bottles could simply be wheeled into place ready for customers to buy them.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

The really interesting thing about this story, as Barry eloquently explained, was that the research project team as a whole came up with the idea, everyone agreed that it could work, but out of all of the retailers who participated it was Tesco that had the innovation inclination to pilot the approach, prove it worked, and then the innovation infrastructure to spread the good idea more widely \u2013 a great example of a swift organizational tempo. \u00a0Once widely implemented the other retailers followed (it\u2019s a key feature of Aldi\u2019s supermarkets btw, where almost all products are delivered on their own cardboard shelf, speeding up each restock).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

Organisational tempo is the outcome of what I\u2019m describing in my Creating Organisational Cultures of Learning \u2013 Linked Learning Loops model.<\/a> It\u2019s what Simon Elias is describing when he talks about how you can tell how effective an organisation is by how easy it is to change a lightbulb.\u00a0 Are people empowered to be able to spot a problem and solve it, or does it require.. a request to a Manager, raising a request with an estates department, purchase order, financial approval, maintenance date, internal payment for the work done several weeks\/ months later. \u00a0If you have a fab organizational tempo, great things can happen, fast.<\/p>\n

I am confident about the organizational tempo of the Executive Education and External Relations department that I lead, although sometimes we have to work to the tempo of the wider institution. What\u2019s exciting for me in 2023 is that I\u2019m going to have more time to devote to new innovations as I\u2019m not going to be looking after Executive Education anymore. Prof. Sarah Hurlow<\/a> has taken on this role at the beginning of January, so please do contact Sarah with any requests that you have for programmes of learning! I\u2019m going to devote myself to wider external engagement activities for the School as Pro Dean of External Engagement and I\u2019m really looking forward to the challenge. Executive Education is going to really benefit from Sarah Hurlow\u2019s expertise so look out for some exciting new programmes and for our organizational tempo to move to a fresh beat!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Christmas and New Year period is the best holiday in the academic calendar because Cardiff University literally shuts. (I\u2019m sure that there will be some people who have to […]","protected":false},"author":151,"featured_media":1058,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","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":[5,3],"tags":[31,16,32],"custom_author":[44],"class_list":["post-732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lean","category-organisational-culture","tag-innovation","tag-lean","tag-organisational-tempo","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\/2023\/01\/tempo.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732","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=732"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":745,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732\/revisions\/745"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=732"},{"taxonomy":"custom_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/custom_author?post=732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}