Our Philosophy
Our Philosophy of performance improvement is a key differentiator that sets our service apart from our competitors. It’s a critical element of what makes us unique.
We do not share this publicly at present, for obvious reasons. However we do share it with our clients and their teams once we have confidentiality agreements in place, purely and simply to protect our intellectual property.
What we will state is that this philosophy was developed over the course of 20 years of driving performance improvement in a multitude of organisations through the roles that our founder held, and through the experiences of managing the teams he has led, and businesses he has run during the course of his career.
At it’s heart are the recognition of several profound truths, which once recognised are obvious, but which very few people seem to have recognised in advance, let alone work with.
The power within this philosophy, and the truths it reveals, are that they apply to us all, to every individual, group, team, organisation, business, and extend to social groups and nation states. They are truly universal, and yet hardly, if ever, discussed or worked upon.
They can be readily and easily understood from the CEO to the cleaner, because we all recognise them, and can relate to them on a personal level. Once shared they shift perspective, and allow individuals, groups, and organisations, to rapidly identify areas of opportunity they had not noticed previously. This forms a powerful surge in collective energy and activity to drive improvement, which just needs focussing, harnessing and guiding, and which can be built upon to deliver transformational change in an entity.
To give you an inkling of this philosophy, we include below a couple of the elements of the perspective we bring, which we believe makes us unique.
Emergent Processes
One of the foundational elements of this philosophy is that the productivity, results and accomplishments of businesses and all of the people working within them, are emergent characteristics. That is to say, that the results are the outcomes of emergent processes, which rely on and are affected by many factors, especially the conditions and environment in which they exist.
An example that’s easy to illustrate this is growing tomatoes. You can’t control how many will grow on a plant, but you can control the conditions the plant grows in to give it the best possible chance of producing a good harvest, hence why gardeners use greenhouses to grow them in.
This is fundamentally different to a direct process, for instance digging holes, where you directly control the output.
As a society we are progressively treating people in a more an more mechanistic way, and often the tools we are using to try to get the outcomes we want only work superficially, or are often applied in the wrong way. We are collectively using sledgehammers to crack walnuts, and processes and practices which should be empowering people to perform, are often constraining them in tiny boxes of daily frustration and limitation.
Want more tomatoes, use a greenhouse, want more profits, then…..
To give a practical example.
Many businesses rightly use measures to track performance of key processes and individual performance.
All businesses buy something, and so many of them track inventory, and it is often a “key performance indicator” for buyers.
However inventory, like many things in a business, is an emergent outcome of many variables. Your buyer can control what they order and when, however there are many other factors which effect the inventory. Your sales processes and customer services decisions effect inventory, if you are a manufacturer, your production effectiveness and quality can effect inventory, as well as your shop floor material controls. If you have theft it can effect inventory. This list can be virtually endless.
The buyer will often be committing to material significantly (often months in today’s climate) in advance, and as many have found over the last couple of years, can’t necessarily control when it will be received. So unless you have good control everywhere else, is it really fair to measure their performance on a number that is largely out of their control? We don’t think so, and yet around the world this is happening every day.
What happens when you have issues? The buyer who fails to meet the KPI number will be treated as though they are not good enough. People apportion blame, because it’s easy to do, and the unresolved root cause of the issues continue, raising stress levels for everyone and contributing to a decline in performance. You may replace the buyer who is not good enough, with someone else who has a stellar background, who will come in and face the same issues, and so the cycle continues.
This is just one functional example. Businesses are full of examples like this, and our society is endemic with this issue. People every day are losing jobs because of performance problems that are caused by issues elsewhere in the business, and every day businesses are losing profits because of issues which go unacknowledged and unresolved.
There is a smarter way. Once people understand the emergent nature of the issue, and the various factors which contribute to something critical, they will and do, if encouraged and enabled, work together to address the issues causing the underlying problem. People who you think don’t perform, will show themselves to be stars, and with the collective intelligence of your whole team addressing issues, mountains will become molehills.
The effect and implications of this one simple element of our philosophy are so profound and powerful they are the reason we call ourselves Emergent See.
We help people see the emergent nature of key processes, and once you can see something, you can deal with it. If you can see a problem, you can fix it, if you can see an opportunity, you can capture it, if you can see a path to success, you can follow it.
Amongst many other things, our philosophy will open your eyes, so that you and your team can see.
Your business is a dynamically growing and evolving entity
Whilst we don’t really think about it, in truth businesses are cybernetic entities, which are constantly evolving and developing as they grow and mature.
As it increases in size, you witness increased specialisation in key functions, as roles and activities develop, and the needs of the business change.
The processes and activities required for a successful £5M turnover business, are different for the same business to be successful at £20m turnover. This is a key factor many organisations fail to recognise, and as they grow, just try to do more of the same, however this absolutely kills margins.
The old adage “don’t fix what’s not broken”, is a curse for businesses, and like all organisms, if a business is not developing and growing, it will stagnate and start to decline.
Like all organisms, the environment the business is in, is crucial to its development. Poor conditions, and it will decline, and eventually die. Good conditions, it will grow and develop almost like magic.
Even better, we’ll show you how you can create the equivalent of a greenhouse for your business. Like the tomatoes mentioned in the section above, you will be amazed at the progress and the harvest you can get once it truly starts to thrive.